Bruce Conner
In addition to drawings, engravings, and assemblages, Bruce Conner makes films. His 1958 A Movie is a witty compendium of found footage of disasters–a torpedo exploding, a bridge collapsing–while his 1977 Take the 5:10 to Dreamland strikes a more delicate note with unrelated, quiet images that recall the collages and boxes of Joseph Cornell. But unlike Cornell’s art, Conner’s collaged films focus on the physicality of the image: there’s a graphic intensity to Crossroads (1976), a 35-minute collection of footage of a 1946 atomic bomb test that begins to seem a study in shapes.
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Cornell is doubtless an influence on Conner’s 12 collages at Alan Koppel, but whereas Cornell’s objects suggest transcendence of the physical, Conner’s appear physically entrapping; at the same time, he seems fascinated by his materials, mostly found engravings and woodcut prints he cuts and pastes. In Secret Garden (1996), the viewer is led by a cutout rectangle of flowers, trees, and butterflies to think of an entryway, a window. But the eye’s movement inward is stopped by the center’s even denser black-and-white floral pattern. At the center of The Countess Potozokl (1995) is a woman’s head and torso; her right eye is covered by one butterfly wing while others sprout from the left side of her face. Here Conner creates a dialogue between suggestiveness and entrapment. On the one hand, this is a Cornell-like confection, the countess made more mysterious by her wings; on the other, the eye feels blocked by the wings even as they suggest flight.
Like Cornell’s work, Susan Barron’s photographs, drawings, and collages point to something beyond themselves. The centerpiece of her exhibit at Printworks is her 1981 book Another Song, which includes 40 of her black-and-white nature photographs printed very small and three poems John Cage wrote in response to them. (The book’s pages are exhibited on the wall, and a bound volume is available for viewing.) Barron’s untitled photos filled with leaves, grass, branches, and bodies of water have a contemplative quality that takes the viewer to a wordless place beyond the physical. In one, the dark silhouette of a tree yields to the glowing light of the water behind it; at first perceived as its opposite, the tree comes to seem as blank and insubstantial as the water. In another, a maze of debris almost chokes a bright stream that nevertheless leads upward, out of the picture frame. In a third, a thicket of plants invites the eye inward, toward a mysterious, almost empty center. It’s not as if the plants’ gently textured grays were a trap: though the image looks cluttered at first, it resolves into something quiet and empty.
