BRUCE CONNER: A NEW SENSIBILITY
THE DACHAU PLAYBOY
He can visualize the loveliest flesh charred beyond recognition. The data which informs his work is that of the extermination camps, Hiroshima, horror comics, sexual psychopathology, lunatic feminine adornment. “I would hate,” said a woman at one of his openings, “to be his wife.” One can appreciate her uneasiness: could he not transform her most enticing postures into a Black Dahlia, with its nail pounded maniacally into the heart of the matter? What must he see as she draws on those nylons, those silken underthings, those bangles and gee-gaws which he discards into his work as into a skid-row bargain store? Looking at his work, one conceives a mentality which must obsessively re-cast all it observes into the imagery of the most unutterable horrors of our times.
That imagery comes to him ready-made out of the history of this century; the logic of its usage derives from the experiences of the generation he addresses. In a piece called Oven for example, we are presented with a squat, repugnant box, with a small opening at its front. Clinging to this mouth of the oven are a scattering of human, or human-appearing, hairs, tightly curled, tough, immediately pubic in association. The simultaneous evocation of the crematories and the erotic charges the atmosphere with depthless evil—and guilt. But the piece, hideous in the extreme, speaks a language universal to this generation, contains a logic we understand all too well. The point is not simply an ugly pun, turning on the slang usage of the word “oven” for the female genitalia. It refers to an even more murky connection between the sexual and the maniacal, the never-ending dark dialogue of the sexual sickness and the social sickness.
Disordered sexuality with its persistent association of disordered society is thematic in Conner’s work. Black Dahlia uses a semi-pornographic pin-up photo as a fuse to ignite an explosion of psychotic imagery. The feathers and fringes, the length of rubber hose, and, above all, the murderous central nail are imagery out of Kraft-Ebbing (but the tattering of comic-strips in the lower right-hand corner directs our attention elsewhere). In another piece, a similar photograph will be found dangling from a string; in another, we will find it partly obscured in a welter of junk. The pornographic references can be found as ubiquitously in Conner’s work as the mutilated silk stockings, and for much the same reason: both refer to the undercurrent of aberrated sexuality which Conner never disassociates from society.
If the imagery in Bruce Conner’s work is revolting, it at the same time addresses itself to a generation which does not have the moral authority to question his bad taste. The “notorious” and often-exhibited Child is one of the few of Conner’s works in which his genuine sense of pity, terror and outrage is not hidden. It is, therefore, doubly infuriating to see people turn from this piece pale with rage and disgust. The data of the work is drawn from the greatest massacre of children in recorded history; that single charred body fixes a guilt which a dozen Disneylands cannot diminish.
L’OBJET PERDUE
We appear to be entering a period in which an artist’s medium will be as private to him as his signature. Bruce Conner’s medium is most often “silk stocking, wax, and assorted lost objects.” The silk stocking which is so universal in his work, serves several purposes. First, it is usually the container in which the rest of the work is packed; remove it and the entire construction would fall out like an overturned drawer. Being transparent, and being capable of having its transparency made more or less perfect by tightening or loosening or by choice of gauge, it serves this technical purpose admirably. Secondly, it adapts to, and often augments the tone of the piece as a whole. When the piece is a comical one, the stocking adds to the humor; but used in a piece like Child, it immeasurably intensifies the horror, and used in a piece like Black Dahlia it heightens its quality of demented sexuality. Thirdly, being itself primarily a discarded object, it serves as a kind of transition to the innumerable and uncategorizable discarded objects to be found in almost all of Conner’s works.
Unlike almost all other artists working with discarded objects, Conner does not treat these as “found objects,” but as lost objects. There is no attempt to give them a new life, or to bring to us a new awareness of them. He throws them into his constructions exactly as they are thrown into drawers or onto the tables of “Thrift” shops. Fringes, feathers, tatters of lace, marbles, old hardware, old five-and-dime-store “jewelry” are simply discarded into the work, at random. (In one work, The Snore, they are packed into little bundles and stored into the work as if it were some old lady’s attic.) The effect is a tone of total hopelessness, a sense of unrelieved depression, a sense of wretchedness, melancholy, despair—and death. The death symbol in Conner’s work is always the dead object, and the dead object is always present. Overtly, Conner’s concern would appear to be less with death itself than with the hideous forms death has taken in our times: mass murder, atomic bombing, torture, mutilation. But the omnipresent dead objects are “memento mori,” pure and simple. Composed for the most part of long-disused feminine adornment, they say, like Yorick’s skull, “Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come.”
One of the reasons Conner fits so awkwardly into the “assemblage” category is precisely this refusal to “treat” discarded objects. He does not present us with a ‘found object’ and offer it to us for re-examination. He does not isolate objects in peculiar contexts, forcing us to see them new. He does not employ objects in ingenious ways completely foreign to their original uses. Discarded objects serve his singular purpose precisely in their passive, unreactivated state. This is one of the many things that distinguish Conner, not only from most “assemblage” makers, but from the Dadaists and the neo-Dadaists with whom he has so often, and so inaccurately, been grouped. Comparison to Dubuffet is also misleading: where Dubuffet is elegant, Conner is brutal; where Dubuffet challenges the conceptions of art and beauty held by an entire civilization, Conner is totally indifferent. Goya, and, perhaps, Ensor would seem to more closely approximate the tradition and the content which is of interest to him, but the truth seems to be that with Bruce Conner we are dealing with an almost unique phenomenon.
A NEW SENSIBILITY
It is difficult to define the characteristics of a completely new sensibility. Intelligence seems to have little to do with it; technical mastery or innovation does not necessarily appear hand in hand with it. What we get is simply a completely new way of seeing the world, which, once communicated to us, never leaves our old way the same again. In literature, whose communication is much more direct than that of the visual arts, the appearance of a new sensibility sends a kind of shock wave around the world; one thinks, for example, of the peculiar addition to their understanding shared by all people who have read Kafka, or Celine. In Kafka, intelligence runs high, in Celine not. Celine revolutionized the literary uses of his language, Kafka employed a conventional prose. But both have in common the communication of a way of responding to the world so unique, so entirely new, that no one reading them ever sees the world in quite the same way again as before.
Painting rarely offers us this experience embodied in the work of a single person, though the great schools of painting often communicate, in a manner much less dramatic because much less direct, the experience of a new sensibility. It is all the more exciting then, facing the work of Bruce Conner, to realize that what we are confronting is a uniquely new way of seeing things, a strange re-casting of experience in terms of a sensibility we have not before encountered. It is a rare phenomenon.
—Philip Leider
