July 10, 2008


Bruce Conner (1933-2008)


Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Bruce Conner’s “Sound of Two Hand Angel,” 1974.

Bruce Conner died Monday (July 7, 2008). This from a [Smithsonian] Archives of American Art interview, April 16, 1973:

BRUCE CONNER: Well, when I was in high school I was very interested in paleontology and archeology. I had a geology class which I had no real interest in because they were always scratching rocks for the first two-thirds of the semester before it got into paleontology. My instructor in high school, Dr. Barnard, made a claim that there were no trilobites in the Permian strata in Kansas. Nobody had ever found any. Michael and Dave knew of a limestone quarry where there were lots of fossils.

There were many fossils that had come loose, little bits of pyrenoids. There was a big heap of pieces of rock. You did not have to dig things up. It was just mounds and tons of shattered rock with fossils in it. I drove out there with them. I had the car. They were just having a trip in the country. I was looking for fossils. I crawled up on one big heap and started looking at rocks and Michael was throwing rocks at me. Dave was throwing rocks at me and I said, “Stop it. I have to look at this stuff and find some good fossils.” Mike picked up a rock indiscriminately and threw it to me and said, “There is your trilobite.” I looked at it and it was. There was a trilobite and that made us excited. I ended up with twenty-five trilobites that I brought to this class. I changed my instructor’s attitude that trilobites did not exist in Kansas Permian strata. Later, Dave was taking science classes and was doing student teaching under that same teacher. Unbeknownst to the teacher, Dave knew all about this story and he asked him about trilobites and Permian strata. He said, “Yes, they just don’t seem to exist in Kansas. But there is one place seventy-five miles east of here where they have been found.”

posted by Sheila Ryan in aesthetics, archeology, art, culture, history, science 

comments

2 Responses to “Bruce Conner (1933-2008)”

  1. Sheila Ryan on July 10th, 2008 at 5:58 pm

    For the longest time I knew of Bruce Conner principally as a filmmaker — and a Name, but somehow or other I think that his aesthetic got under my skin.

    (See the images on the Magnolia Editions site, for instance.)

  2. [Removed.] : clusterflock on July 12th, 2008 at 3:03 pm

    [...] a number of links to Bruce Conner films were removed from Movie City Indie, and much as I respect honoring artistic integrity, I am [...]

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