Bruce Conner: The Afternoon Interviews - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1889307211 ISBN 13: 9781889307213

Publisher: Re/Search Publications, 2016

Synopsis

From the late '70s to 2005, V. Vale interviewed Bruce Conner by telephone and in person mostly in the afternoons. Spontaneous yet insightful in his conversation, Conner is revealed as an innovative improvisatory artist whose goal in life seemed to be freedom and the transcendence of hidebound careerist conformity in all its bureaucratic manifestations. Therefore he created art that annihilated boundaries, categories and predictability. These interviews have never been transcribed and made public, until now. Bruce Conner: The Afternoon Interviews includes a revelatory introduction by art curator, writer and philosopher Natasha Boas. Boas positions Conner as a key artist of the late 20th- to early 21st-century, profiling Conner as a surprising role model for today's emergent and future artists.

About this title

About the Authors

V. Vale is a popular-culture investigator as recognized by The New York Times, NPR and other major dispersers of culture and "the news." He has been self-publishing for 40 years and now is a talk-show host on The Counter Culture Hour in San Francisco.

Bruce Guldner Conner (11/18/1933-7/7/2008) was born in MacPherson, Kansas. He has been a filmmaker, photographer, assemblage creator, sculptors, philosopher, painter, conceptual artist, post-Duchamp activist, and more. He moved to San Francisco in the late fifties and became associated with the Beat Movement.

From the Back Cover

Bruce Guldner Conner (11/18/1933-7/7/2008) was born in MacPherson, Kansas. He has been a filmmaker, photographer, assemblage creator, sculptors, philosopher, painter, conceptual artist, post-Duchamp activist, and more. He moved to San Francisco in the late fifties and became associated with the Beat Movement. In the late seventies, V. Vale gave him a press pass to take Punk photographs for Search & Destroy magazine…

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

V: I will. But it’s true. And I also realized that you had captured some really horrific moments in terms of the people in the footage—the anonymous people and things that happened to them. They probably suffered internal injuries, broken bones, died, what- ever—but yet, everyone in the audience was laugh- ing! You somehow managed to combine laughter and humor with catastrophe.

BC: Well, A Movie starts out with classic “comic” events. Bit by bit it makes it clear that people are really getting hurt here. At a certain point it changes; stops being a laughing matter, and everybody gets pretty quiet.

V: Well, it seems that you have definitely destabi- lized, and contributed a lot of Surrealist thinking, to many onlookers of your art. I think a lot of the art you’ve done has really been pranks. So let’s talk about the idea of your art as pranks—

BC: Well, what in the world can I possibly say after I say, “I’m sorry.”

V: Like, “I’m sorry I changed your perceptions of the world of film.”

BC: I could say: “I apologize. I have really bad manners. It’s been a big mistake. I hope you don’t ever take any of this seriously again.”

V: “I’m sorry I did a paint-by-numbers version of da Vinci’s Last Supper and showed it at the de Young Museum of Art”—

BC: Yes, absolutely.

V: And, “I’m sorry I took all this rotting material and made all these creepy assemblage-collage 3-D sculpture things and tried to pawn them off as ‘art’ on you, the gullible public.”

BC: Absolutely.

V: I remember when I first saw some of those they looked absolutely creepy, and I then had to “process” it.

BC: Oh, you did? How did you process it?

V: I went, “Wait a minute—this is ‘art’?”

BC: [laughs] Well, that’s just because it was in an art gallery or an art museum, probably. People just jump to those assumptions, don’t they?

V: Well, your work certainly makes them think a lit- tle, rather than just going, “Ooh, that’s beautiful.”

BC: But I like it when they say that about my stuff, too! 

V: Of course. But then, creepy things can be beautiful— 

BC: I guess so. 

Edition details

• Publisher: Re/Search Publications
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1889307211
• ISBN 13: 9781889307213
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 128
• Editor: Vale V.