"This book is published by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on the occasion of the exhibition Bruce Conner: It's All True, co-curated by Stuart Comer, Rudolf Frieling, Gary Garrels, and Laura Hoptman, with Rachel Federman"--Colophon.

Bruce Conner (1933-2008) first came to prominence in the late 1950s as a leader of the assemblage movement in California. Conner had close ties with poets of the San Francisco Renaissance (particularly Michael McClure) as well as with artists such as Wallace Berman, George Herms, Jess and Jay DeFeo. Conner's use of nylon stockings in his assemblages quickly won him notoriety, and saw his work included in Peter Selz's classic 1961 Art of Assemblage show at MoMA. Around this time, Conner also turned to film-making, and produced in swift succession a number of short films that helped to pioneer the rapid edit and the use of pop music among independent film-makers. Conner's innovative editing techniques and decidedly dark vision of American culture laid the foundation for later Hollywood directors such as Dennis Hopper (a friend and collaborator of Conner's, who frequently acknowledged his influence) and David Lynch. A long overdue and significant addition to the understanding of twentieth-century American art and cinema, 2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story Part II represents the most comprehensive book to date on Conner's work from the 1950s to the present. The authors elucidate Conner's work in film, assemblage, drawing, printmaking, collage, and photograms, as well as his more ephemeral gestures, actions, protests and "escapes" from the art world. This beautifully designed clothbound monograph is a landmark publication for anyone interested in contemporary art, film, culture and the Beat era.

The Rat Bastard ProtectiveÊAssociation was an inflammatory, close-knit community of artists who livedÊand worked in aÊbuilding they dubbed Painterland in the Fillmore neighborhood of midcentury San Francisco. The artists who counted themselves among the RatÊBastardsÑwhich included Joan Brown, Bruce Conner, Jay DeFeo,ÊWallyÊHedrick, Michael McClure, and Manuel NeriÑexhibited a unique fusion of radicalism,Êprovocation, and community. Geographically isolated from a viable art market and refusingÊto conform to institutional expectations, theyÊanimated broader social andÊartistic discussions through their work and became aÊtransformative part of American culture over time. Anastasia Aukeman presents new and little-known archival material in this authorized account of these artists and their circle, a colorful cultural milieu that intersected with the broader Beat scene.

"In a career that spanned five decades, most of them spent in San Francisco, Bruce Conner (1933--2008) produced a unique body of work that refused to be contained by medium or style. Whether making found-footage films, hallucinatory ink-blot graphics, enigmatic collages, or assemblages from castoffs, Conner took up genres as quickly as he abandoned them. His movements within San Francisco's counter-cultural scenes were similarly free-wheeling; at home in beat poetry, punk music, and underground film circles, he never completely belonged to any of them. Bruce Conner belonged to Bruce Conner. Twice he announced his own death; during the last years of his life he produced a series of pseudonymous works after announcing his 'retirement.' In this first book-length study of Conner's enormously influential but insufficiently understood career, Kevin Hatch explores Conner's work as well as his position on the geographical, cultural, and critical margins. Hatch finds a set of abiding concerns that inform Conner's wide-ranging works and changing personas. A deep anxiety pervades the work, reflecting a struggle between private, unknowable, interior experience and a duplicitous world of received images and false appearances. The profane and the sacred, the comic and the tragic, the enigmatic and the universal: each of these antinomies is pushed to the breaking point in Conner's work..."--Publisher's description.

From the late '70s to 2005, V. Vale interviewed Bruce Conner by telephone and in person mostly in the afternoons. Spontaneous yet insightful in his conversation, Conner is revealed as an innovative improvisatory artist whose goal in life seemed to be freedom and the transcendence of hidebound careerist conformity in all its bureaucratic manifestations. Therefore he created art that annihilated boundaries, categories and predictability. These interviews have never been transcribed and made public, until now. Bruce Conner: The Afternoon Interviews includes a revelatory introduction by art curator, writer and philosopher Natasha Boas. Boas positions Conner as a key artist of the late 20th- to early 21st-century, profiling Conner as a surprising role model for today's emergent and future artists.

Artist and filmmaker Bruce Conner's (1933-2008) mobility was severely limited for the last five years of his life, when he rarely left the San Francisco home he shared with his wife, Jean. To aid in his physical navigation of its spaces, he worked with assistants to install a succession of solid brass handles in each and every room--surrounding the stove, down the boat-like stairwell, inside the recesses of the bedroom closet. At last count, the handles, a labyrinth of critical support, numbered 163. Still in situ after his death in 2008, the handles are arguably Conner's last great work--at once physical and metaphysical, fragmentary and elusive, elegant and anonymous. Together, they draft the ghost architecture of Conner's final years, transforming the pedestrian into something altogether different. Will Brownis a collaborative project founded by Lindsey White, Jordan Stein and David Kasprzak. Formerly based in a San Francisco storefront, Will Brown's main objective is to manipulate the structures of exhibition-making as a critical practice. Will Brown recently mounted a solo exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive.