Untitled
Bruce Conner
After moving to San Francisco in 1957, Bruce Conner became associated with the Beat movement—artists, writers, and poets who abandoned the norms of American society. Influenced by Zen Buddhism and drug-induced experiences, the Beats used art to investigate new realms of thought. In this period marked by the insecurity and fear of the Cold War and McCarthyism, along with the catastrophic possibilities of the atomic bomb, Conner made artworks in a wide variety of media that attempt to explore the unknown forces behind life and death, a preoccupation that has remained steady throughout his career. In Untitled (1965-66), he subtly manifests these political and spiritual concerns behind an abstract veil of ambiguity and mystery.
This historical context also gives meaning to the duality between black and white in the drawing. The uncertainty that many felt during the 1960s could induce paranoia or exhilaration, and sometimes both simultaneously. A sense of motion prevails in Untitled, with the black shapes that seem to shift and roll across the page echoing ripples of change in an era marked by political and social upheaval. With such weighty concerns at the heart of Conner’s enterprise, it is no wonder that even his most abstract works are imbued with a delicate foreboding. While Conner’s black forms achieve fluidity through their folding and bending, they also become ubiquitous, engulfing the paper in mysterious blackness. In more conceptual terms, the black forms enclosing the white might symbolize death overcoming life, suggesting that even in sunshine, shadows always loom near.
While this fixation on the inevitability of death at first seems pessimistic, Conner’s representation of life through the drawing’s white space is not disheartening. As with the white in Conner’s star drawings, in which he drew black pen loops on white paper, steadily shrinking the whiteness into tiny points of light, the white fragments in Untitled prevail as pieces of hope that halt the spreading blackness. Further, the organic black shapes create the illusion of movement in several directions, with the sketchier black forms traversing from the lower right corner towards the smaller, tighter forms in the upper left corner—or vice versa. This ambiguity of direction, in addition to the mysterious meanings of the forms themselves, can put the viewer into a trance. In its correspondence between white and black and its shapes’ fluidity, the drawing becomes an object inspiring Zen meditation.
Later works by Bruce Conner demonstrate his persistent fascination with concepts of life and death, in addition to a continued exploration of trance-inducing and contemplative organic forms. Always concerned with artistic identity and integrity, Conner has done all that he could to derail public notice of his work—he even submitted his own obituary to Who’s Who in America. For Conner it seems that life and death are intricately related to the mystery of disappearance, and his own disappearance has been manifested through his official retirement from the art world in 1999. At sixty-five, a fitting retirement age for a man concerned with tweaking the sacred conventions of American society, Conner stopped making new works under his name, instead attributing recent works to his “associates”— Anonymous, Anonymouse, Emily Feather, and Justin Kase. These artists make inkblot drawings of astonishing delicacy that explore the relationships between symmetry and chance, order and chaos; an inkblot drawing by Anonymous on view here invites comparisons to wood grains, exotic flowers, prehistoric creatures, or characters from an unknown language, while still carrying a subtext of psychological disorder and paranoia.
The inkblot drawings and Conner’s Untitled each reward close inspection and contemplation. They tow a fine line between mysticism and pragmatism, symbolically addressing matters of life and death through mysterious, meditative compositions, and ultimately providing sites of reconciliation for the anxious concerns of Conner’s generation.
Laura Beshears
Skidmore College, Class of 2007
This historical context also gives meaning to the duality between black and white in the drawing. The uncertainty that many felt during the 1960s could induce paranoia or exhilaration, and sometimes both simultaneously. A sense of motion prevails in Untitled, with the black shapes that seem to shift and roll across the page echoing ripples of change in an era marked by political and social upheaval. With such weighty concerns at the heart of Conner’s enterprise, it is no wonder that even his most abstract works are imbued with a delicate foreboding. While Conner’s black forms achieve fluidity through their folding and bending, they also become ubiquitous, engulfing the paper in mysterious blackness. In more conceptual terms, the black forms enclosing the white might symbolize death overcoming life, suggesting that even in sunshine, shadows always loom near.
While this fixation on the inevitability of death at first seems pessimistic, Conner’s representation of life through the drawing’s white space is not disheartening. As with the white in Conner’s star drawings, in which he drew black pen loops on white paper, steadily shrinking the whiteness into tiny points of light, the white fragments in Untitled prevail as pieces of hope that halt the spreading blackness. Further, the organic black shapes create the illusion of movement in several directions, with the sketchier black forms traversing from the lower right corner towards the smaller, tighter forms in the upper left corner—or vice versa. This ambiguity of direction, in addition to the mysterious meanings of the forms themselves, can put the viewer into a trance. In its correspondence between white and black and its shapes’ fluidity, the drawing becomes an object inspiring Zen meditation.
Later works by Bruce Conner demonstrate his persistent fascination with concepts of life and death, in addition to a continued exploration of trance-inducing and contemplative organic forms. Always concerned with artistic identity and integrity, Conner has done all that he could to derail public notice of his work—he even submitted his own obituary to Who’s Who in America. For Conner it seems that life and death are intricately related to the mystery of disappearance, and his own disappearance has been manifested through his official retirement from the art world in 1999. At sixty-five, a fitting retirement age for a man concerned with tweaking the sacred conventions of American society, Conner stopped making new works under his name, instead attributing recent works to his “associates”— Anonymous, Anonymouse, Emily Feather, and Justin Kase. These artists make inkblot drawings of astonishing delicacy that explore the relationships between symmetry and chance, order and chaos; an inkblot drawing by Anonymous on view here invites comparisons to wood grains, exotic flowers, prehistoric creatures, or characters from an unknown language, while still carrying a subtext of psychological disorder and paranoia.
The inkblot drawings and Conner’s Untitled each reward close inspection and contemplation. They tow a fine line between mysticism and pragmatism, symbolically addressing matters of life and death through mysterious, meditative compositions, and ultimately providing sites of reconciliation for the anxious concerns of Conner’s generation.
Laura Beshears
Skidmore College, Class of 2007