I AM BRUCE CONNER. I AM NOT BRUCE CONNER.
An Exhibition
Opening: September 11, 2010 7:00 p.m.
Duration: 12.09. - 17.10.2010
Bruce Conner demonstrated a new path to making films that revealed a
large number of exegeses and possible variations. Born in 1933, he was
a member of the first generation of American independent filmmakers in
the circle of Stan Brakhage, Jack Smith, and Jonas Mekas. The artist
died in San Francisco in 2008, having spent much of his life there. He
was close to the Beat Generation and its free-spirited redefinition of
the American way of life, and during the 1950s he made sculptures from
nylon stockings, pieces of furniture, broken dolls, and other refuse
from an affluent society—long before the trash aesthetic
became a form of artistic expression.
The exhibition will include a selection of his most important films of
the past fifty years as well as drawings that reveal a very different
facet of his creativity: grid structures of small, Rorschach-test-like
forms produced by inkblots on corrugated, concertina-like paper. The
exhibition presents an artist who, despite pioneering achievements in
numerous areas, has remained an insider’s tip in comparison
to the stars of Pop Art and the legendary poets of the Beat movement.
The exhibition will after then take place from October 8, 2010, to
January 30, 2011, at the Kunsthalle Wien.
Curator: Dr. Gerald Matt, director of the Kunsthalle Wien
