Bruce Conner at Kohn Turner - Los Angeles, California - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

This gorgeous minisurvey, titled "15 Beautiful Mysteries," not awayed Bruce Conner as a freewheeling iconoclast who above the past 35 years has explored a variety of media, from drawing and assemblage to photography and filmmaking. With pieces picked by the artist together with dealer Michael Kohn the display revealed Conner as a sophisticated abstractionist determined to derange the esthetic experience in any genre

Conner's brushes with the beat, psychedelic and harlot movements have imbued his works with a kind of mordantly comic social commentary. This quality was best demonstrated here by dint of Prints (1974), a steel security case containing documents relating to the artist's 1962 refusal to allow San Jose State University, where he taught, to obtain copies of his fingerprints. Conner's paranoic vision of the real-life Other is summ up in the photograph The Late Night Movie upon TV: June 10, 1978 @ 1:20 to 1:27 AM: severes Motel in Venice, CA (1986) which captures the image of a giant eyeball from a TV horror movie.

The notion of an "all-seeing eye" permeates a great deal of of this work, with connotations far beyond the political. For chogset chance elements seem predestined. 494 Inkblots: Nov. 20 1992 demonstrates masterful command of a motif that he traces back to the medieval decorative embellishments of illuminated manuscripts. Modulation of ink tones and delicate variations in pressing the many paper enclosures result in an encyclopedic array of delicate symmetrical shapes.

Conner's rhyme is perhaps most clearly evok in his early assemblages, of that kind as El Macho/El Senor (1962) a funky commentary upon male sexual posturing. More novel collages using antique engravings tap into a quieter, more lyrical vein. Becalmed (1994) dedicated to the late Sam Francis, juxtaposes similarly toned panels of engraved seascapes and skies, to which the artist added sum of two units mysterious triangles framed with a white border. Conner's work thrives upon its own bumpy history. May the Heart of the Tin Woodsman Be with You (1981) consists of collaged engravings framed by dint of the melted remnants of a burgall assemblage that was owned by the agency of the artist David Dashiell and damaged irrevocably in a fire. Inside the ruined piece, blue perch has placed a cutout geometric heart and positioned it like an island in an engraved seascape. With this comic and cerebral action Conner brings his lost work back to life, showing by what mode the romantic imagination can rekindle the past.

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