Born in McPherson, Kansas, in 1933, Bruce Conner—who died in San Francisco in 2008—became known on the California Beat Generation scene in the 1950s for his assemblages of recycled materials. In 1958 he reinvented the idea of cinema narrative with A Movie, a frenetically paced found footage montage of newsreels, B-movie fragments and black spacings. In later films he combined the music of Devo and David Byrne with images and in this respect can be seen as the father of the music video. In parallel with his experimental cinema work he built up a substantial uvre: he drew, made collages and challenged the photographic medium in, for example, Angels (1975), the famous series of photograms made by placing a self-portrait or a visual recording of the artist’s aura between a light source and a sheet of light-sensitive paper. He began structuring his work around the punk aesthetic in 1978, taking photos at San Francisco’s Mabuhay Gardens club and getting them published in Search and Destroy, the new fanzine created by publisher V. Vale. A cult late 1970s counterculture venue, the chaotic, rundown Mabuhay hosted punk bands like The Avengers, Rozz & Negative Trend, The Situations, UXA, Toni Basil and Devo. Conner’s photos of this microcosm testify to the empathy between a Beat Generation artist and the incandescent, post-Dada energy of the musicians: he was perfectly attuned to the insolent humour epitomised by Devo, famous for their mechanical, dehumanised version of the Rolling Stones’ Satisfaction. Conner worked fast, like a war correspondent, pogo-ing with the crowd and emerging from the seething mass of bodies with images whose transcending of punk’s ear-shattering din broke through into what Greil Marcus has called the dramatic ‘silence’ of the Blank Generation. With the sculptural collages of Dead Ashes (1995), made almost twenty years later, Conner paid tribute to such fleeting punk figures as Ricky Williams, Frankie Fix, Johnny Strike and De Detroit in odes to musicians who had taken Neil Young’s motto as their own: ‘It’s better to burn out than to fade out.’
