Bruce Conner: It’s All True (2016)

“Realist. Surrealist. Hippie. Punk. Bruce Conner (1933-2008) was all of these and more. A pioneer in experimental film, collage, photography, conceptual works, and paintings, he challenged the limitations of medium, genre, and style, constantly breaking new ground. Both of and ahead of his time, Conner continues to exert influence over artists working today. Bruce Conner: It’s All True was the first comprehensive retrospective of this pivotal American artist’s output, bringing together over 250 objects in various media, including film and video, works on paper, assemblages, photographs and photograms, performance, and more. Spanning his five-decade career, the exhibition presents aspects of Conner’s work that have rarely been seen before, from paintings he made in the 1950s to photos from the Bay Area punk scene in the 1970s to video work from the 2000s, as well as numerous works produced in the last decade of his life.”

With texts by Rachel Federman, Laura Hoptman, Kellie Jones, Michelle Barger, Roger Griffith and Megan Randall, Rachel Federman, Kristine Stiles, Rudolf Frieling, Gary Garrels, Diedrich Diederichsen, Stuart Comer, Johanna Gosse, a.o.

Edited by Rudolf Frieling and Gary Garrels
Publisher San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in association with University of California Press, 2016
ISBN 9780520290563, 0520290569
384 pages

Review: Hugo Daniel (Critique d’art, 2017, FR).
Exh. reviews: Roberta Smith (New York Times), Andrea K. Scott (New Yorker), J. Hoberman (New York Review of Books), Matthew Biro (Brooklyn Rail), Maika Pollack (Aperture), Kristin M. Jones (Wall Street Journal), Kimberly Connerton (Aesthetica), Thomas Gladysz (Huff Post).

Exhibition (MoMA)
Exhibition (SFMOMA)
Exhibition (Reina Sofia)
Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (35 MB)

P. Adams Sitney (ed.), Film Culture Reader (1970)

“This compilation from Film Culture magazine―the pioneering periodical in avant-garde film commentary―includes contributors like Charles Boultenhouse, Erich von Stroheim, Michael McClure, Stan Brakhage, Annette Michelson, Arthur Miller, Dylan Thomas, Andrew Sarris, Rudolph Arnheim, Jonas Mekas, and Parker Tyler. This collection covers a range of topics in twentieth century cinema, from the Auteur Theory to the commercial cinema, from Orson Welles to Kenneth Anger.”

Publisher Praeger Publishers, New York, 1970
Reprint, Cooper Square Press, New York, 2000
ISBN 0815411014, 9780815411017
viii+438 pages

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (23 MB)

Len Lye: Motion Sketch (2014)

“Len Lye’s career was marked by a lifelong fascination with movement and an aspiration to compose motion; the movement of the drawing hand was an important touchstone for his works in various media. In the 1920s, however, Lye began to make what he termed “motion sketches”; abstract drawings that attempted to render the movement of his subjects, rather than their appearance.

Motion Sketch reintroduces Lye’s multidimensional practice specifically in relation to drawing. Describing his drawing practice in his own carefree prose, Lye said that doodling “cultivates a vacuous seaweed-pod state of kelp as a skull which is attached to a pencil betwixt the arm and the fingers held doodling in turn ‘twixt you and the paper in a rather bemused, empty, harmonious state of an attitude, eyes periphering said paper.”

Lye’s kinesthetic approach to drawing—related to Surrealist automatism and anticipating aspects of Abstract Expressionism—also informed his practice in painting, photography, film and sculpture. Not limited to works on paper; the catalogue reveals how Lye’s concept of “doodling” underpinned his approach to much of his work. ”

Featuring a foreword by Brett Littman and essays by Gregory Burke, Tyler Cann, and Len Lye.

Publisher Drawing Center, New York, 2014
Drawing Papers series, 115
ISBN 9780942324853, 0942324854
97 pages
via publisher

Exhibition
Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (low res, 9 MB)
Issuu