Bruce Conner, 1933-2008.

Bruce Conner, who died in San Francisco on July 7, led more lives in his 74 years than most of us could begin to imagine. An unpredictable and inveterate trickster, he made sculptures, collages, films, prints, drawings, paintings, photos and light shows; he even stood for political office. He didn't hesitate to drop each craft and move on to the next when he felt he had exhausted the opportunities for mind-expanding magic and mischief. He pronounced his own death twice before the real one got him, including the words "works by the late Bruce Conner" in a 1959 exhibition invitation.

His experiments in identity slippage and dissolution foreshadowed out current cultural moment: in childhood, he entered an altered state of consciousness and saw his life flash before his eyes; he convinced accomplices to portray him at public appearances; he lost a Bruce Conner look-alike contest by entering a mirror into the competition; and he tried to mount a 1967 exhibition of collages under the name of his friend Dennis Hopper, the quintessential 60s countercultural figure.

Born in McPherson, Kansas, in 1933 and the recipient of a BFA from the University of Nebraska in 1956, Conner soon fled the dusty, stultifying Midwest of the paranoid, intolerant Cold War era for the promise and excitement of the Bay Area, where he started his art practice surrounded by Beats and mystics.

Rather than exploring personal material, the seemingly ego-free Conner grappled with the mysterious truths of human existence: the sacred and the profane, the sublime and the mundane, desire and repression, always marking his work with a profound sense of ambivalence. He infused his explorations with both a political consciousness (thankfully free of dogmas) and a darkly ironic wit that frequently evoked a state poised between laughter and despair.

In post-war America's mass-culture castoffs, he found evidence of his country's polymorphously perverse unconscious: torn nylons envelop his pendulous sculptures and girlie mags are brought out from under the mattress and placed on gallery walls. They joined all manner of rubbish: dolls, wax, jewellery, fur, snakeskin, a bicycle tire. In this ephemeral trash, Conner found "intimations of our mortality" (in Joan C. Siegfried's words) and, thus, he stands as one of the great chroniclers of America's apocalyptic imagination, with the doomladen mushroom cloud as a recurring motif. For example, his 1976 film Crossroads is an unsettling, slow-burn montage of government nuclear-bomb tests on Bikini Atoll, while the bluntly titled Bombhead is an impish 1989 collage of a suit whose head has been replaced with the iconic radioactive puff. The abject assemblage sculpture entitled Child (1959)--a premonition of the traumatic 60s--and the other sculptures that made him a star in the 50s employ "lost" objects that hold on to all the sad majesty of their dejected, discarded status. Conner was soon exhausted and ulcer-scarred (according to Stan Brakhage) by the experience of being a commodity traded by the New York art world, and largely abandoned his 3D work and his gallery representation as his fame crested in 1967.

I came to know Conner through his films, notably A Movie (1958) and Report (1964-67). Conner understood the huge affective and erotic power of the cinema to uplift banal reality to the status of glorious spectacle. While he made work in honour of female stars like Jean Harlow and Marilyn Monroe, on big and small screen alike he mostly saw lies, lies, lies--as glamorous and compelling as they may be.

Infused with the same ironic, collage sensibilities as his other work, the films manifest his sensibility most completely. Using decontextualized fragments of whatever celluloid he could afford--newsreels, B-movies, stock footage, educational and industrial films, smut and, most notoriously, film leader--in films like A Movie, he carefully orchestrated kinetic, rhythmic and often shocking montages that expressed the dark underbelly of American destiny. Often using repetition to suggest how trapped we are in our patterns of destruction, he revealed the ideological meanings that usually remain obscured through formal manipulation.

In the space of 12 minutes, A Movie mutates from comical slapstick to hellish cataclysm in its critique of American might and conquest. A stampede of violence and devastation, A Movie is all movies, all narrative that sees the world in terms of heroes and villains, and Conner declares "THE END" to these stories before the film even starts. The men and their life-extinguishing games on the nations battlefields and boardrooms displayed are sharply contrasted with all the women in Conner's films, who are the source of a potent life energy (exemplified in Cosmic Ray [1962] and Breakaway [1966]).

In Report, Conner obsessively returned to the terror of John F. Kennedy's assassination and the transformation of the dead president into marketable myth. Radio reports from that fateful day are provocatively juxtaposed with a wide variety of surprising and affecting found images, from shots of the motorcade to glossy commercials. With no footage of the actual shooting, Conner poignantly employs an empty screen and the hallucinogenic flicker of alternating black and white frames--as if to admit the failure of representation in the face of real death. The second act evokes the soul-killing consumer culture that turns politics into spectacle, lives into commodities. The final close-up of a cashier pressing the "SELL" button on her register sends shivers down the spine.

Conner would re-edit his films regularly; they were always in progress, lived and breathed, never finished (completing Report meant accepting that JFK was really dead). Conner's visionary spirit will live on in all who see his films and find themselves affected by their visceral intensity. And he played one last gag on us: shown as a part of Life on Mars, the current Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, are his 1972-75 series of photogram self-portraits that transformed his body into pure light. Their title: Angels.