BRUCE CONNER / RECORDING ANGEL

“When I think about nonlinear perception, I think about the way you collect various pieces of information and put them into some kind of functional use to make sense of the world. It is about consciousness itself.”

–Bruce Conner

The multidisciplinary artist Bruce Conner (1933–2008) was truly an enigma. He moved effortlessly between sculptural assemblage, painting, conceptual art, collage, drawing, photography, and experimental filmmaking without any sense of hierarchy. Deeply embedded in American countercultural movements of the postwar period, from the Beat poets of the 1950s to the emergent punk scenes of the 1970s and 1980s, Conner had a radical and restless eye that brought with it a wry humor, biting wit, and love of the uncanny and the revolutionary. Nowhere was Conner’s irreverent inquisitiveness more apparent than in the now legendary body of experimental films he undertook in 1958, which were composed of found, scavenged, and original film footage. In many ways Conner can be seen as the pioneer of the remix and cut-up techniques of filmmaking that are now so ubiquitous. In fact, he has been called the “father of the music video” in recognition of the rapid-fire editing effects that he developed, which are widely used in music videos and film trailers today. As he said to an interviewer in 1986, “I learned to distrust words. I placed my bet on vision.”

BRUCE CONNER / RECORDING ANGEL brings together seven of Conner’s most iconic films in the Marciano Art Foundation’s Theater Gallery, projected in an alternating sequence on four different screens. On view will be a number of Conner’s pioneering works using the assemblage technique of cutting up and reediting found footage, such as the groundbreaking A MOVIE (1958), which brings together clips of Western serials, soft-core “stag” films, newsreels of car crashes, the usually unseen leaders that precede films, and so on, or his now legendary masterpiece CROSSROADS (1976), for which he reedited documentary footage of the Operation Crossroads underwater atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll in 1946. Throughout these works, Conner offers a meditation on both the power of images in consumer culture and the hubristic and violent nature of the human condition in general and postwar American economic and military hegemony in particular. Music, and the intimate connection of sound and image, makes its presence particularly felt in all of the works seen here, whether through Ottorino Respighi’s 1924 composition “Pines of Rome” in
A MOVIE, the haunting score by the minimalist composers Patrick Gleeson and Terry Riley in CROSSROADS, or the songs by Toni Basil, The Beatles, DEVO, David Byrne and Brian Eno, and Ray Charles that form the auditory backbones of Conner’s films BREAKAWAY, LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS, MONGOLOID, AMERICA IS WAITING, and THREE SCREEN RAY.

This survey of Conner’s radically innovative, lifelong cinematic output both explores the structural limits of the medium of film and highlights his poetic and biting cultural critique of the dark side of the American Dream.

BRUCE CONNER / RECORDING ANGEL is organized by independent curator Douglas Fogle for the Marciano Art Foundation. Thank you to Michelle Silva, Toni Basil, and Patrick Gleeson. Special thanks to Michael Kohn at Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, for his contribution to the restoration of Bruce Conner’s films.

Bruce Conner (November 18, 1933 – July 7, 2008) was an American artist renowned for his work in film, assemblage, drawing, sculpture, painting, collage, photography, and conceptual pranks.  Born in McPherson, Kansas and raised in Wichita, he attended Wichita State and got his BFA from Nebraska University in 1956, where he met and married Jean Sandstedt in 1957 before transplanting to San Francisco. Emerging from the California art scene, Conner’s work touches on various themes of postwar American society, from a rising consumer culture to the dread of nuclear apocalypse. His works have been included in major exhibitions, such as the historic 1961 “The Art of Assemblage” at the Museum of Modern Art. Career retrospectives have been presented at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (2000)—which traveled to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art—and at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2016), which traveled to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in California and Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid. His works are represented in many public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.

BRUCE CONNER / RECORDING ANGEL is now on view through July 18, 2026.

Image credit: Bruce Conner, CROSSROADS, 1976. 35mm, black/white, sound, 37 min. Digitally Restored, 2013. Courtesy of The Conner Family Trust and Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles. Copyright Conner Family Trust