Reception: Saturday, March 3, 4 - 6pm
Gallery Paule Anglim is pleased to present a photo-based body of work by Bruce Conner (1933-2008), his 1978 record of the Punk scene in San Francisco.
The exhibition will premier a suite of 13 color photographs edited and transferred by the artist to digital color format before his death in 2009. The just-published set will also be exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver as part of the exhibition, Bruce Conner and the Primal Scene of Punk Rock, on view from March 30 through June 24, 2012.
In 1978 Conner photographed Punk Rock shows at the Mabuhay Gardens, a club on Broadway in SF's North Beach strip-club zone. The club was the scene of the 2nd British invasion of punk bands and Devo, and also, importantly for Conner, local groups like Negative Trend, The Mutants, Crime, UXA and the Avengers. Sometimes his photos captured the first performance of a group, and some of the groups were short-lived. Selected photos were published in the Punk magazine, "Search and Destroy."
"I had always liked the idea of action photos... Like-sport events. Basketball. They're floating in the air, part of this suspended sphere, and they've got these beatific looks on their faces, they're in anguish. Or combat photography..." Conner quoted by Greil Marcus in Bruce Conner Mabuhay Gardens 1978 publ. NRW Forum Kultur und Wissenschaft, Düsseldorf, 2006
Bruce Conner heroically created a new lexicon of film and fine art for post-war America. Repurposing found films, engravings and discarded objects, he explored precepts of metaphor and history, physical and metaphysical, by means of a new consciousness. Born 1933 in McPherson, Kansas, Conner moved to San Francisco in 1957 where he became a pivotal figure in the Beat scene of poets, writers, artists and performers.
His work is in the permanent collections of many museums including New York's MoMA and the Whitney Museum, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, Los Angeles MOCA, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Walker Art Center, LACMA, and SFMoMA.