Utilizing the strategies of collage across sculpture, drawing, photography, and film, Bruce Conner created irreverent artworks that outed bourgeois standards of decency. His films, often considered his most influential legacy, blend found footage from movies, commercials, and government films with his own seductive yet scathing social critiques.
Three Screen Ray, created in 2006, is based on Conner’s 1961 film Cosmic Ray. It features fast-paced montages of original and found imagery set to Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say” with social critique, non-Western cultural references, and nods to Abstract Expressionism. The film is a key visual link between early twentieth-century avant-garde cinema—particularly the black-and-white films of Hans Richter and Fernand Léger—and music videos, which came to the fore in the last decades of the twentieth century.
Carol Eliel and Frances Lazare
