Nicholas Gamso on Bruce Conner

Eighteen years have passed since Bruce Conner’s death, in 2008, aged seventy-four; ten since MoMA held its massive Conner retrospective. The countercultural polymath, known equally for his ragged combines (described by Philip Leider in Artforum as “hideous in the extreme”) and his seductive film collages, has been canonized, if the label befits a true iconoclast, for a long time. A new show at the Marciano Foundation in Los Angeles—located in a former Masonic temple, and showcasing the private collection of the co-founders of Guess jeans—is the latest test of Conner’s caustic sensibility.

Famously wary of the art market, Conner lived for only six months in New York before decamping to what he called the “mystery and romanticism” of San Francisco. He became a key figure among Beat-adjacent visual artists thriving creatively in the city’s predominantly Black Fillmore district—Jay DeFeo and her husband Wally Hedrick were Conner’s neighbors—where he mined junk stores and dilapidated Victorian houses for old furniture, stockings, metal pipes, and window frames to use in assemblages like Rat Purse (1959), Black Dahlia, and Medusa (both 1960). A series of exhibitions around 1960 garnered sales, but his encounters with extreme wealth bothered him. In a 1974 interview with the Archives of American Art, he described the experience of seeing his work installed in an ostentatious Los Angeles living room:
"I was doing black wax sculptures . . . I did one that was called Oven . . . a sort of Buchenwald oven door, the door handle has wings on it; there are tubes coming out. . . When I was in Los Angeles in 1960 or 1961 I went to [collector] Don Factor’s house. There the piece was on their wall. The wall was immaculate white. They had white overstuffed furniture and white modern furniture, and glass and chromium and a swimming pool and colored lights on the trees outside. . . It was the most unbearable experience. I could hardly stand it. It was like I was living inside of that sculpture."

His decision to quit the plastic arts in 1964 was a means of extracting himself from the mindless extravagance he witnessed in the commercial art world. Film was different—he called it a homeless art—and he was taken more and more with performance and psychedelia, making light shows for the Avalon Ballroom and collaborating with the dancer Anna Halprin. The biggest shift came when he befriended a group of actors living around Topanga Canyon outside Malibu: Dennis Hopper, Dean Stockwell, and the singer Toni Basil, who would star in Conner’s 1966 film BREAKAWAY, dancing deliriously in her underwear.

The Marciano exhibit focuses on this second, more vibrant, supposedly liberated phase of Conner’s career. Organized by Douglas Fogle, the show features a half-dozen films projected digitally onto enormous screens. They include Conner’s A MOVIE (1958), a mix of found pornographic “blue movies” with stunts, car wrecks, maimed soldiers on a battle field. Alongside it are several subsequent works, like THREE SCREEN RAY (the 2006 three-channel iteration of COSMIC RAY, 1961), scored to Ray Charles, and LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS (1959–67), a vivid psychedelic travelogue filmed in the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona. Two projects from the 1980s, featuring Devo, Brian Eno, and David Byrne, are also there, reminding us that Conner was the “father of the music video,” a hagiographic title that evokes the domesticated boomer capitalism the artist would, most likely, have disdained. 

Conner cast himself as an outsider, and as a critic of his time and place. He fixated on what Jeremy Millar has called “destructive impulses of desire and the emptiness that lies at the center of things”—an evocative description that could name a generational obsession with authenticity, as well as feelings of disappointment and regression. A flight from the New York galleries to a more feral western intensity was Conner’s way of getting close to the real thing, and his disciplinary restlessness and vehement lifelong amateurism were like this too. Real success could be costly. The Marciano announcement emphasizes Conner’s exhilarating “love of the uncanny and the revolutionary,” but an equally significant, if much darker, more emotionally bracing element is missing.

Two masterpieces of the 1960s enrich Conner’s legacy considerably: THE WHITE ROSE (1967), about the excavation, from a San Francisco walkup, of Jay DeFeo’s painting of the same name (later retitled The Rose, 1958–66); second, REPORT (1967), comprising broadcast footage of the Kennedy assassination, intercut with scenes of a bullfight and ads for steel wool—the brand is S.O.S. The two films point in different directions. The earlier piece explores a troubled avant-garde existence, and a defiant commitment to one’s own vision—DeFeo’s tireless labor and the instability which followed her eviction. The latter film, by contrast, is political, artifactual, and angry, jumbling mass media to suggest a stuttering collective despair. It shocked Conner’s friends, still traumatized by the shooting, and it was also a referential work, possibly a critique of Robert Rauschenberg’s JFK collages.

But according to Conner’s final assistant, the film restorer Michelle Silva, the two films were, for their creator, of a piece. Conner was devastated by the assassination and doubly by its constant replay: the motorcade, shots fired, Jackie bent over the slack body, all strung together in an endless commercial break. He was likewise disturbed seeing his confidante DeFeo at wits’ end, smoldering over Fillmore Street, the wall torn from her building’s face to get the massive canvas out. Her life would contract radically in the next years.

The power and the glory resurface in Conner’s most famous work, CROSSROADS (1976), made of twenty-four clips of a 1946 underwater nuclear test at Bikini Atoll, played in extreme slow motion. Blast after gargantuan blast fills the screen with vapor, and the effect is electrifying, awful, but also perversely beautiful, scored with sublime electronic music by Patrick Gleeson and Terry Riley. Conner grew up with the bomb, and saw this footage as a child on newsreels in Wichita, Kansas. The bomb was supposed to be every boy and girl’s best friend—so Conner told Silva many years later—and it was also, in his rendering, an uncompromising, God-like father figure, linked implicitly to midwestern Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. His achievement in CROSSROADS is in worshiping and, at the same time, radically estranging the myths of a purifying imperial violence. It is difficult to call the work ironic, and that is what makes it so unnervingly contemporary.

Conner clearly foresaw the sensory inundation that characterizes our contemporary culture. His nuclear blasts, women dancing, scenes lifted from the Bride of Frankenstein—each  image flits by and is then forgotten. More prescient, and disturbing, are the ways he seems to exalt violence, even formally. His rhythmic cuts and disorienting jerky camera moves in BREAKAWAY and THREE SCREEN RAY are exhilarating, but watched in succession—and at Marciano in the round—they become depleted and hollow. Only CROSSROADS is really served by the setting. Marciano’s cavernous central gallery, formerly the temple’s auditorium, enhances the cultic monumentality of the film, with Gleeson and Riley’s score reverberating magnificently through the whole building. Yet in the end, one is left unsure of how to interpret the totemic work. The other films on view offer no answers—neither THE WHITE ROSE nor REPORT have been included—while mushroom clouds emblazoned on Marciano’s adverts, its brochures, the free poster given to viewers, imply a sort of decadence.

THE WHITE ROSE did screen several years ago in New York, on the occasion of a DeFeo/Conner exhibit at Paula Cooper Gallery, and around the same time, I watched it from a rapt audience at the San Francisco Art Institute; the occasion was the release of Jordan Stein’s book Rip Tales, which recounts the artists’ friendship. But it has rarely been shown since, and is difficult to find online. It remains a quiet but challenging, ultimately unassimilable pleasure that dramatizes the great psychic and material risks of devoting your life to work with resonance, as Conner’s career makes clear, that may extend beyond your own control.

Bruce Conner’s “RECORDING ANGEL” is on view at Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles, February 21 through July 18, 2026.