Looking for Bruce Conner

Download or read book Looking for Bruce Conner written by Kevin Hatch and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. 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.