BERKELEY

Sadly, we have lost Bruce Conner, who died on July 7 at the age of 74. To call him an artist’s artist is to take understatement to an extreme; it is more to the point to say that Conner was an artist’s artist at least four times over, and maybe even five times over if we remember his large, black and white paintings executed in 2002 and 2003, a few of which were exhibited at Galerie Paule Anglim last November. In our new age of the international art fair, Conner was a true anomaly who reveled in his own eccentric
indifference to the market. And in our current moment of artists willfully working in multiple media, he was an early and influential groundbreaker whose own innovations were on a par with those of Robert Rauschenberg.

Conner was well-known in multiple worlds, and I have always taken a perverse enjoyment in the fact that some film aficionados never knew that he also made drawings and sculpture, just as I have also enjoyed the fact that some gallery and museum-goers who were familiar with the dark Baudelairian poetry of his assemblage works executed in the late 1950s and early 1960s never had a clue about any of his groundbreaking films that pioneered the jump-cut collage technique that has henceforth been beaten into the collective retinas of our visual culture by MTV-style music videos. Add to this the scores of obsessive inkblot drawings that he executed throughout the middle-late ‘60s and early ’70s, and his series of large black-and-white photograms collectively titled The Angels, from the mid-1970s, and a very complex artist starts coming into the art historical view. Not that he was ever very far away from that view; remembering back to the “Beat Culture and the New America” exhibition held at the old de Young Museum in 1996, we must acknowledge the prominence of his contribution to that show. Four years later, the de Young hosted an anti-retrospective of Conner’s work that was initially organized by the Walker Art Center. Titled “2000 B.C.,”
it toyed with the turn-of-the-millennium mania that was sweeping the nation while also making his multiple contributions to the history of art crystal clear. Conner’s work always had an apocalyptic air about it, and the first step into the 21st Century seemed like the perfect moment to bring the diverse threads of that work into a much overdue singular statement.

A recent exhibition at the UC Berkeley Art Museum extended that view even further. Curated by Steve Seid and titled, “Bruce Conner: Mabuhay Gardens,” the show featured 53 black-and-white photographs that Conner took of the unruly punk rock scene at the nightclub of the same name in 1978 and ‘79. This was the epicenter of the San Francisco punk scene and those were its golden years, the very cusp of the transition from Jimmy Carter’s failed presidency to Ronald Reagan’s re-pricing of the American dream as being officially out of reach from most people. Conner’s ostensible mission was photojournalistic documentation—he was working with the legendary punk fanzine Search and Destroy, and in fact, he did capture the moment with a keen eye for the relevant detail’s of costume and gesture. But the photographs also captured something else that was very much in line with much of his previous work. In keeping with Marcel Duchamp’s famous eulogy of André Breton, Conner captured “the beautiful dream of youth in a world of prostitution” as it was revealed by the likes of De Detroit and Penelope Houston, two of the scene’s reigning queens of pathos and despair. Certainly, it was a theatrical moment, and it was named as such by beleaguered Mabuhay impresario Dirk Dirksen, the black-sheep nephew of pro-Vietnam war Senator Everett Dirksen.

The hard-edged anger of Conner’s subjects was mirrored in these photographs’ icy, clear-cut compositions. Often their stark lighting blows out a range of their mid-tones to highlight extreme tonalities, and this squares with the social and psychological extremities that are pictured therein. These works make it interesting to muse on Conner’s imagined relationship with his subjects’ might-have-been. I expect that, as a former beatnik, Conner saw something of his own artistic beginnings being reenacted on the beer-strewn stage at the Mab, and I also expect that he may have felt that he was bearing witness to the flamboyant conclusion of oppositional and insurrectional cultural gestures, and he wanted to record that for a posterity that could only scratch its head in befuddled amazement.

“Roz Makes a Giant Step for Mankind: Negative Trend,” January 23, 1978, Bruce Conner, Black and white photograph, 131⁄8" x 97⁄8"
Museum purchase: bequest of Thérèse Bonney, Class of 1916, by exchange
Photo: courtesy of the artist