Bruce Conner, along with the Legion of Decency, figured out pretty early on that rock ‘n’ roll and sex were joined at the, well, hip. (It’s a youth thing, don’t you know.) The San Francisco artist and filmmaker, who died in 2008, was also among the first to pioneer a new way of thinking about images, namely that appropriating footage shot for one purpose — educational films, cartoons, commercials, propaganda films — and presenting it in another context offered all sorts of shocking and entertaining possibilities.
The use of found footage, as the approach has come to be known, is familiar to the point of cliché thanks to countless TV ads and music videos. So I’m extremely pleased (and relieved, frankly) to report that Conner’s Three Screen Ray, a triptych reworking of 1961’s Cosmic Ray that’s on view at SFMOMA through the spring, remains an energy-packed chunk of voracious, irreverent Americana. Half a century on, Conner’s fast and furious marriage of sexy black-and-white imagery and swaggering Ray Charles stomp has lost none of its wit but a good bit of its audacity.
Bruce Conner, Breakaway
detail from film strip, 1966.
Cosmic Ray, as well as this new ultra-widescreen installation, lays Charles’s soulfully, suggestively lascivious What’d I Say underneath a barrage of shots and snippets that essentially traverse the arc from foreplay to climax. A choice selection of nude female dancers provide the surface come-on, augmented with shots of rockets, cannons (courtesy of a Mickey Mouse ‘toon) and even the raising of the Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima. (Insert flagpole joke here.) The fire-hose-like cascade from an uncorked bottle — eyes on the left screen only, if you please — provides the punch line in case you took everything that came before it too seriously.
