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de mortuis once more
Jul. 11th, 2008 11:06 amWhen I made my first adolescent pilgrimage to San Francisco many summers ago, I bought Philip Lamantia's Destroyed Works in a small-press edition, not just for the poems but for the look of the book, and especially for the eerie, imagination-prodding black and white photograph on the cover, of a destroyed assemblage by someone named Bruce Conner.
It took until A.D. 2000 to find out who Bruce Conner was, at the Walker Art Center retrospective "2000 B.C.: The Bruce Conner Story, Part 2." Michael McClure, Rebecca Solnit and a number of other notables paid homage in a symposium devoted to yet another famous avant-garde artist nobody had ever heard of.
Conner's obituary in the New York Times yesterday feels less tragic by virtue of the fact that he got his due, for a few weeks more than Andy Warhol's proverbial fifteen minutes. His films, assemblages, photograms (which are now in the Carnegie International exhibition), and all the rest would not add up to enough when taken individually, although they were groundbreaking examples of genres in which others would outstrip Conner (though I personally would rank "A Movie" as one of the most glorious uses of found footage ever, putting Conner up there with Joseph Cornell as a filmmaker who everybody thinks of as something else).
It is pointless to rattle on and fill up friends' friends page with details of Conner's accomplishments and why, as with other examples I often cite, it is the complete context that makes him so astonishingly significant. One needs to be converted by something more than a sermon without illustrations.
But I feel the loss even if Conner left us on a note of fresh homage. He left us with a few treasures and a great deal to think about. I shall try to write something more coherent later, perhaps in conjunction with the various fiftieth anniversaries being celebrated this year in conjunction with the San Francisco Renaissance that had gotten started a year or two earlier.
It took until A.D. 2000 to find out who Bruce Conner was, at the Walker Art Center retrospective "2000 B.C.: The Bruce Conner Story, Part 2." Michael McClure, Rebecca Solnit and a number of other notables paid homage in a symposium devoted to yet another famous avant-garde artist nobody had ever heard of.
Conner's obituary in the New York Times yesterday feels less tragic by virtue of the fact that he got his due, for a few weeks more than Andy Warhol's proverbial fifteen minutes. His films, assemblages, photograms (which are now in the Carnegie International exhibition), and all the rest would not add up to enough when taken individually, although they were groundbreaking examples of genres in which others would outstrip Conner (though I personally would rank "A Movie" as one of the most glorious uses of found footage ever, putting Conner up there with Joseph Cornell as a filmmaker who everybody thinks of as something else).
It is pointless to rattle on and fill up friends' friends page with details of Conner's accomplishments and why, as with other examples I often cite, it is the complete context that makes him so astonishingly significant. One needs to be converted by something more than a sermon without illustrations.
But I feel the loss even if Conner left us on a note of fresh homage. He left us with a few treasures and a great deal to think about. I shall try to write something more coherent later, perhaps in conjunction with the various fiftieth anniversaries being celebrated this year in conjunction with the San Francisco Renaissance that had gotten started a year or two earlier.
