Word: conner
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...1960s, several young artists -most notably Andy Warhol and California's Bruce Conner - have abandoned the paint tube for the film can, leading their fans to hail the underground cinema as the birth of "a new art form." Rebirth would be more like it. The first artists to experiment with film were the Dadaists and surrealists in the 1920s, including Duchamp and Man Ray. The most inventive of the lot was a film maker who, as an artist, is all but unknown...
...Francisco Artist Bruce Conner paints and pastes together his caustic collages and assemblages from all manner of thrift-shop odds and ends. When they were shown at the Museum of Modern Art's "Art of Assemblage" in 1961, William Seitz, the show's organizer, was sufficiently impressed to rank Conner on a par with Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Yet, while the latter two have gone on to Venicelebrity and $20,000 canvases, Conner, at 34, remains mainly an underground hero, known to the world at large only for his fine experimental films...
What the current exhibit of 73 of his works at Philadelphia's Institute of Contemporary Art has demonstrated is that Conner remains as fine an artist as the pop laureates, and is far fiercer. In their own way, his fragile panels and boxes, smeared with black wax and ornamented with tarnished jewelry, Victorian wallpaper, girlie postcards and other detritus, shock and edify much as does a scabrous Matthias Grunewald crucifixion, or the death's-head kept as a memento mori by medieval princes...
...people concerned about the permanency of material things," asks Conner, "when they themselves may not be here tomorrow" His entire output illustrates the question, picturing death in life, the swift passage of beauty as an integral part of growth, with a chilly poetry that haunts the viewer like the ghost of Savonarola. Crucifixion, a 7-ft.-high cross with a black, rotting cadaver, skeined by a cobweb of raveled nylon stockings, comments acridly both on the original sacrifice and its loss of contemporary meaning, while lesser works recall that Conner tried marijuana in the early 1960s...
...moment, Conner is as bored with drugs as he is with assemblages. His belated artistic recognition concerns him very little, since his future projects are all for films and he intends his present museum show to be his last. Conner considers museums a form of death in life, a technique for embalming art so that people can avoid seeing its relevance to their lives. "Why," he asks with a smile, "should I participate in my own funeral...