Bruce Conner’s irreverent artworks epitomize the Beat counterculture of postwar San Francisco. Raised in Wichita, Kansas, Conner moved to the Bay Area in September 1957, just hours after marrying artist Jean Sandstedt in Lincoln, Nebraska. Upon arrival, the pair joined a close-knit group of artists and poets, including Jay DeFeo, Joan Brown, and Wallace Berman, who congregated in a coldwater flat in the city’s Fillmore district known as “Painterland.”
Working within this milieu, Conner began a series of arresting found-object sculptures with materials culled from the streets of the rapidly gentrifying Fillmore. The works paid homage to his fellow artistic outcasts, whom he dubbed the Rat Bastard Protective Association (RBPA)—a dual play on the PRB (Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood) of the late nineteenth century and the Scavenger’s Protective Association, the civic organization that picked up the city’s trash.
RAT PURSE is among the few extant works from this early series. Described by the art historian Jenevive Nykolak as “a talismanic collection of trinkets and sundry materials,” the sculpture draws together photographs, costume jewelry, fabrics, and a syringe, all stuffed and wrapped in a woman’s nylon stocking. Like the other works in the Rat Bastard series, this unsettling, veiled object challenges bourgeois standards of decency by surfacing the castoff, overlooked, and undesirable aspects of artistic life.
Frances Lazare
2024