Looking for Bruce Conner (October Books)

A new perspective on the enormously influential but insufficiently understood work of San Francisco-based artist Bruce Conner (1933–2008).

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. 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.

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.

Kevin Hatch is Assistant Professor of Art History at Binghamton University.