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2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story, Part II Walker Art Center Minneapolis, Minnesota October 9, 1999-January 2, 2000

Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth Fort Worth, Texas February 6-April 23, 2000

M. H. de Young Memorial Museum San Francisco, California May 21-July 30, 2000

Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, California October 8, 2000-January 14, 2001

2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story, Part II essays by Peter Boswell, Bruce Jenkins and Joan Rothfuss

In an interview published in Afterimage in 1982, Scott MacDonald admitted to Bruce Conner, "I hadn't realized until recently that you're a sculptor and a painter as well as a filmmaker." "Some people think of me as a filmmaker and don't know me as someone who does sculpture," Conner replied, "and there are people who are familiar with my drawings, but have no idea that I've done collages." [1] Most of the confusion over Conner's artistic identity has been by design- for years Conner has cultivated multiple public personalities through acts of sabotage, substitution and silence.

Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1999 266 pp./$59.95 (hb), $35.00 (sb)

The Walker Art Center exhibition is an attempt to introduce the work of this prolific and influential figure to audiences beyond the small coterie of curators, collectors and film historians who have followed Conner's career since the 1950s. This wide-ranging show comes at a time when people are finally ready to receive all of Conner at once. His work and biography dovetail with the current critical interest in identity politics and postmodernism as well as important re-investigations of the cultures of advertising and the' Cold War. Over the past decade, there has been an explosion of curatorial and scholarly interest in areas in which Conner is increasingly cited as an important and influential contributor: the American avant-garde, experimental cinema, music video, the Beat movement and primitivism.

If there is a common thread running through the diverse works in this exhibition, it is Conner's fascination with the problem of the artist's name, signature and identity--a problem that Conner and the exhibition organizers convincingly demonstrate to be crucially connected to modern America itself. Early in his career, Conner achieved notoriety for the erotic, densely narrative pieces he made from found objects that he wrapped or veiled in stretched and torn nylon stockings. To avoid becoming permanently known as the "nylon-stocking artist," he began long-term experimentation with the ways in which an artist's signature acts as a fixative on artworks using two methods. The first was to make his name larger than life, producing the effect Russian Formalists called "defamiliarization." He announced this strategy with his 1958 short film A Movie in which the production credit bearing his name ("BY BRUCE CONNER") has the longest duration of any single shot in the film. The other method was to leave his name off a work completely or to send in a proxy. In 1964 he abruptly stopped making the assemblages he had become known for, imposing on his own biography a break with the past. In 1967 Conner finished a series of collages made from wood engravings and asked a gallery owner to show them, unsigned, under the title "The Dennis Hopper One Man Show." (The gallery owner refused, fearing potential legal complications. The complete works are included in a separate room at the end of this show.) During a 14-year period from the early 1950s to mid-1960s he refused to have publicity photographs taken and has never produced a recognizable self-portrait. Mischievous and parodic activities such as these produce a conundrum for those wanting to tell the full Bruce Conner story. Instead the show's curators attempt to draw out the artist's multiple personalities; indeed, given the variety of works on view, one could easily mistake this sprawling exhibition for a group show.

"2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story Part II" suggests Conner's own narrative of disappearance, moving from the most visually cluttered and layered pieces to the most spare. Untitled (1954-61), a double-sided hide-and-seek meditation on sexual difference he made as an art student, is the first piece in the exhibition. The front of the sculpture is composed of layers of cardboard and distressed wood scraps interrupted by a small vertical slit that partially reveals a postage stamp. The homonymic pun on the mail is made obvious by what is on the back side of the piece: a collage of images clipped from stag magazines resembling the interior of a young man's gym locker and meant to titillate the observer. Closer inspection reveals other images and texts, including the words "FRAGILE" and "WARNING YOU ARE IN GREAT DANGER" and an official document from the U.S. Armed Forces asking Conner to report for a physical. Against a history of western visual dynamics and sexual politics understood to organize the eye into a unified and contemplative male observer, Conner expresses the tension between that ideal figure and a more material, distracted and threatened viewer.

The first gallery also contains Conner's assemblages composed of familiar and suggestive fragments (beads, wallpaper, fur, newspaper, plastic flowers) wrapped in nylon and string as if to encase them in cobwebs that both hide and reveal the contents. The second gallery contains sculptures and drawings from a year Conner spent in Mexico in 1961 -62 where he had gone to escape the oppressive climate of the Cold War. Still working with some of the basic techniques of assemblage, he incorporated local objects into pieces that suggest themes of search, escape or hiding. After his return from Mexico the concept of camouflage remained present in his work. Collage offers a technique for heterogenous images to appear simultaneously synchronous and radically differentiated. In the third gallery are intricate pen and ink drawings, paper collages and photograms in which Conner explores the eclipsing of the self in the face of the fantastic and the sublime in religious, naturalist and scientific discourse.

Many visitors will find the relationship between Conner's flimmaking and the techniques and themes of his studio work fascinating. Five of his experimental short films, A Movie, Take the 5:10 to Dreamland (1977), Television Assassination (1963-64/1995), Breakaway (1966), and two versions of Looking for Mushrooms (1959-67) run continuously in separate rooms inthe exhibition. A daily cinematheque showcases other films Conner handselected, and in some cases reedited, for this exhibition. While the films are editing tours-deforce (especially A Movie, a canonical work of American avant-garde cinema) they refuse to let Conner emerge as that cult figure of mass culture: the director. Rather, and this is most important to his current broad appeal, these films iterate Conner-as-spectator.

With few exceptions, Conner made his films by assembling found footage-orphaned pieces of film history-and recorded sound into rhythmic explorations of the tension between reader and author. The stag films, promotional and training material, B-movie condensations, countdown leaders, newsreels and intertitles he uses operate as commentary rather than as entertainment. Such remnants of ephemeral culture describe a forgotten history of audiences, a genealogy of the American spectator not available to us through the canons of American art and culture. In his use of these traces of neglected film discourses, Conner turns our attention from the gaze that preoccupies narrative cinema and its critics, toward the organized stare that characterizes Guy Debord's concept of the "Society of the Spectacle." By working with both collage and cinematic montage, Conner also returns us to questions Walter Benjamin raised about the revolutionary capacity of cinema to show us the mechanics and techniques producing our own subjec t positions.

Conner leaves us to resolve the possible connection between objects and their histories. To underscore this feature of his work, the organizers of the exhibition make use of numerous fragments of discourse-anecdotes, rumors and letters-to make the objects in the show into stories. Conner is as interested in the circulation of stories as he is in the circulation of value in art. Two pieces from Conner's career illustrate this idea. In 1963 Conner carried a small glass and metal cigarette box containing an inkpad and rubber stamp bearing his signature to a lecture by Marcel Duchamp at Brandeis University. Enclosed but still visible, the machinery of forgery reveals Conner's indebtedness to Duchamp and at the same time marks their difference: while Duchamp was known for signing works he did not make, Conner did not sign works he made. He wrapped the box in string and rather than giving it to Duchamp as a gift (a gesture he thought had "a burdensome character" to it) Conner asked Duchamp to deliver the object to his art dealer, the gallery director Charles Alan in New York. Several months later a delighted Alan phoned Conner to tell him Duchamp's wife had brought the piece to him; some time later it was donated to the Guggenheim Museum with the title The Marcel Duchamp Travelling Box (1963).

Similarly swathed in art world folklore is Conner's nylon-wrapped two-sided Ratbastard (1958). Conner had been working on a small canvas and out of frustration, slashed it with a knife. Partially visible on the front of the piece is a black and white photograph. of a group of white men in suits who are either convening a meeting or arriving at the scene of a crime. Conner stapled a page from an illustrated tabloid containing two stories about organized violence to the back of the canvas. One of the articles tells of an artist endeavoring to produce photographic illustrations of barbaric methods of torture and punishment out of a concern that aging hand-drawn illustrations do not show the procedures in clear enough detail. The second story, headlined "Talks To His Wife By Carrier Pigeon," presents the story of a Midwestern professional boxer with a novel method of sending home reports of his bouts. Because the page is undated-and the piece is suspiciously missing the section from its border where we would expect to find the date-our attention is drawn, as we can suspect Conner's was, to the way that "the modem" chafes against "the pre-modern" when isolated on a page in this way. Conner stapled a canvas handle to the top and supposedly carried the piece with him to various events. The marks of Conner's frustration with painting as a medium, coupled with the quotidian yet startling press items on the back, form a palimpsest of the triumph of narrative over abstract art and spectacle over interpretation.

The fundamental version of this argument in Conner's work is A Movie, which was given its own room off of the first gallery. Like another of his films, Ten Second Film (1965), A Movie is a lesson on the machinery of cinematic meaning, displaying both the over-viewed and never-viewed as parts of the social apparatus of moving pictures. A 12-minute pun on the idea of technological progress, the film indicates the semblance of continuity by linking together abbreviated images of plane crashes, motorcycle accidents and waterskiing stunts gone wrong in a cavalcade of disasters that flow into each other with the ineluctable logic of a movie trailer. Against the haunting accompaniment of Respighi's 1923-24 composition, Pines of Rome the action of one shot seems to set off a reaction in the one that follows, in the time-honored manner of Hollywood. On closer view, however, the frames retain their value as stock imagery. The spectator's desire for logic is repeatedly frustrated and rewarded as sequences are interrupted by countdown leaders and blank frames; at one point the "end of part four" appears on the screen, startling a viewer who had not realized there were any parts at all. The unsettling proposition that Conner makes with A Movie is that in its efforts to speak directly to its spectator, film must speak to no one in particular.

Two later works make clear that, for Conner, identity is both the moment to be caught and the moment to escape, to leave only a trace. The figures that make up the "Angel" series (1973-75) explore the problem of embodied disappearance. These life-size gelatin silver print photograms fill one room of the show. The reverse-exposure procedure creates a silhouette figure that easily evokes either a specter or crime-scene outline. For Prints (1974), Conner arranged a set of his fingerprints produced at the Palo Alto Police Department along with a strongbox containing file folders. Set among the files is a photograph of a subject whose prints are being taken. On the police department form in the box labeled "name of person being fingerprinted" is Conner's signature, which had not appeared on his works for the previous three -and-a-half years.

These two works help us to finally understand the show's title. As in his most recent work, a remarkable series of intricate, self-produced, Rorschach-like inkblots, Conner suggests that in the places where interpretation and institutions meet, the self is merely a part produced by our instruments. This is not a new idea, but it is certainly relevant to the contemporary moment. Conner, who either could be the artist of the last century or of the next, reminds us how our apparatuses of representation, in their quest to identify each of us, leave only traces of the individual.

JENNIFER HORNE is a doctoral candidate in the Program in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

NOTES

(1.) Scott MacDonald, "I Don't Go to the Movies Anymore: An Interview with Bruce Conner," Afterimage 10, nos. 1&2 (Summer 1982), pp. 20-23.