Bruce Conner, a Bay Area artist who used sculpture, drawing, film and photography to explore mortality and other cosmic mysteries, died Monday at his home in San Francisco. He was 74.
The cause was complications from a liver condition, according to his art dealer, Michael Kohn.
Throughout his career, Conner moved from one art form to another, starting in the 1950s with collage sculptures known as assemblage that he made of junk, castoffs and debris. He next concentrated on art films crafted from existing footage that he edited together. He moved on to art photography and later to delicate ink blot drawings.
"Conner was the most important West Coast artist of his time, but he defied categories," said museum curator Peter Boswell, who organized the first major survey of Conner's work in 2000. He was unfailingly countercultural and changed his methods often, in part because "he mistrusted success," Boswell said of Conner. "He viewed it as evidence of selling out."
The theme of the work never changed, however. "Bruce looked at the interplay between good and evil, dark and light," Boswell said. "It runs through all his work."
One assemblage, "Anniversary Greetings" from 1963, includes part of a woman's stocking, a blatant "girlie picture" and scraps of sentimental greeting cards in a mix of "nostalgia and dark memory," Kohn said.
Other sculptures suggest shrines. In "July George" from 1962, a journal, a ball and other well-worn objects imply personal possessions. Conner's shrine-like works recall "an altar built in observance of the Day of the Dead," Times art critic Christopher Knight wrote in a 2000 review of a Conner exhibit. "There amid the decay, the maw of death yawns wide. As the only cogent response, the artist invites us to luxuriate in the . . . stuff of life."
In the late 1950s Conner made "A Movie," a 12-minute film that critics have praised as an art film classic. It is constructed from stock industrial footage, Hollywood clips and other pre-existing images of disaster, both natural and man-made, failed rescue attempts and carnage, interrupted by an ominous title card, "The End," long before the film is over. The film's nonstop show of destruction has an unexpected effect. "Death gives life meaning," Knight wrote of "A Movie." This "spiritually potent" theme runs through all of Conner's art, Knight observed.
