ART REVIEW : CONNER AROUSES TOUGH EMOTIONS

It’s not unusual for downtown galleries to exhibit the works of artists based in Los Angeles. But it is unusual for them to go somewhat farther afield and exhibit the works of artists based as far away as San Francisco.

The Pink and Pearl Gallery (711 8th Ave.) is showing works by Bruce Conner, whose identification with the exotic (some think demonic) city to the north and its art goes back to the Beat era of the 1950s.

Conner has continued to be a potent, and somber, although intermittently elusive, presence in the Bay Area since then. And he is critically recognized as an artist of international stature.

My first exposure to his works 20-some years ago was an unforgettably horrific experience. It was an exhibition of assemblages, or sculptures made from found materials, in Ruth Braunstein’s pioneering gallery, then located in a basement in Jerome Alley across from the back door of Ernie’s, one of San Francisco’s most elegant restaurants. You passed cans full of garbage on your way to the art.

And what art!

Conner’s assemblages were somber forms, most memorably dolls in chairs, blackened as if charred and covered by stretched women’s stockings.

Evocative? Yes!

They recorded Conner’s response to executions of criminals, but they were, as well, mementos of great acts of destruction--the ovens of the Holocaust and the infernos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki--and anticipations of destruction in the future. Like the recent anti-war statements of Robert Arneson and Robert Morris, they were reliquaries for humankind.

“Resurrection” (1960), a work from that early show, is now on view, for the first time since its acquisition in 1981, at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art in conjunction with the downtown exhibition.

Several other related assemblages appear in the Pink and Pearl Gallery exhibition in photographic form, entitled as a group “Destroyed Works.”

Conner himself destroyed some of them because he could not bear to live with them. Strangers destroyed others because they did not recognize them as works of art.

The artist has described them as “works that are no longer extant.” Reduction of them to two dimensions from three reduces their impact commensurately; nevertheless, they are haunting images.

“Superhuman Devotion” (1960), one of the earliest, includes dolls and a doll’s head, photographs of what appear to be starving people, and a contorted cardboard Halloween skeleton in an indescribable melange of junk.

“The Last Supper” (also from 1960) appears in three images. In the largest, it looks like a burned human body with an arm raised enigmatically in protest, in defense, in defiance or in blessing. Seen in scale, however, it is a spooky black blob on a small table.

“Bomb” (also of 1960) evinces Conner’s fears of atomic warfare, the theme of his well-known film of the same name made from found footage.

“November 22, 1963,” made the day of the assassination of President Kennedy, is, despite its puzzling appearance, a deeply disturbing, even painful, image to study.

Finally, “Reliquary,” the most recent of the works (from 1964), had perhaps the weirdest history. Conner placed the assemblage, composed of a crucifix made of match sticks on top of a battered cabinet with a broken glass panel and filled with junk, in a doorway in the Haight-Ashbury area of San Francisco, the heart of hippiedom. As days passed, objects were mysteriously added to it or taken away from it. One day, the piece itself simply disappeared.

Also on view are several images entitled as a group “Inanimate Objects,” photographs of a television set taken June 10, 1978, between 1:20 and 1:27 a.m. at the Sterns Motel in Venice, Calif.

Whatever Conner puts his hand to, his works are visually strong and emotionally challenging.

There is nothing extraneous in the Pink and Pearl Gallery installation. You know you are in the presence of authentically “tough” art. Conner’s career will be fully documented in a major retrospective exhibition now being organized by the UC Berkeley University Art Museum for the fall of 1988.

The modest show of Conner’s works at the Pink and Pearl Gallery is important for San Diego, a needed counterweight to shows of what is cute, elegant, seductive, decorative and trendy.