Looking for Bruce Conner

Book excerpt: "In a career that spanned five decades, most of them spent in San Francisco, Bruce Conner (1933--2008) produced a unique body of work that refused to be contained by medium or style. Whether making found-footage films, hallucinatory ink-blot graphics, enigmatic collages, or assemblages from castoffs, Conner took up genres as quickly as he abandoned them. His movements within San Francisco's counter-cultural scenes were similarly free-wheeling; at home in beat poetry, punk music, and underground film circles, he never completely belonged to any of them. Bruce Conner belonged to Bruce Conner. Twice he announced his own death; during the last years of his life he produced a series of pseudonymous works after announcing his 'retirement.' In this first book-length study of Conner's enormously influential but insufficiently understood career, Kevin Hatch explores Conner's work as well as his position on the geographical, cultural, and critical margins. Hatch finds a set of abiding concerns that inform Conner's wide-ranging works and changing personas. A deep anxiety pervades the work, reflecting a struggle between private, unknowable, interior experience and a duplicitous world of received images and false appearances. The profane and the sacred, the comic and the tragic, the enigmatic and the universal: each of these antinomies is pushed to the breaking point in Conner's work..."--Publisher's description.