2 Comments » July 11, 2008 in Art & Music & Video by Martin Skivington

Bruce Conner, 1933-2008: “Forefather of 21st century art”

Bruce Conner, 1933-2008 Rhizome.org have posted an obituary today for Bruce Conner, the Beat Generation film-maker who pioneered remixing audio and video long before music videos and mash-ups rose to prominence in creative culture. Conner who was aged 73, was considered one of the last survivors from the Bay Area Beat era art scene that included Jay DeFeo, Wallace Berman and Wally Hedrick. He went on to work with several “sound artists” including David Byrne and Brian Eno.

Given the enormous popularity of video mash-ups and artistic remixing, we must therefore give note to the recent passing of filmmaker and artist Bruce Conner, who created mind-blowing re-edits of found-footage on 16mm way back when the Internet was but a mere twinkle in a Pentagon-subsidized computer engineer’s eye.

Conner was first known in Beat-era San Francisco for his collages, paintings and assemblages, but began making his mark on cinema in 1958 with A Movie, a stream-of-consciousness montage made from films purchased at a local camera store; its dreamlike structure, Conner later said, was influenced by TV channel-surfing.

Later, Cosmic Ray (1961), an Atomic-bomb dance party set to Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say”, grooved to a Pop-political pulse and presaged the music video, while his powerfully minimalist Kennedy assassination study Report (1967) was one of the earliest artistic uses of serial looping and pure flicker, processes that became integral to structural filmmaking.

Bruce Conner, 1933-2008

Posted in Art & Music & Video by Martin Skivington on July 11, 2008.