
Looking for Bruce Conner
Kevin Hatch(Author)
MIT Press
1st Edition
Published on 17. February 2012
Book
Hardback
360 pages
978-0-262-01681-0 (ISBN)
Description
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. Generously illustrated with many color images of Conner's works, Looking for Bruce Conner proceeds in roughly chronological fashion, from Conner's notorious assemblages (BLACK DAHLIA and RATBASTARD among them) through his experimental films (populated by images from what Conner called "the tremendous, fantastic movies going in my head from all the scenes I'd seen"), his little-known graphic work, and his collage and inkblot drawings.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge, Mass.
United States
Publishing group
MIT Press Ltd
Target group
College/higher education
US School Grade: College Graduate Student and over
Illustrations
51 s/w Abbildungen, 53 farbige Abbildungen
53 color illus., 51 b&w illus.
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 178 mm
Thickness: 25 mm
Weight
1179 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-262-01681-0 (9780262016810)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

Kevin Hatch
Looking for Bruce Conner
Book
02/2016
MIT Press
€89.00
Article exhausted; check different version
Person
Kevin Hatch is Assistant Professor of Art History at Binghamton University.