Wright Auction

The present work comes from Natasha Nicholson, an artist who was close to Bruce Conner from 1967 to 1972, a productive period of transition (among many) for Conner, one where he was creating some of his now most notable collages, films and drawings. 

Nicholson first met Conner when she was twenty-two, in an evening class Conner was teaching at the Art Institute of San Francisco. The class was titled "For Women Only" and in the first session, Conner went over to the door, locked it and told the students: “we’re staying here all night. If anyone is uncomfortable, you can leave now.” Nervously, a few women left, but Nicholson stayed. She looks back now, saying Conner was one of the most brilliant teachers she has encountered: “mentally demanding” and able to “get you to go somewhere you had no intention of going...powerfully but quietly...into an unfamiliar realm.” 

They spent the next five years together, collaborating, learning from the other’s artistic practice and navigating the nascent, somewhat ungainly west coast art scene.  This time was particularly difficult for Conner, as he struggled to move away from the assemblages that had gained him recognition, avoid the label of “film-maker” and maintain gallery support as he withdrew from the art world. “Everything broke the rule from the last time,” Nicholson says of Conner’s work, and he was always concerned with “yes and no, black and white, positive and negative—all of the contrasts that could be between something.” 

Conner’s enigmatic, passionate and imperious approach to art making is evident in this collection, which includes a rare, early abstract painting, dense, metaphysical "all-over" prints and drawings, letters and ephemera, small collages and assemblages and a stunning 16mm reel of nine of his pioneering films, compiled by Conner himself.

In 1965, Bruce Conner received a two-month fellowship at the prestigious Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, which was founded by June Wayne in 1960. At a time when printmaking was held in low regard, she raised the profile of the medium by inviting contemporary artists to the workshop including Sam Francis, Louise Nevelson, Josef and Anni Albers, Ed Ruscha and Bruce Conner. 

Much as the Ford Foundation grant Conner received that same year for film-making caused him anxiety and roused a rambunctious streak in him, his time at Tamarind was spent subverting sacrosanct practices of printmaking. Cal Goodman, the acting director at Tamarind while Wayne was away in Europe, even discharged Conner from the residency after Conner tried to edition a cancelled print. When Wayne returned, she was delighted by Conner's antics and allowed him back in—his affection for her is captured in his print This Space Reserved for June Wayne.
 

Conner created fourteen prints during his time at Tamarind, each in an edition of twenty, and refused to sign them, opting instead to mark them with a thumbprint (normally a much-dreaded result of pulling prints with ink-covered fingers). This act points to his perpetual struggle with notions of authorship, his identity as an individual and an artist, and adhering to anything nearing convention. One print in particular he made, a photo-lithograph replica of his birth certificate, drew ire from Wayne, as she had built her whole career around raising the reputation of printmaking beyond simply a means of reproduction.

These prints represent an important transitional era in Conner's life as a person and an artist—in 1967 he proclaimed he was “retiring” from the art world and soon after the Tamarind fellowship, he shifted his focus to his dense, obsessive “all-over” and mandala drawings and prints along with his films. The errant attitude with which Conner approached mediums, styles and propriety throughout his long career is encapsulated in these works from his time at Tamarind.