Bruce Conner’s Crossroads

How many names can you call Bruce Conner? Surrealist, beat, prankster, poet, illustrator, assemblagist, filmmaker, punk. Spray-paint anything you like across Conner’s legacy and someone will think it sticks. A few years ago, a big brain from Harvard hilariously decreed this slipperiest of major American filmmakers a “structuralist” (never mind the centrality of “content” in, or the profoundly expressive and. Myriad, sometimes mirthful, but often wholly misguided, such assessments litter the Google-field of old newspaper articles on the artist from New York to Los Angeles. Conner (1933-2008) reveled in the tipsy tumult of his ever-elusive “reputation,” sometimes billing his work as a “Dennis Hopper one-man show,” sometimes showing up at gallery functions claiming to be a hired hand merely impersonating the artist Bruce Conner. “When I did my show ,” he told legendary underground publisher V. Vale in a 2005 interview now collected in the recently published (RE/Search Publications), “I saved all kinds of comments and reviews. On the same day, there would be a newspaper review saying I was an egomaniac and Jesus Christ, and in the same city another newspaper article would say that I’m a humble person and generous and self-effacing…You could fill up the United Nations with different points of view about what Bruce Conner’s work is: what it means, what he’s doing, what it is…”