“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 from sculptural assemblage to 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 restless eye more apparent than in his now legendary body of experimental films that he undertook in 1958, which were composed of found, scavenged, and original footage. In fact, in many ways Conner can be seen as the pioneer of the remix and cutup techniques of filmmaking that are now so ubiquitous while he has also been called the “father of the music video” in recognition of his rapid-fire editing techniques used in every music video and film trailer made today. As he once said to an interviewer in 1986, “I learned to distrust words. I placed my bet on vision.”

Organized by independent curator Douglas Fogle, 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. A MOVIE (1958) brings together clips of Western serials, soft core “stag” films, and newsreels of car crashes, while his now legendary masterpiece CROSSROADS (1976) uses reedited declassified footage of the Operation Crossroads underwater atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll in 1946. In both works, Conner offers a meditation on the power of images in our 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 in film makes its presence felt in all of Conner’s films. A MOVIE features a soundtrack of Ottorino Respighi’s 1924 composition “Pines of Rome,” while the repeated nuclear explosions of CROSSROADS are accompanied by a haunting score by the minimalist composers Patrick Gleeson and Terry Riley.