This pioneering role is evidently the “Godfather of Music Clips” (Museum of Modern Arts, Los Angeles) in the work “Looking for Mushrooms”. Conner backed the psychedelic sample of film snippets from 1959 to 1967 with the equally psychedelic song “Tomorrow Never Knows”, with which the Beatles had broken new musical territory.
In this and all other film works, Conner reveals a high degree of musicality – even if instead of music, as in the subversive socio-political “report” on the Kennedy murder, the voice of a radio reporter sometimes makes the soundtrack. Otherwise he supports his work with originally composed compositions by music avant-garde artists such as David Byrne and Brian Eno, but also with classical orchestral works.
Intoxicating, oppressive sheets of images
One of these classic works, namely “Pini die Roma” by Ottorino Respighi, accompanies the pioneering early work “A Movie” from 1958. In this radically subversive film experiment, Conner added snippets from news programs, B-movies and film-technical graphics to create an intoxicating and oppressive pictures together. Wild chases with Indians and settlers turn into car races and pictures of accidents and armed disasters.
Finally, in front of the portal to Tinguely’s apocalyptic group of works “Mengele-Totentanz”, Conner’s film “Cossroad” will be shown. While Tinguely abstracts the brutal reality in his machine world, Conner leads the apocalyptic vision into perversion, with aesthetic images, recordings of the atom bomb tests at Bikini Atoll.
The cabinet exhibition «Bruce Conner». Light out of Darkness “in the Museum Tinguely can be seen until November 28th.
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