About

Bruce Connor was a pioneering figure of post-war American art, working across assemblage sculpture, drawing, performance and film. His assemblage films in particular are considered radical for both their approach to the materiality of film and sequencing of appropriated images. Connor sought to sculpt the moving image with a poetic form of deconstruction and arrangement, drawing together existing imagery from countdown leaders, training films and newsreels, with disturbing subjects and events. A Movie is an experimental montage using stock footage. Report explores news reporting on disasters and features newsreel footage and radio tapes of President Kennedy's assassination. Mongoloid uses instructional diagrams, old television commercials and a pop song by Devo to create a parody of America's "silent majority". Based on declassified footage from the US air force of the first underwater atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll on 25 July 1946, Crossroads is a transcendent work that presents the detonation "as theatre, as sculpture in time, clouds, mist".