Conner
On November 18th, UCLAs Melnitz Movies will celebrate artist Bruce Conner’s birthday by inviting renowned restorationist Ross Lipman (UCLA Film & Television Archive) to present his multimedia lecture on the production of Conner’s 1976 film Crossroads, first seen last year at MoMA.
Read MoreBruce Conner’s best-known film, “Crossroads” (1976), pulls a pivotal moment of history into the art world, using declassified footage of the first underwater atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean in 1946. Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles is hosting a retrospective of Conner’s work in the context of this magnum opus, offering screenings of the classic film alongside drawings by Conner that contemplate destruction and rebirth.
Read MoreDennis Hopper credited Bruce Conner with inventing the music video, and Bruce Jenkins, the former director of the Harvard Film Archive, once wrote, “what the Cubists wreaked on painting . . . Conner inflicted on cinema itself.” For every iconoclastic film that the renegade West Coast artist made before his death in 2008, there are sculptures, collages, paintings, and drawings, too. Simply put, if you’re not yet familiar with Conner’s work, now’s the time for an introduction—well ahead of the retrospective that MoMA and SFMoMA are rumored to be jointly planning for next year.
Read MoreOne of two short films Bruce Conner made for Brian Eno and David Byrne's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts—itself a defining work of assemblage—MEA CULPA (1981) comes near the end of Conner's active filmmaking career.
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