Another of his most admired films, "Report," from the late 1960s, replays footage of the assassination of President Kennedy for a mind-numbing effect that raises questions about memory and emotion.
From film Conner moved to "photograms," which he made by placing his own body in front of photographic paper and shining light on it. The results are large, ghostly images.
"Sound of Two Hand Angel," a photogram from 1974, shows Conner emerging from darkness, his body seemingly made of light.
His fascination with the mystical began at an early age. Conner, who was born Nov. 18, 1933, in McPherson, Kan., was 8 when he had a vision of himself in an out-of-body experience. It was the kernel that grew into an artist's quest.
He earned a bachelor of fine arts degree at the University of Nebraska and attended the art school at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. In 1957 he moved to San Francisco, where his friends included beat-era poet Michael McClure and painter Jay DeFeo. In the early '60s, Conner lived briefly in Mexico City, where he experimented heavily with hallucinogenic drugs, Boswell said. Years of drugs and alcohol contributed to a liver disease he developed in the mid-'80s.
Critical success came early and continued. In the '60s, Conner's work was included in "The Art of Assemblage," an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He was included in several shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art, among them "Beat Culture, 1950-1965" in 1996. A retrospective, "2000 B.C: The Bruce Conner Story Part II," opened in 2000 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where Boswell was a curator. It traveled to the De Young Museum in San Francisco and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.
Conner occasionally taught courses, including filmmaking at San Francisco State in 1976 and "The Art of Assemblage" for UCLA Extension in 1973.
His art is in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.
Survivors include his wife, Jean, son Robert and a granddaughter.
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mary.rourke@latimes.com
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On latimes.com
Examples from a life in art
To see more of artist Bruce Conner's work, go to latimes.com/conner.
