The exhibition Bruce Conner. Light out of Darkness at Museum Tinguely presents Conner’s experimental films with a representative selection of nine works. Among these is CROSSROADS (1976), a film that assembles footage of the first U.S. underwater atom bomb tests at Bikini Atoll in 1946 into a 36-minute study on the horror and sublimity of this apocalyptic event.
Conner's work in various media is radical and wide-ranging, at once hauntingly beautiful and horrifyingly bleak; it is political, subversive, and powered by a sensual immediacy that gets under the skin. Many of his early collages, assemblages and installations are made of low-quality, ephemeral materials such as nylon, wax or worn textiles and hence are too fragile to be exhibited except on very rare occasions. Conner’s anarchic stance was defined by his caustic irony, boundless dedication, and insistence on keeping as far away as possible from the art market.