Bruce Guldner Conner

Bruce Guldner Conner

1933-2008

Over the course of his fifty-year career, Bruce Conner has been something of an artistic chameleon, working in sculpture, film, collage, painting, photography, printmaking, performance, and conceptual art. He has courted diversity and unpredictability to the point where he has seemingly made an art out of elusiveness, abandoning a given type or style of work whenever he felt he was becoming too closely identified with it. As a result he has gained a fractured following. Devotees of his experimental films of the 1960s and 1970s might be totally unaware of the nylon-shrouded assemblages that were the springboard for his success in the art world in the 1950s and early 1960s, and vice versa. Younger viewers might be familiar only with the intricate Rorschach-like drawings of the 1980s and 1990s. The Walker Art Center’s 1999 exhibition 2000 BC: THE BRUCE CONNER STORY PART II, which looked at Conner’s lifetime achievement through the lens of its relation to his films, did much to increase awareness of the full breadth of his accomplishment, though its protean diversity still resists easy understanding. Both in the course of organizing that show and in its wake, the Walker has assembled the largest and most significant grouping of Conner’s work outside of the artist’s own studio.