The inkblot drawings and Conners Untitled each reward close inspection and contemplation.
These artists make inkblot drawings of astonishing delicacy that explore the relationships between symmetry and chance, order and chaos an inkblot drawing by Anonymous on view here invites comparisons to wood grains, exotic flowers, prehistoric creatures, or characters from an unknown language, while still carrying a subtext of psychological disorder and paranoia. At sixty-five, a fitting retirement age for a man concerned with tweaking the sacred conventions of American society, Conner stopped making new works under his name, instead attributing recent works to his associates Anonymous, Anonymouse, Emily Feather, and Justin Kase. For Conner it seems that life and death are intricately related to the mystery of disappearance, and his own disappearance has been manifested through his official retirement from the art world in 1999. Always concerned with artistic identity and integrity, Conner has done all that he could to derail public notice of his work he even submitted his own obituary to Whos Who in America. Later works by Bruce Conner demonstrate his persistent fascination with concepts of life and death, in addition to a continued exploration of trance-inducing and contemplative organic forms. In its correspondence between white and black and its shapes fluidity, the drawing becomes an object inspiring Zen meditation. This ambiguity of direction, in addition to the mysterious meanings of the forms themselves, can put the viewer into a trance. As with the white in Conners star drawings, in which he drew black pen loops on white paper, steadily shrinking the whiteness into tiny points of light, the white fragments in Untitled prevail as pieces of hope that halt the spreading blackness.įurther, the organic black shapes create the illusion of movement in several directions, with the sketchier black forms traversing from the lower right corner towards the smaller, tighter forms in the upper left corner or vice versa. While this fixation on the inevitability of death at first seems pessimistic, Conners representation of life through the drawings white space is not disheartening. In more conceptual terms, the black forms enclosing the white might symbolize death overcoming life, suggesting that even in sunshine, shadows always loom near. While Conners black forms achieve fluidity through their folding and bending, they also become ubiquitous, engulfing the paper in mysterious blackness.
With such weighty concerns at the heart of Conners enterprise, it is no wonder that even his most abstract works are imbued with a delicate foreboding. A sense of motion prevails in Untitled, with the black shapes that seem to shift and roll across the page echoing ripples of change in an era marked by political and social upheaval. The uncertainty that many felt during the 1960s could induce paranoia or exhilaration, and sometimes both simultaneously. This historical context also gives meaning to the duality between black and white in the drawing. In Untitled (1965-66), he subtly manifests these political and spiritual concerns behind an abstract veil of ambiguity and mystery. In this period marked by the insecurity and fear of the Cold War and McCarthyism, along with the catastrophic possibilities of the atomic bomb, Conner made artworks in a wide variety of media that attempt to explore the unknown forces behind life and death, a preoccupation that has remained steady throughout his career. Influenced by Zen Buddhism and drug-induced experiences, the Beats used art to investigate new realms of thought. After moving to San Francisco in 1957, Bruce Conner became associated with the Beat movement artists, writers, and poets who abandoned the norms of American society.
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