Looking for Bruce Conner

In a career that spanned five decades, most of them spent in San Francisco, BruceConner (1933--2008) produced a unique body of work that refused to be contained by medium or style.Whether making found-footage films, hallucinatory ink-blot graphics, enigmatic collages, orassemblages from castoffs, Conner took up genres as quickly as he abandoned them. His movementswithin San Francisco's counter-cultural scenes were similarly free-wheeling; at home in beat poetry,punk music, and underground film circles, he never completely belonged to any of them. Bruce Connerbelonged to Bruce Conner. Twice he announced his own death; during the last years of his life heproduced a series of pseudonymous works after announcing his "retirement." In this firstbook-length study of Conner's enormously influential but insufficiently understood career, KevinHatch explores Conner's work as well as his position on the geographical, cultural, and criticalmargins. Hatch finds a set of abiding concerns that inform Conner's wide-ranging works and changingpersonas. A deep anxiety pervades the work, reflecting a struggle between private, unknowable,interior experience and a duplicitous world of received images and false appearances. The profaneand the sacred, the comic and the tragic, the enigmatic and the universal: each of these antinomiesis pushed to the breaking point in Conner's work. Generously illustrated with many color images ofConner's works, Looking for Bruce Conner proceeds in roughly chronologicalfashion, from Conner's notorious assemblages ( BLACK DAHLIA andRATBASTARD among them) through his experimental films (populated by images fromwhat Conner called "the tremendous, fantastic movies going in my head from all the scenes I'dseen"), his little-known graphic work, and his collage and inkblot drawings.

Kevin Hatch is Assistant Professor of Art History at Binghamton University.