Bruce Conner

Posted by on July 12, 2008 · 4 Comments 

I gasped aloud this evening when I found out, several days late, that one of my favorite artists, Bruce Conner, died Monday.hitcounter

I had never heard of Conner before I wandered into the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA, one day in 2000. They were having a retrospective of his work, and I thought that it might be perhaps a cute little show of an artist of marginal importance. What a shock — the museum was jam-packed with room after room of staggering masterpieces in all manner of media — collages, assemblages, drawings, photographs, films and other, more conceptual works, less easily categorized.  My head felt like, well, like the guy in the collage above. 

Around every corner, it seemed, there was another aspect to his art, utterly unexpected, utterly unusual, utterly triumphant, waiting to jump out and kick my brain around. For years I would bug anyone who would listen about Conner and his phenomenal talent. Why hadn’t I heard of him before that fateful day at MoCA? Well, for the simple reason that I was a New Yorker, and Conner was a California artist, and the New York art work, in their hateful parochialism, had chosen to ignore Conner for the entirety of his gigantic, prodigious career.

The first thing I saw coming into the MoCA show was a room or two of these curious assemblages. So at first I thought “Aha, he’s a Rauschenberg also-ran”, except that, upon looking them over, I found his assemblages more interesting, more evocative and more haunting than Rauschenberg’s.

But then he also did these rather striking felt-tip marker drawings. Each drawing is a single line, wandering, snaking across the paper, never breaking, in bothdeliberate and abstract shapes, the variations of tone coming from the marker drying out before being replaced with a new one.

One of his more amazing series of drawings were a large number of “inkblots”, these intricately-detailed, symmetrical drawings. He made dozens upon dozens of these cunning works, in all different levels of complexity. At the MoCA show, drawings like this filled up an entire wall, in row upon row, a thrilling cornucopia of ideas. Presented with them, I said, well, either I have to stop looking at these right now, or else look at them for the rest of my life. As it happened, I split the difference, looking at them for an hour or so and then buying the show’s catalogue so I could peruse them at my leisure later.

He is perhaps best known for these detailed, wry collages — and if they were all he’d done, he’d still be a great artist.

But then there are his movies, which took all kinds of different forms, from oddball collages of discarded film clips to music videos of Toni Basil (from, like, 1969, when Toni Basil was an avant-garde artist instead of an MTV star).

In any case, do yourself a favor and check him out.

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