Bruce Conner: ‘It’s all true’
Political, impudent, restless, instinctual — SFMOMA looks back at an artist who still can’t be easily described
He made an art film about the Kennedy assassination and delicate, meditative paintings based on inkblots and autumn leaves. His haunting assemblages, like those of a viscerally rotting “COUCH” or a mutilated and gauzeshrouded “CHILD” bound in a high chair, hold an undimmed charge more than a half century after they were made. So do his photographs of San Francisco’s burgeoning punk rock scene of the 1970s and ’80s. Female nudes proliferate in his art. Mushroom clouds of nuclear bombs are forever blooming — one from the neck of a headless man in a collage.
He was political and impudent, restless and instinctual — “one of the great outliers of American art,” said Roberta Smith in the New York Times. J. Hoberman, writing in the New York Review of Books, declared him “too anarchic and contrarian a personality to be easily assimilated into the art world.” Former Chronicle art critic Kenneth Baker wrote that his “work is distinguished by a nearly unique combination of visual and emotional impact and artistic disguise.”
Like the capital letters he favored in naming his work, everything was writ large for Bruce Conner.
In a major retrospective that may be an inherently quixotic undertaking for an artist so hard to categorize and contain, “Bruce Conner: It’s All True” opens Saturday, Oct. 29, and continues through Jan. 22 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
The show, which was initiated and organized by SFMOMA, contains some 250 works in multiple media. It arrives here after a critically celebrated engagement at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “It’s all True” is the first substantial Conner show in 16 years, and probably the most comprehensive ever.
Deeply identified with San Francisco, where he spent most of his adult life, Conner lived for more than three decades in a modest wood-frame house on a winding hillside street in the Glen Park neighborhood. His widow, Jean, welcomed a visitor at the door of what remains her residence eight years after Bruce Conner’s death at age 74 in 2008.
A distinctive and touching feature of the house are the 163 brass handles Conner installed to help him navigate after a liver disease, first diagnosed in the 1980s, severely restricted his mobility. The handles are everywhere — near chairs and lamps, in the bathroom and closets and kitchen. Practical and essential as they were, the brass accents are so rhythmically deployed from room to room that they seem to constitute a kind of installation piece. A new book about the handles sat on a coffee table in the compact, art-filled living room.
Born in McPherson, Kan., and raised in Wichita, where he met the future Beat poet Michael McClure and other like-