“It has to do with the theater”: - IA de Investigación especializada en el MIT

“It has to do with the theater”:
Bruce Conner’s Ratbastards*

KEVIN HATCH

Bruce Conner’s engagement with the medium of assemblage was relatively
brief—his ﬁrst forays date to his arrival in San Francisco in 1957, while his pur-
posefully grandiloquent farewell to the medium, LOOKING GLASS, was completed
in 1964—but intensively productive.1 Among the nearly 200 works made over
those eight years, a subset, completed within the ﬁrst few years of the artist’s set-
tling in San Francisco, is of particular interest.2 These were Conner’s ﬁrst and
some of his most forceful assemblages, works that registered the artist’s initial
encounter with his new urban surroundings.3 Possessed of a claustrophobic
energy and dark sensibility, these idiosyncratic objects are identiﬁable by their
muted tonal range, a product of the grimy, faded character of their constitutive
materials—everything from fragments of charred wood and rope, to frayed pho-
tographs of pin-ups and femme fatales, to scraps of grubby lace, ribbon, y
fabric, to the odd discrete object, such as a bicycle wheel or doll’s head. Uno
might group this subset of works under the loose rubric of “Ratbastards,” as many
have titles that include the words “rat” or “ratbastard” (an evocative term Conner

*
This article derives from the first chapter of my dissertation, Looking for Bruce Conner,
1957–1967 (Universidad de Princeton, 2008). I would like to thank Hal Foster, Brigid Doherty, PAG. Adams
Sitney, and Y ve-Alain Bois for their support, encouragement, and constructive criticism.

Por supuesto, this project would never have come to pass without both the assistance and inspira-
tion of the artist himself (1933–2008), whose death this past July came as deeply saddening news.
Bruce Conner’s keen intelligence, unﬂagging loyalty to friends, unfailing commitment to principle,
y, not least, warm sense of humor touched many. This essay is dedicated to him.
The titles of Conner’s works are always printed in uppercase, at the artist’s request.
1.
I am unaware of a deﬁnitive list of Conner’s assemblages composed by either the artist or anoth-
2.
er informed party. Such a list would be difﬁcult to produce, in any event, given the ephemeral nature
of many of the works in question. My own informal catalog numbers just under 200 unique works,
though many of those are missing or no longer extant.
Conner was born outside Wichita, Kansas, on November 18, 1933. After time spent studying
3.
in Lincoln, Nebraska; Brooklyn, Nueva York; and Boulder, Colorado, he and his wife, the artist Jean
Conner, moved to San Francisco in September of 1957. Allá, Conner established his identity as a
San Francisco artist quickly and ﬁrmly, despite extended periods spent in Mexico and Massachusetts
in the early 1960s.

D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d

F
r
oh
metro
h

t
t

pag

:
/
/

d
i
r
mi
C
t
.

metro

i
t
.

mi
d
tu
oh
C
t
oh
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d

F
/

d
oh

i
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
1
7
5
3
2
4
5
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
pag
d

b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t

oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3

110

OCTUBRE

D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d

F
r
oh
metro
h

t
t

pag

:
/
/

d
i
r
mi
C
t
.

metro

i
t
.

mi
d
tu
oh
C
t
oh
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d

F
/

d
oh

i
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
1
7
5
3
2
4
5
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
pag
d

b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t

oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3

Bruce Conner.
LOOKING GLASS. 1964.

borrowed from a friend, the poet Michael McClure), and all share a consistent set
of formal attributes. Built up from Conner’s eccentric hoard of objects, each work
comprises a kind of reliquary of discards, lovingly pieced together by hand—and,
in most cases, bound together with segments of nylon stockings, a gesture connot-
ing both criminal violence and sexual bondage. With their array of once-seductive
images and materials gone deﬁnitively to seed, the works solicit a voyeuristic gaze,
but at the same time they bluntly, even brutally, reject it.

The Ratbastards established Conner’s vocabulary of form and material for
his assemblage practice, and gained him his ﬁrst critical acclaim and commercial
success. En 1962, Philip Leider wrote approvingly in Artforum of these early assem-
blages, suggesting they augured an uncompromising “new sensibility”—an
authentic break with the accepted artistic idioms of his day. Though he did not
use the word, Leider seemed to suggest that Conner’s assemblages functioned like

“It has to do with the theater”

111

fetishes, channeling the energies of a
fundamentally disordered society. Él
lauded the fact that the works offered
no readily legible critique, but rather
glared unblinkingly at the brut al
truths embodied in their very materi-
ality. Leider stressed the deadness of
the once sumptuous mater ials in
Conner’s works; unlike most of his
assemblagist peers, Conner left his
found objects in their rotten, lost
estado. “He can visualize the loveliest
flesh charred beyond recognition,"
Leider wrote, appreciatively.4

Leider’s enthusiasm not with-
st anding, the impact of Conner’s
“new sensibility” found little traction
in the 1960s, remaining out of step
with the mainstream art world, all the
more so as it increasingly embraced
the harder-edged (and more readily
salable) productions of Pop art and
Color Field painting. This condition
was reinforced by the perceptions of
parochial isolation that have perenni-
ally plagued artists working in the
Área de la Bahía, but it was also exacerbated
by Conner’s own recalcitrance and
tendency to sabotage his own success.
For many years, the artist himself,
through actions at turns comic and
heartbreaking, contributed to the general obfuscation regarding his underappre-
ciated contribution to assemblage—as when he refused to agree to a major
retrospective exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art in the early 1970s
unless the museum agreed to split with him a percentage of the “box ofﬁce.”
(Needless to say, the exhibition never took place.)5 In time, a series of entertain-
ing anecdotes attached themselves to Conner—for example, the time he painted a
baby elephant with psychedelic patterns in front of the Samuel Goldwyn Studios in

Conner.
UNTITLED. 1959–60.

Philip Leider, “Bruce Conner: A New Sensibility,” Artforum 1, No. 6 (November–December

4.
1962), pag. 30.
5.
Modern Art. The museum was known as the San Francisco Museum of Art until 1975.

This history is contained in letters held in the archival ﬁles of the San Francisco Museum of

D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d

F
r
oh
metro
h

t
t

pag

:
/
/

d
i
r
mi
C
t
.

metro

i
t
.

mi
d
tu
oh
C
t
oh
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d

F
/

d
oh

i
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
1
7
5
3
2
4
5
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
pag
d

b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t

oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3

112

OCTUBRE

Hollywood, or the time he
ran for public office in
San Francisco and read a
list of dessert s for his
major policy speech—that
generally supplanted seri-
ous critical engagement.
In the shadow of such sto-
ries, the finer points of
the objects Conner cre-
ated with such care
remained
lament ably
unexamined.6

Bruce Conner painting an elephant. 1967.

While geographical bias
and anecdotal diversion
have contributed to the
lack of a thorough criti-
cal treatment of Conner’s
refractory objects, ellos
do not tell t he whole
story, for Conner’s work itself functions in a way not easily assimilable to the dic-
tates of the dominant trends in advanced art—a fact borne of Conner’s liminal
estado. For in the late 1950s and early ’60s, Conner was indeed a liminal ﬁgure,
neither fully within nor entirely removed from the dominant art world, con su
center of gravity planted ﬁrmly on the East Coast. Unlike many of his West Coast
colegas, whose orientation was decidedly local, Conner had strong connections to
Nueva York, with numerous contacts in the city and steady uptown gallery represen-
tation beginning in 1956 and lasting through the 1960s. Más, despite the
apparent sculptural character of his assemblage, the artist was deeply immersed in
the discourse of modernist painting, the principal strains of which he had encoun-
tered during a semester of post-graduate schooling spent at the Brooklyn Museum
of Art a year before he moved to San Francisco. Conner was stimulated by the
painting he saw in New York, much of it for the ﬁrst time in person, but he was
also disheartened. Much of what he saw appeared to him to be cynically conceived
products, done in signature styles and churned out to satisfy market demands.7
“Painting” quickly came to signify a whole complex of evils for the young artist,
from its institutional strictures—“don’t touch”—to its privileged place in the

6.
A este respecto, it is worth noting that, of the two most incisive scholarly treatments of Conner
and his milieu, neither is written by an art historian: Richard Cándida Smith, Utopia and Dissent: Arte,
Poetry, and Politics in California (berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); and Rebecca Solnit,
Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1990).
Indispensable as these two texts are, art-historical readings of Conner’s work lie outside their scope.
7.
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

Bruce Conner, interview with Paul J. Karlstrom (Agosto 12, 1974), Oral History Program,

D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d

F
r
oh
metro
h

t
t

pag

:
/
/

d
i
r
mi
C
t
.

metro

i
t
.

mi
d
tu
oh
C
t
oh
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d

F
/

d
oh

i
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
1
7
5
3
2
4
5
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
pag
d

b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t

oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3

“It has to do with the theater”

113

commercial workings of what he would come to call, with increasing distaste, el
“art business.”

In response, Conner developed a sophisticated mode of assemblage that
worked over the discourse of painting from the outside in, demonstrating a pecu-
liar mixture of fascinat ion and loathing born of his own hybr idit y. El
particularity of this engagement was evident in his choice of materials as well as in
his methods in the Ratbastard works: not only nailing and pinning, but also layer-
En g, melting, pasting, scraping, peeling, breaking, stufﬁng, tying, and binding.
These were not the traditional methods of painting, but in the Ratbastards they
were made to serve as such.8 The result was a kind of ﬂaying of painting: an exter-
nalizat ion, at turns comic and violent , of the pr incipal concerns of it s
practice—from mark-making to the ﬁguration of subjectivity. Perhaps most radi-
cally, Conner developed a singularly dynamic approach that enveloped the viewer,
suturing him or her directly into the experience of the work, and forcing a mode
of interaction that was the very opposite of what seemed to him to be the static,
passive mode of viewership elicited by the vast majority of modernist painting.
Conner’s assemblage was thus highly theatrical in orientation—a mode wholly
unacceptable in the modernist idiom within and against which he worked.9
En efecto, as Conner would later state straightforwardly of his assemblage, “It has to
do with the theater.”10

Yet it was theatrical in a particular sense: aggressive, environmental, participar-
pator y, transitor y, ephemeral. As I hope to demonstrate here, Conner’s
assemblage enacted a mode of theatricality speciﬁc to his Bay Area milieu, uno
wholly other from that which would be ﬁercely debated across the pages of East
Coast art periodicals only a few years later—and which would be codiﬁed and vili-
ﬁed most famously in Michael Fried’s essay “Art and Objecthood.”11 For Fried and

8.
In this, Conner’s practice calls to mind another hybrid ﬁgure, part insider, part outsider: Eva
Hesse. Hesse’s work involves similarly unconventional methods, y, like Conner’s assemblage, can be
understood as being in unexpected dialogue with painting, as Rosalind Krauss has shown. Yet Hesse’s
work ﬁgures a mode of painting heavily invested in the “bodily,” as Krauss has suggested (whether in
the mode of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s “body without organs,” as Krauss has argued, or in the
ﬁgure of melancholic lack, as Briony Fer has put forth); Conner’s work eschews such recourse to the
body, one of several points of divergence from Hesse. See Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious
(Cambridge, Masa.: CON prensa, 1993), páginas. 309–20; and Briony Fer, “Bordering on Blank: Eva Hesse and
Minimalism,” in On Abstract Art (nuevo refugio: Prensa de la Universidad de Yale, 1997), páginas. 109–30.
9.
Conner’s approach runs parallel in some ways to Michelangelo Pistoletto’s embrace of the “theatri-
cal” as recently elucidated by Claire Gilman. Gilman attributes Pistoletto’s theatrical impulse to what she
terms an “anti-modernist” strain in the Italian postwar milieu, in which “such typically taboo concepts as
theatricality and narrativity assumed a critical force in light of the association between Italian modernist
aesthetics and the Fascist regime.” See Gilman, “Pistoletto’s Staged Subjects," Octubre 124 (Primavera 2008), pag.
55. Given Conner’s radically different setting (en el cual, por supuesto, the modernist aesthetic project was not
burdened with such a politically fraught legacy), I would suggest his embrace of theatricality represented
instead something more like a “para-modernism,” symptomatic of the artist’s own liminality—working
within certain conventions, while subverting others.
10.
of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
11. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood” (1968), in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1998).

Bruce Conner, interview with Paul Cummings (Abril 16, 1973), Oral History Program, Archives

D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d

F
r
oh
metro
h

t
t

pag

:
/
/

d
i
r
mi
C
t
.

metro

i
t
.

mi
d
tu
oh
C
t
oh
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d

F
/

d
oh

i
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
1
7
5
3
2
4
5
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
pag
d

b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t

oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3

114

OCTUBRE

other modernist critics, modernist painting could not countenance theatricality
because the theatrical was inherently false, “hollow,” lacking in the true profun-
dit y that Fr ied labeled “presentness.” Yet neither did the proponent s of
Minimalism, Fried’s primary nemesis, take up the banner of theatricality; en cambio,
they argued for their own non-theatrical, philosophically “credible” forms (a fact
that points to a seldom-recognized commonality between the two camps).12 Fue
left to Conner, liberated by his liminal status, to trick and trouble from the mar-
gins, to mobilize — through the arduous form of looking demanded by his
assemblages—a mode of theatricality capable of subverting some of the sacrosanct
fundaments of the modernist project.

Conner’s serious engagement with the medium of assemblage began after
his arrival in San Francisco in September 1957. Notablemente, the object he identiﬁed as
his ﬁrst assemblage began as a painting:

“It was almost like cutting through skin”

I was involved in this one oil painting and became so aggravated with it
that I slashed it and hacked it, it was almost like cutting through skin. I
dealt with it like it was a physical thing, this small square canvas, y yo
stuffed a bunch of nylon stockings in it so that it looked like its
innards were coming out, wires and such, wrapped a nylon stocking
over the front of it, stuck a picture that I found in Life magazine of a
cadaver lying on a table, and after it was all ﬁnished, it was a real three-
dimensional thing. There was no real reason to hang it on the wall as
an art object, so I put a handle on it, a cloth handle, so that I could
carry it around and put it on display any time I wanted to.13

He called the resulting work RATBASTARD .

That Conner’s ﬁrst assemblage found its origins in a painting is signiﬁcant, pero
not surprising. By the time he had relocated to San Francisco, he had already
attained considerable success as a painter. En 1956, while still a student, he had had
several works accepted for display at the Alan Gallery, the showplace run by Charles
alan, formerly of Edith Halpert’s famous Downtown Gallery.14 The paintings from

On “credible” forms, see Donald Judd, “Speciﬁc Objects” (1965), in Complete Writings, 1959–1975

12.
(halifax: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design Press, 1975).
13.
Conner, quoted in Solnit, Secret Exhibition, pag. 61. Conner identiﬁes RATBASTARD as his ﬁrst
assemblage in “Bruce Conner: Marilyn and Spaghetti Theory,” interview with Marc Selwyn, Flash Art
156 ( January/February 1991), pag. 94.
14.
Charles Alan worked at the Downtown Gallery from 1945 a 1952 before opening his own gallery,
where he exhibited an eclectic mix of contemporary American artists (most notably, the social realist Jack
Levin) along with works by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists that appealed to, in his own words,
his “neurotic” sensibility. See Charles Alan, “Interview: Paul Cummings Talks with Charles Alan,” Archives of
American Art Journal 18, No. 2 (1978), pag. 22. Conner’s connection to Alan began when the artist walked into
the gallery unannounced with a portfolio of work. Conner’s 1956 showing began a lengthy working rela-
tionship with Alan, which culminated in a retrospective show in 1965.

D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d

F
r
oh
metro
h

t
t

pag

:
/
/

d
i
r
mi
C
t
.

metro

i
t
.

mi
d
tu
oh
C
t
oh
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d

F
/

d
oh

i
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
1
7
5
3
2
4
5
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
pag
d

b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t

oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3

D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d

F
r
oh
metro
h

t
t

pag

:
/
/

d
i
r
mi
C
t
.

metro

i
t
.

mi
d
tu
oh
C
t
oh
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d

F
/

d
oh

i
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
1
7
5
3
2
4
5
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
pag
d

b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t

oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3

Conner. RATBASTARD. 1958.

116

OCTUBRE

this early period show remarkable self-assurance. Monochromatically white or in har-
monic ranges of muted earth tones, they feature highly impastoed surfaces built up
with gesso, vermiculite, and other bulky substances. An early review described the
paintings well, noting that they “look like nothing so much as framed cross-sections
of prehistoric crustaceans embedded in limestone.”15 The reviewer likely did not
know of Conner’s abiding interest in paleontology, but the characterization is apt:
paint in these early works seems less
applied than sedimented. Más
adding to the sense of primordial
layering, many of these early paint-
ings feature excised sections from
other works pasted directly onto
their surfaces. Even at this early
stage in Conner’s plastic work, el
sanctity of painting as such was an
open question.

Sin embargo, it is clear there is a
substantive difference between such
paintings and RATBASTARD, y
that the latter represented some-
thing of a breakthrough for the
young artist. Critics have routinely
identified Conner’s move to San
Francisco, that “oasis of delights . . .
on the edge of the Paciﬁc,” as the
main st imulus for this break-
a través de, citing both his interaction
with artists already working in the city and his encounter with refuse from the
demolit ion of ornate Victor ian houses in the area known as the Western
Addition.16 In doing so they have followed Conner himself, who identiﬁed as
sources of inspiration and materials not only the junk shops and picturesque rub-
ble in the Western Addition, but also the general gothic ambience of the city as
typiﬁed by the Sutro Museum, the crumbling Victorian collection of curiosities
which sat at the time on the western edge of Golden Gate Park.17 However,

Conner. Untitled. 1954.

R. h. Hagan, “Music and Art,” San Francisco Bay Window, Junio 15, 1958.
15.
16.
Joan C. Siegfried, “Bruce Conner,” in Bruce Conner: Sculpture, Assemblages, Collages, Drawings, Films,
ed. Stephen S. Prokopoff (Filadelfia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1967), notario público. Rebecca Solnit notes
that the “thrift stores and ambience of gothic decay of the Western Addition” was a source of fascination
not only for Conner but also for many artists working in the city. She also suggests there was a racist
dimension to the city’s urban renewal project to raze homes in the largely African-American neighbor-
hood, to which artists, including Conner, were attuned. See Solnit, Secret Exhibition, pag. 61.
17.
Thomas Albright, Art in the San Francisco Bay Area: 1945–1980 (berkeley: University of California
Prensa, 1985), pag. 98. Albright notes that the Sutro Museum “housed a surrealistic treasure house of mum-
mies, mechanical dolls, and toothpick carnivals, as well as the wardrobe used by Thom Thumb.” The build-
ing that housed the museum burned to the ground in 1966.

D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d

F
r
oh
metro
h

t
t

pag

:
/
/

d
i
r
mi
C
t
.

metro

i
t
.

mi
d
tu
oh
C
t
oh
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d

F
/

d
oh

i
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
1
7
5
3
2
4
5
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
pag
d

b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t

oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3

“It has to do with the theater”

117

Conner had considered the aesthetic possibilities of found objects before his
arrival in San Francisco, during his six-month stay in the Lower East Side of New
York while on scholarship at the Brooklyn Museum. Allá, he lived in a district
that was home to the city’s rag pickers and was struck by the way they piled their
multicolored wares behind large glass shop windows.18 The play between surface
and depth inherent in these window displays stayed with him, eventually ﬁnding
its way the following year into the Ratbastard assemblages.

Of course, for an artist with little money, the found object was also what
was at hand. Yet while poverty of means played a part in dictating his chosen
medio, it is apparent that from his earliest period, Conner saw great poetic
potential in overlooked, discarded materials. This sensibility was shared by the
poets and writers of the so-called Beat Generation, the diffuse subculture that
achieved national recognition in 1957, and with which Conner has often been
grouped.19 Despite his friendships with many of the Beats, sin embargo, Conner’s
magpie approach to art-making had more in common with the idiosyncratic
group of visual artists working in the Bay Area in the 1950s, including George
Herms, Wally Hedrick, Jay DeFeo, Joan Brown, and Wallace Berman. Most of
these artists lived and worked in close proximity in the late 1950s, many occupy-
ing studios and living quarters in a large house in the Fillmore neighborhood
rented by Hedrick and DeFeo, who were married at the time. As Richard
Cándida Smith has discussed, the group shared an adventurous sense of playful
possibility that energized their art—and suffered from anxieties that no one out-
side the group was paying attention.20

The lack of an informed (and paying) audience was an obvious threat to the
viability of a working artist like Conner. But the absence of expectations allowed
room for play, as demonstrated in Conner’s notorious founding of the Rat Bastard
Protective Association soon after his arrival in San Francisco. Conner named the
group in solidarity with the city’s garbage collectors, the Scavengers Protective
Asociación. As he later remarked, “The people themselves were considered the
lowest people employed by society . . . . I decided we’ll have the RAT BASTARD
PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION: people who were making things with the detritus of
sociedad, who were themselves ostracized or alienated from full involvement in soci-
ety.”21 The group’s initials, RBP, constituted an ironic parody of the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood. The RBP—whose members included DeFeo, Hedrick, Marrón, Manuel
Neri, and other local artists and writers—was more of a social club than a rigorous
artistic alliance. Informal groupings of this sort cropped up regularly in 1950s San

Conner, interview with Cummings (1973).
18.
19.
For a sensitive recent consideration of Conner and his work in the context of the Beat
Generación, see Lisa Phillips, ed., Beat Culture and the New America, 1950–1965 (Nueva York: Whitney
Museum of American Art, 1995).
Cándida Smith, “The Beat Phenomenon,” in Utopia.
20.
21.
Conner, interview with Peter Boswell ( Junio 15, 1983), quoted in Boswell, “Bruce Conner:
Theater of Light and Shadow,” in 2000 BC: THE BRUCE CONNER STORY, PART II, ed. Peter Boswell,
Joan Rothfuss, and Bruce Jenkins (Mineápolis: Walker Art Center, 1999), pag. 4.

D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d

F
r
oh
metro
h

t
t

pag

:
/
/

d
i
r
mi
C
t
.

metro

i
t
.

mi
d
tu
oh
C
t
oh
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d

F
/

d
oh

i
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
1
7
5
3
2
4
5
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
pag
d

b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t

oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3

118

OCTUBRE

Francisco, often around a gallery space. The RBP numbered around a dozen
miembros, and while the members attended parties, few made use of the stamp
Conner gave them to mark their work. Conner himself did, sin embargo, make
numerous works using the word “rat” or “rat bastard” in the title, including RAT-
BASTARD 2, RAT BACK PACK, RAT PURSE, GENERIC RAT HAND GRENADE, y
otros. John Bowles has noted that the names and putative functions of many of
these objects had a martial bent, as if Conner were “outfitting an army of
Ratbastards,” furthering the idea of an embattled subculture.22 Bowles has sug-
gested that Conner adopted this aggressive strategy as a means of confronting a
press bent on pigeonholing him as “Beat,” understood by Conner and other
artists as a limiting and derogatory term; Bowles has also noted the RBP’s simul-
taneous critique of materialist society and art-world exclusion. En efecto, para
Conner, working with refuse became not only a means of cementing in-group
st atus and circumvent ing est ablished channels of distr ibut ion, but also a
defense against the Bay Area’s lack of serious galleries and collectors. As Conner
later noted about the San Francisco art scene of the late 1950s, “The idea of hav-
ing shows was silly. Most of the other people that I knew that were artists just
ﬁgured it was absurd. Why have a show? Just have a party. If you are going to
have a show, why bother to take on all the trimmings and expectations of what
art should be as a permanent work of art? Why spend your money on that if
nobody is going to buy it? You really are doing it for yourself.”23

Sin embargo, it is important not to overestimate this indifferent attitude
toward the art object, at least in Conner’s case. Unlike some of his peers (mayoría
notably, Berman and Hedrick), Conner did create a substantial body of art
objects in the late 1950s. While a number of these objects came to an early end,
either accidentally or through deliberate action of the artist (Conner would
occasionally burn or otherwise divest himself of works—a 1982 list of “lost and
destroyed works” included thirty assemblages), many more have survived to the
present.24 The insistent materiality of those that have survived, together with
the meticulous care put into their construction, demand they be examined
closely. The ferocity of Conner’s attack on the painting that would become
RATBASTARD, Por ejemplo, suggests that more was at stake in the project than
mere destruction.

RATBASTARD, después de todo, is not a destroyed painting, though it does convey
a sense of having been tormented, or even tortured. The front of the work con-
t ains a mix of fabr ic, wire, and other object s compressed into the space

22.
John P. Bowles, “‘Shocking “Beat” Art Displayed’: California Artists and the Beat Image,” in
Reading California: Arte, Image, and Identity, 1900–2000, ed. Stephanie Barron, Sheri Bernstein, and Ilene
Susan Fort (berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), pag. 239.
Conner, interview with Cummings (1973). Emphasis in original.
23.
24.
Conner himself expressed contradictory feelings about the fate of his assemblages. While consis-
tently asserting that the works are ephemeral and subject to the vicissitudes of time (Por ejemplo, el
accretion of dust), he nonetheless remained vigilant to the point of obsession concerning their care,
and expressed anger in not being allowed to conserve works in private collections.

D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d

F
r
oh
metro
h

t
t

pag

:
/
/

d
i
r
mi
C
t
.

metro

i
t
.

mi
d
tu
oh
C
t
oh
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d

F
/

d
oh

i
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
1
7
5
3
2
4
5
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
pag
d

b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t

oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3

“It has to do with the theater”

119

D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d

F
r
oh
metro
h

t
t

pag

:
/
/

d
i
r
mi
C
t
.

metro

i
t
.

mi
d
tu
oh
C
t
oh
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d

F
/

d
oh

i
/

Conner. RATBASTARD 2. 1958.

between the original painting’s canvas and the nylon stockings stretched and
stapled across its surface. Tucked into the upper corner, and nailed in for good
measure, is the photograph Conner identiﬁes as a picture of a “cadaver on a
table.” The back of the work is dominated by a page from The American Weekly—
a sensat ionalist newspaper supplement— which has been st apled to the
stretcher bars of the original canvas. The page contains fragments of two arti-
cles, one an illustrated feature on gory medieval tortures and the other a
human-interest story about an itinerant boxer who communicates with his
farmhouse wife via carrier pigeon.

The photograph of the cadaver inserted into the front and the illustrated
article about torture stapled to the back together establish the tone of RATBAS-
TARD, which might best be character ized as manifest ing a concern with
violation. “Violation” connotes both the transgression of taboo and the carrying
out of violence, and both senses of the term are active in the assemblage. El
notion of violation is present in a number of registers. Most immediately obvi-
ous is the way it deﬁes one of the fundamental tenets of traditional painting: el
hierarchy between front and back. In RATBASTARD, both sides compete for the

1
0
1
1
6
2
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
1
7
5
3
2
4
5
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
pag
d

b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t

oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3

120

OCTUBRE

D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d

F
r
oh
metro
h

t
t

pag

:
/
/

d
i
r
mi
C
t
.

metro

i
t
.

mi
d
tu
oh
C
t
oh
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d

F
/

d
oh

i
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
1
7
5
3
2
4
5
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
pag
d

b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t

oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3

Conner.
RATBASTARD (verso).

viewer’s attention, despite the fact that when the work is displayed one side is
necessarily held close to the wall and kept out of sight. This tendency to veil part
of a work, either through strategies of display or via the use of unconventional
media (such as melted wax, bunched cloth, torn wallpaper, y, above all,
shrouds of nylon stockings), would soon become a hallmark of Conner’s
Ratbastards and other assemblages.

RATBASTARD also baldly violates another of painting’s core principles: es
not stationary—or rather, it dispenses with the myth that a painting is stationary.
Concepts of painting active in the late 1950s—whether invested in illusionism and
narrative or committed to ﬂatness and surface opticality—rarely if ever took into
account the fact that paintings do, En realidad, move: from studio to exhibition, de
gallery to collector, and from museum storage to display. RATBASTARD makes

“It has to do with the theater”

121

recognizing this fact unavoidable. The handle from which it hangs, whenever
and wherever it is displayed, always contains the latent possibility of its being
emocionado (and therefore touched—another art world prohibition). With the sim-
ple addit ion of a cloth strap, Conner vaulted his assemblage into a new
relationship with the viewer, one that fundamentally altered the power relation
between artist, viewer, and work. While the obvious device of a handle would
recur only rarely in future works, other increasingly sophisticated devices would
be employed to extend and develop this new artwork/viewer relationship.

Conner repeatedly described his practice of assemblage in the 1950s and
’60s as “gluing the world down,” and the phrase is telling.25 It suggests the exis-
tence of an aggregate totality of fabricated things from which it is possible to
apprehend and frame a cross-section—a semi-automatic process, akin to the
taking of a photograph. This sensibility is apparent in RATBASTARD, which in
many respects served as a template for further elaboration in subsequent assem-
blages. The work is literally stuffed with items, which appear to be not so much
selected by an individual artist as accreted by some unknown force. Of course,
the assumption of a preexisting matrix of material out of which an artwork may
accumulate was diametrically opposed to the myth of the virgin canvas that
underwrote Abstract Expressionist painting and that still held sway, in many
campamentos, in the late 1950s. Sin embargo, it also differed in kind from the clever manip-
ulation of sign systems and the deft arrangement of semiotic bits at play in the
contemporaneous work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg—ﬁgures with
whom critics regularly compared Conner at the time.26

Conner’s work contrasts most sharply with Johns’s and Rauschenberg’s
work in his handling of signs. Fred Orton has argued that in Johns’s work signs
are stitched together metonymically, in associative sequences that are best read
allegorically.27 Signs enact a network of meanings across the surface of Johns’s
trabajar, in metonymic chains polysemically resonant with meanings both private
and public: a broom suggests movement, a poem fragment suggests a poet—and
both may conjure an absent human presence, to take only one, relatively simple,
example.28 In Rauschenberg’s case, Leo Steinberg presciently and famously

25.
See for example Bruce Conner, “A Conversation with Bruce Conner,” interview with Robert
Dean, in Bruce Conner: Assemblages, Paintings, Drawings, Engraving Collages, 1960–1990 (Santa Monica,
California: Michael Kohn Gallery, 1990), notario público.
See for example William Seitz’s comments in his essay for the catalog of the Art of Assemblage exhibi-
26.
tion at the Museum of Modern Art, in which he notes Willem De Kooning’s precedent in using pop cultur-
al references that “became so important as a subject for Rauschenberg, Johns, Conner, and so many subse-
quent, but usually less skillful, painters and assemblers.” The Art of Assemblage (Nueva York: Museum of
Modern Art, 1961), pag. 74.
27.
Fred Orton, Figuring Jasper Johns (Cambridge, Masa.: Prensa de la Universidad de Harvard, 1994).
According to Orton, Johns’s work operates allegorically: “Johns’s dominant mode of seeing,
28.
thinking and speaking ‘the visual world’ and forming ‘works of art’ is allegorical” (Figuring, pag. 157).
This means that it operates in relation to, and extrapolates on, an antecedent text, or pretext—in
Johns’s case, the narrative of modern painting, which had its apogee in Abstract Expressionism.
Allegory operates textually—that is, linguistically, as Johns’s work does—and consists of metonymic
chains of meaning (rather than metaphoric symbols).

D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d

F
r
oh
metro
h

t
t

pag

:
/
/

d
i
r
mi
C
t
.

metro

i
t
.

mi
d
tu
oh
C
t
oh
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d

F
/

d
oh

i
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
1
7
5
3
2
4
5
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
pag
d

b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t

oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3

122

OCTUBRE

focused on the semiotics, the “artistic language,” of the artist’s work.29 Steinberg
was the ﬁrst to point out the “ﬂatbed” nature of Rauschenberg’s picture plane,
cual, he noted, was like a sensitized plate highly receptive to signs of wildly
divergent natures: “Against Rauschenberg’s picture plane you can pin or project
any image because it will not work as the glimpse of a world, but as a scrap of
printed material. And you can attach any object, so long as it beds itself down
on the work-surface.”30 Taking up this question of the sign in Rauschenberg’s
early work, Branden Joseph has recently argued that the activation of the idea
of “difference”—that is, the ﬁssures between signs—is the locus of meaning in the
artist’s work. As with Johns, signs are deployed across the visual surface, pero el
making of meaning takes place in the “gaps” between them. In this model—
which Joseph regards as a consistent avant-garde strategy—meaning occurs in
the process of signiﬁcation, in a multiplicity of semantic forces which never quite
cohere; it is interstitial, generated by the unresolved relay, Por ejemplo, entre
linguistic and visual registers.31

These are schematic sketches of complex semiotic analyses; I mention
them here only to clarify the issues at hand in Conner’s work. Para, paraphrasing
Orton discussing Johns, the question in Conner’s case is not what the work
medio, but rather how the work makes meaning. Like Johns and Rauschenberg,
Conner deﬁnitively breaks with the dominant semiotic system of the immediate
pasado, a saber, the romantic poetics of Abstract Expressionism. Yet rather than
elaborating meaning in metonymic chains of signiﬁers, or inﬁnitely deferring it
in a play of difference, a Conner assemblage like RATBASTARD approaches a
density beyond sign systems. It is not that Conner’s assemblage exists outside of
language—this would be impossible. But the work’s signs are damaged to such
a degree and compressed with such force that it ultimately offers up language
itself as ruined, broken—seemingly pushed beyond any semiotic recovery, alle-
gorical or otherwise.32 Signiﬁcatory meaning of any kind is dispensed with in
favor of the brute power of tangible reality. Rather than exhibiting a surplus of
narratives, as Peter Boswell has suggested, RATBASTARD and Conner’s other
assemblages in fact bury any potentially intelligible narratives under the weight

Leo Steinberg, “Other Criteria,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (Nuevo

Ibídem., pag. 88.
Branden Joseph, Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde (Cambridge, Masa.:

29.
york: prensa de la Universidad de Oxford, 1972), pag. 85.
30.
31.
CON prensa, 2003). See especially Chapter 3, “Mole Archaeology.”
32.
In a well-known essay, Craig Owens argued for an allegorical reading of what he labeled post-
modernist art, citing an “allegorical impulse” motivating certain contemporary art practices against
the modernist mythos that privileged the “symbolic” and suppressed the allegorical on behalf of the
Kantian-Romantic aesthetic. In his explication of the postmodern operation of allegory, Owens
bears down on the opacity of language, the material dimension of the sign, which can amount to
ruins. Conner’s assemblage, sin embargo, overruns opacity; annihilation and obliteration are more use-
ful descriptive terms. See Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” in
Art after Modernism: Rethinking Represent at ion, ed. Br ian Wallis (Nueva York: New Museum of
Contemporary Art, 1984), páginas. 203–35.

D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d

F
r
oh
metro
h

t
t

pag

:
/
/

d
i
r
mi
C
t
.

metro

i
t
.

mi
d
tu
oh
C
t
oh
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d

F
/

d
oh

i
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
1
7
5
3
2
4
5
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
pag
d

b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t

oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3

“It has to do with the theater”

123

of their own sheer physicality.33 Their point of origin as artworks is not the
realm of signs, of communication, but rather the pre-semiotic sphere of feeling
which Conner’s close friend McClure called the “undersoul”—“the deepest,
most per sonal, physiological core,” far from “the outer social world of
speech.”34 McClure considered achieving awareness of the undersoul an over-
whelming but joyous experience. It was the point from which such distinctions
as body/mind and self/other could be effaced, and the groundswell from
which energy might be channeled into the making of a new poetry.35 It is safe
to say that for Conner the experience was far less joyful, and far more terrify-
En g; nonetheless, in both the visual conundrum it poses to its viewer and in its
breaking with the conventions of painting, RATBASTARD pointed toward a new,
theatrically animated relay between work and viewer that would find fuller
expression in subsequent works.

Dark Brown

Conner borrowed the term “ratbastard” from a friend, the poet Michael
McClure, who had overheard the word used in a gym locker room.36 In the envi-
ronment of the San Francisco locker room, the term constituted both a base
insult and a playful means of marking off a (masculino) speaker and addressee from
the rest of society. Sin embargo, for both McClure and Conner the term suggested
more than an insult or indicator of subculture, subtending a whole theory of the
unspeakable; the “ratbastard” was that which lacked recourse to signiﬁcation,
and thus required instantiation in process—whether in terms of the physical
grafting of materials in an assemblage, or in the almost physical wrestling of
words away from their understood meanings—to form a new poetry “far from
the outer social world of speech.”

Conner and McClure developed a friendship during their childhood
together in Wichita, Kansas, and remained close through the 1950s and after.
They traveled to New York together in the early 1950s, and it was McClure who
urged Conner to move to San Francisco in 1957. En 1959, Conner made a painting
for McClure called DARK BROWN. Conner took the name of the work from the
title of a long poem McClure was working on at the time, published for the ﬁrst

Peter Boswell has identiﬁed “high density narrative” as one of the two strategies (junto con
33.
“optical overload”) that Conner uses in order to assure the artwork is “subject to renewal and redeﬁ-
nition each time it is viewed.” See Boswell, “Bruce Conner,” p. 27. According to Boswell, a Conner
assemblage provides too many signs to process during a single visual encounter, so each subsequent
encounter allows new narratives to emerge. The works constitute “open-ended tales whose meaning
is ultimately left up to the viewer.” While I believe Boswell is correct in identifying density as being of
fundamental importance in Conner’s work, I disagree that this density is to be found in the register
of narrative. Bastante, narrative as such is undone at the level of material excess.
34. Michael McClure, Scratching the Beat Surface (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1982), pag. 26.
35.
36.

Ibídem., pag. 74.
Bowles, “‘Shocking “Beat” Art Displayed,’” p. 239.

D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d

F
r
oh
metro
h

t
t

pag

:
/
/

d
i
r
mi
C
t
.

metro

i
t
.

mi
d
tu
oh
C
t
oh
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d

F
/

d
oh

i
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
1
7
5
3
2
4
5
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
pag
d

b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t

oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3

D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d

F
r
oh
metro
h

t
t

pag

:
/
/

d
i
r
mi
C
t
.

metro

i
t
.

mi
d
tu
oh
C
t
oh
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d

F
/

d
oh

i
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
1
7
5
3
2
4
5
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
pag
d

b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t

oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3

Conner. DARK BROWN. 1959.

“It has to do with the theater”

125

time by their mutual friend and fellow Wichitan Dave Haselwood in 1961.37 El
painting (or assemblage; the work, like Conner himself, is something of a hybrid)
is a square canvas to which thick brown and black paint has been applied, alto-
lighted by touches of ochre, naranja, and yellow. A piece of pearl costume jewelry
sits in a pool of silver-white aluminum paint near the lower center of the canvas,
while a thin fringe of brown fur runs along its perimeter, an element Conner said
he added to satisfy McClure’s predilection for touching art objects. The facture of
DARK BROWN recalls the heavily impastoed, furrowed surfaces of Conner’s early
paintings, but the latter work possesses a different sensibility; its visual ﬁeld is
richer, its colors denser and more evocative of something elusive and obscure
behind them.

Peter Boswell has discussed DARK BROWN in relation to McClure’s poem
that gave it its name. McClure’s long, exhortatory poem consists of the thoughts
and feelings of a narrator venturing deep within himself in pursuit of mystical
union with the undersoul (for which, in McClure’s vocabulary, the phrase “dark
brown” is a synonym). Boswell reads a duality in the poem between despair and
hope, which for him corresponds to the bifurcation of the self into body and
spirit. While McClure’s “dark brown” journey is unavoidably traumatic, it is,
according to Boswell, ultimately redemptive; he reads in the closing sections of
the poem the narrator’s discovery of liberation in the ecstasy of sexual union. Para
Boswell, Conner’s DARK BROWN is legible as a kind of visual translation of
McClure’s poem: the fur tacked to the painting’s four edges functions as a
metaphor for the poet’s “beast/body”; the “turgid darkness” of McClure’s interior
journey is “expressed” through thickly applied, glistening brown and black oil
paint; and the “radiant hope and yearning” in McClure’s poem ﬁnd “parallels” in
the pool of aluminum paint and the pearl brooch “shining with promise.”38

Boswell’s reading of DARK BROWN allows him to fold it into the overarching
theme he sees running throughout Conner’s diverse oeuvre, in which darkness
and light act as “protean forces engaged in a metamorphic dance, one in which
light can both illuminate and annihilate and darkness is both a well of despair and
a cavern of fecund mysteries.”39 As evocative as such symbology might be, sin embargo,
it is inconsistent with Conner’s approach to assemblage, in which the key to inter-
pretation is not metaphorical but rather embedded in the physical processes of
making and looking. DARK BROWN is not a metaphorical analog for McClure’s
poem, nor does it illustrate spiritual joy overcoming corporeal terror; bastante,
much like the poem—and like Conner’s other Ratbastard assemblages—it forces
its viewer to perform, in the very act of looking, the uncertain and overpowering
act of immersion into an unknown.

37. Michael McClure, Dark Brown (San Francisco: Auerhahn Press, 1961). Haselwood’s Auerhahn
Press published a number of important texts by Beat and other writers in San Francisco. All references
to McClure’s poem here are from Hymns to St. Geryon and Other Poems; and Dark Brown (Londres: Cabo
Goliard, 1969).
38.
39.

Boswell, “Bruce Conner," pag. 69.
Ibídem., pag. 67.

D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d

F
r
oh
metro
h

t
t

pag

:
/
/

d
i
r
mi
C
t
.

metro

i
t
.

mi
d
tu
oh
C
t
oh
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d

F
/

d
oh

i
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
1
7
5
3
2
4
5
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
pag
d

b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t

oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3

126

OCTUBRE

McClure’s poem is itself quite ambiguous, employing disjointed language,
typographical idiosyncrasies and other devices in its attempt to represent an
encounter with the “dark brown” depths. Its ﬁnal lines,

Worse than blank pages. So little given.

Bright false images and dull
palabras. Til all that
comes from me is never-before-seen
belleza. Til
I no longer ﬁght to hold vision for
an instant! And can move in it bold.
OH LONGING FOR OBJECTS. Fire of ﬂesh
beating on the cold rocks

fundamentally lack resolution, positing a self stuck groping toward longed-for
objects that cannot be captured by or translated into “bright false images” or “dull
words.” Importantly, for McClure, the undersoul connotes a space within, pero también
something into which one descends. Entering the mind-space that it occupies
entails not an Apollonian union of the body and spirit, pero, crucialmente, a violent
implosion of the two into one.

This much scarier proposition is what Conner’s DARK BROWN presents. A
begin with, the splash of silver-white paint occupying its center offers no
reprieve from the dark, roiled expanse around it; en cambio, it appears, paradoxi-
cally, to be both behind the swirling dark brown ﬁeld and contiguous with it. El
bright white pool and the murky paint surrounding it are equally obstinate in
their presence on the painting’s surface; they promise, and frustrate the desire
para, access to something beyond or below. The painting challenges its viewer
with an impossible proposition in the same way McClure’s poem asks its reader
to imagine becoming “muscled space” and to envision the self as both
“meat/and colored light.” The paradox is presented as a visual conundrum. El
painting implies vast internal depth, but does not construct it through the ordi-
nar y painterly dev ices of cont r ast ing color relat ionships or linear or
atmospheric perspective. Depth here appears symptomatic, as if somehow
secreted through the coagulation of matter on the gnarled surface of the work;
it is sensed but not seen.

En suma, DARK BROWN creates a dimensional space unlike that operating in
most contemporaneous painting, whether on the East or the West Coast. To men-
tion dimensional space in conjunction with painting in the late 1950s is inevitably
to bring to mind the intense debates raging at the time regarding ﬂatness and
depth in advanced painting. Fue, después de todo, en 1959 that Frank Stella claimed to
have found a way to “force illusionistic space out of the painting at a constant rate

D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d

F
r
oh
metro
h

t
t

pag

:
/
/

d
i
r
mi
C
t
.

metro

i
t
.

mi
d
tu
oh
C
t
oh
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d

F
/

d
oh

i
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
1
7
5
3
2
4
5
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
pag
d

b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t

oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3

“It has to do with the theater”

127

by using a regulated pattern”;40 while Clement Greenberg’s essay “Modernist
Painting,” in which he would argue that modernist painting “in its latest phase”
had abandoned “the representation of the kind of space that recognizable objects
can inhabit,” would appear the following year.41 Conner may or may not have been
aware of these debates about ﬂatness and modernist painting, but the metaphysi-
cal ambition of his work rendered them beside the point. For Conner, the stakes
of art making were different: his assemblage aimed to “glue down” a portion of
the real, physical world in its manifold facticity, contradictions included. For an
artist working in this vein, painting was not a discursive practice requiring exten-
sion and advancement , but a hindrance needing to be cannibalized and
overcome. A painting-assemblage like DARK BROWN, in dialogue with painting
but approaching it obliquely, turned the making of an art object into an open-
ended process of submerging and revealing, manipulating for its own ends the
interplay between seeing and not seeing.

“like an immaculate slaughterhouse”

The manipulation of dimensional space would ﬁnd more and more sophisticated
expression in subsequent assemblages in the Ratbastard idiom, as can be seen in a
group of works dating from 1959 with spider-related titles: ARACHNE, SPIDER
LADY, SPIDER LADY NEST, and SPIDER LADY HOUSE. These works extended and
advanced Conner’s grasp of the assemblage medium, while pointing to the
macabre direction his exploration of the material world would increasingly take.

ARACHNE is perhaps the most haunting of the group. Encountering the
assemblage in person is a disconcerting experience: it gives the viewer an odd
visual sensation of inﬁnitely receding space, absent any ﬁrm ground behind it. A
slab of wood is barely discernible beneath layers of dirty, matted material. Shrouds
of nylon encase its rectangular whole, creating a punctured and permeable sur-
face membrane. The nylon scrim makes determining the depth of the work
difﬁcult; at points it appears extremely shallow, while at others it seems to plunge
inward. Only by viewing the work from the side is it possible to see that it is in fact
no more than a few inches deep; when one returns to face the work head-on, él
regains its illusionary depth.

A pool of aluminum paint dominates the work’s upper half. Moving down-
ward, the bright aluminum paint gives way to a rectangular inky black void, cual
occupies the center of the work like an absent heart. Even after close examina-
ción, it remains unclear exactly what materials make up this wet-looking splotch.
En otra parte, wires worm their way to the surface, while balls of wadded cloth and
other castoff objects—bits of crumpled newspaper, fake pearls, a doll’s head—

Frank Stella, “Text of a Lecture Given at the Pratt Institute, Winter 1959–1960,” in Frank Stella,

40.
ed. Robert Rosenblum (Hammondworth, Inglaterra: Penguin Books, 1971), pag. 57.
41.
Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969 (chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pag. 87.

Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting” (1960), in The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volumen 4:

D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d

F
r
oh
metro
h

t
t

pag

:
/
/

d
i
r
mi
C
t
.

metro

i
t
.

mi
d
tu
oh
C
t
oh
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d

F
/

d
oh

i
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
1
7
5
3
2
4
5
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
pag
d

b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t

oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3

128

OCTUBRE

push forward like polyps, distending the work’s porous skin. Toward the bottom of
the assemblage, nylons, rags, strands of beads, and other detritus bunch and
gather, calling to mind a promiscuous range of imagery: river sediment, intestines,
bags of garbage. Crevices between the various materials and objects squeezed
behind the outer layers of nylon capture and dissolve ambient light, further
impeding our ability to plumb visually the work’s interior. Huddled against the
gallery wall, the work appears at once defensive and aggressive, as if unwilling to
reveal itself, but unable to hide its face from view.

The dominant visual feature of ARACHNE is its shroud of nylon stockings.
The sexual and violent overtones of Conner’s use of nylon stockings are mainstays
of the literature on the artist. What has gone unremarked, sin embargo, is the great
variety in the disposition of the nylon material from assemblage to assemblage: en
veces, it is wrapped tightly and densely; at other times, it is balled up and loosely
suspended; at still other times, it is stretched thin. In ARACHNE, nylon stockings
are stretched to the breaking point, allowing holes to open up according to the
material’s chance points of weakness.

Here nylon is both like and unlike painting—for example, the skeins of
paint covering an Abstract Expressionist canvas. The stretches of nylon work as
surface gestures, but they also conceal and dissimulate the surface, like the semi-
transparent overlays of an anatomy book or the screens of a magic lantern show. Si
these are theatrical similes, the allusion is not accidental. In a 1974 interview
referred to earlier, Conner spoke explicitly of the theatrical dimension of his early
assemblages:

It has to do with the theater. Theater in the sense of an image, an envi-
ronment that’s made privately. Somebody makes an altar in their
house, or they set up objects on tables, or they organize objects in win-
dows (like a real theater with curtains). A church is another kind of
theater; a museum is another kind of theater.42

When the interviewer pressed the artist to elaborate, Conner responded with an
anecdote. He related seeing his work OVEN, an uncompromising work inspired by
the death camps at Buchenwald, in the pristine, all-white environs of a patron’s

42.
Conner, interview with Cummings (1973). Virginia Fabbri Butera has also suggested there is an
inherent theatricality in certain of Conner’s assemblages. Sin embargo, for Butera, this theatrical aspect
has to do with Conner’s occasional use of domestic objects such as furniture in his works, which invite
imagined or even actual use, like props. For Butera, Conner’s works are akin in this aspect to the envi-
ronmental assemblages of Edward Kienholz, in that both “are dedicated to . . . merging art and life.”
See Butera, “The Folding Screen as Sexual Metaphor in Twentieth Century Western Art: An Analysis of
Screens by Eileen Gray, Man Ray, and Bruce Conner” (Doctor. diss., City University of New York, 2002).
While both Conner and Kienholz lived and worked in California in the 1950s and ’60s, and both rose
to prominence at the same moment, the differences between the two are of greater signiﬁcance than
any similarities. In the present case, it is sufﬁcient to note that Conner’s employment of the theatrical
in his work operated at some distance from that employed by Kienholz. For Kienholz, use of real
objects in the physical space of the viewer created Magic Realist tableaux at odds with Conner’s subtle
inducements to tortuous looking.

D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d

F
r
oh
metro
h

t
t

pag

:
/
/

d
i
r
mi
C
t
.

metro

i
t
.

mi
d
tu
oh
C
t
oh
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d

F
/

d
oh

i
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
1
7
5
3
2
4
5
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
pag
d

b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t

oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3

D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d

F
r
oh
metro
h

t
t

pag

:
/
/

d
i
r
mi
C
t
.

metro

i
t
.

mi
d
tu
oh
C
t
oh
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d

F
/

d
oh

i
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
1
7
5
3
2
4
5
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
pag
d

b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t

oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3

Conner. ARACHNE. 1959.

130

OCTUBRE

ultra-modernist house. For Conner, the work was ideally suited to the space, en
that it pulled the house into relation and showed how both were equally “unbear-
able”: “the environment and the piece were exactly the same thing . . . another way
would be to put it in a slaughterhouse. [The house] was like an immaculate
slaughterhouse. That’s what it felt like to me. People’s emotions and life totally
unnatural.”43 As his discussion of OVEN suggests, Conner envisioned his assem-
blage as operating like aggressive street theater, intervening in whatever space it
occupied, like the parades and other proto-Happenings he and others periodi-
cally organized to disrupt daily life in San Francisco.44 Like those activities, OVEN,
ARACHNE, and other Ratbastard assemblages held the potential to activate their
surroundings, in turn making their viewers over into “participants.”45

Conner’s comments also point to the private nature of the encounter; un
assemblage such as ARACHNE is, like an altar, a theater for one. This means that
participation takes a quite speciﬁc form. In this case, it means giving in to the
spatial problems posed by the assemblage, experiencing the elusive spaces that it
contains and conceals. Por supuesto, the presence of an enterable, imaginary space
in a work of art is not new; Ha sido, Por ejemplo, a cardinal trait of traditional
landscape painting from at least as far back as Poussin and Claude Lorrain. Many
of Conner’s early assemblages, including ARACHNE, have the scale and sensibility
of landscape paintings; their craggy surfaces recall mountains or moonscapes. Todavía
in Conner’s works, space is created and manipulated with a literalness foreign to
traditional painting. A traditional landscape painting impels the viewer not only
to see the landscape, but also to “visualize his presence at the scene,” as Michael
Fried has observed.46 Such a painting leads the viewer from foreground to hori-
zon by means of an arrangement of carefully orchestrated visual cues; thus is the
viewer made over into an ideal, disembodied “observer.”47 ARACHNE demands a
similarly circuitous looking, but its knotty thatch of materials frustrates any
ideational progress inward. Embedded objects, always taken readymade, trip up
the viewer, stubbornly rejecting his or her projection into the work—as with the
doll’s head inserted behind the nylon scrim in the lower right of the work, cual
snaps the viewer back to the plane of experiential reality and wards off any
attempt to enter. In subsequent assemblages, other objects and, cada vez más, pho-
tographic images would come to serve a similar function.

Poussiniste painting posits an incorporeal viewer; Conner’s assemblage is

Conner, interview with Cummings (1973).

Conner, interview with Cummings (1973).
43.
44.
Speaking of the wide variety of impromptu actions, parades, and performances in the Bay Area
in the late 1950s, Thomas Albright has commented, “In a sense, everything ultimately became a form
of theater.” Albright, Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, pag. 83.
45.
46. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (berkeley:
University of California Press, 1980), pag. 125.
47.
Ibídem. Fried labels this proto-modernist mode of viewing “the pastoral,” and argues that its invited
projection is analogous to the “absorptive” mode of viewing that, he argues, would come to dominate
avant-garde French painting from the age of Diderot through the painting of Edouard Manet and beyond.

D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d

F
r
oh
metro
h

t
t

pag

:
/
/

d
i
r
mi
C
t
.

metro

i
t
.

mi
d
tu
oh
C
t
oh
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d

F
/

d
oh

i
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
1
7
5
3
2
4
5
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
pag
d

b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t

oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3

“It has to do with the theater”

131

materialist, grimy and real, with vision figured as penetration. The former
promises intellectual mastery of an imagined landscape; the latter promises knowl-
edge of the real—but that knowledge is ultimately withheld. Thus do so many of
Conner’s assemblages ﬂout a cardinal trait of Western painting: they refuse to ﬁg-
ure a subject, instead ensnaring vision within their undifferentiated, centerless
ﬁelds, like the gossamer ﬁlaments of a spider web. A ﬁeld without a center brings
to mind the allover compositions of Jackson Pollock, but the model of looking
here differs fundamentally from that of Pollock. Conner’s nylon snarls create no
“space-filling curve of immense complexity,” as Fried would come to find in
Pollock’s work.48 Fried makes this observation in the context of his discussion of
Pollock’s decoupling of line from ﬁguration, in which he sees the elements of
each drip painting “woven together . . . to create an opulent and, in spite of their
diversity, homogenous visual fabric which both invites the act of seeing on the
part of the spectator and yet gives the eye nowhere to rest once and for all.”49
Conner’s ARACHNE traduces any notion of a “homogenous visual fabric” in the
despoiled furrows of its own nylon webbing.

Of course, Fried’s reading of Pollock, invested as it is in a notion of pure
modernist opticality, has received considerable critique. Perhaps most notably,
Rosalind Krauss has offered a powerful reading of Pollock’s painting that con-
trasts sharply with that of Fried.50 For Krauss, Fried and other modernist critics
sublimated Pollock into the modernist canon, reorienting his work from horizon-
tal to vertical and reinventing the painter himself from “howling” Beat to
sophisticated modernist.51 Reading Pollock back through painters who best
grasped the true stakes of his project, such as Cy Twombly, Krauss argues that it is
possible to see the essence of the drip painting come into focus as the grafﬁto, el
indexical mark which is always already distanced from its maker: never “I am
aquí,” but always “I was here”—a mark “delivered over to a future that will be car-
ried on without [the artist’s] presence.” By reading Pollock through Twombly,
Krauss argues that the former’s drip paintings were never “arenas for action,” for
the mirroring of the self, as has often been claimed; bastante, they were the site of a
violent cancellation of the ﬁgure, an abnegation of the self-image.52

Such cancellation—which, después de todo, reinscribes the subject, if in a violently dis-
located form—differs sharply from the approach in Conner’s assemblage. Coming
as it does from outside the ﬁlial tradition that links such artists as Pollock and
Twombly, Conner’s attack on painting differs from the cancellation Krauss teases
out from Twombly’s working through of Pollock. Rather than a cancellation,
Conner’s assemblage stages a ﬂaying, a ritualized sacriﬁce—as evinced by the

48. Michael Fried, “Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella,” in Art
and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pag. 223.
49.
50.
51.
52.

Ibídem.
Krauss, Chapter 6, Optical Unconscious.
Ibídem., pag. 244.
Ibídem., pag. 260.

D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d

F
r
oh
metro
h

t
t

pag

:
/
/

d
i
r
mi
C
t
.

metro

i
t
.

mi
d
tu
oh
C
t
oh
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d

F
/

d
oh

i
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
1
7
5
3
2
4
5
oh
C
t
oh
2
0
0
9
1
2
7
1
1
0
9
pag
d

b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t

oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3

132

OCTUBRE

spilling innards of RATBASTARD, or the totemically shredded nylons of ARACHNE.
These works do not cancel the subject; bastante, they disturb the idea of subjecthood
sí mismo, to the point of annihilation. A radically different theory of mind animates a
work like ARACHNE; its nylon strands veil nothing but its own voided core.

This lack of a core can create a powerful sense of instability, as in ARACHNE,
which communicates a sense of extreme claustrophobic unease despite the
absence of any narrative cues. For if, following Fried, in traditional landscape the
eye mounts an idealized journey from point A to point B, and in Pollock the
observer’s eye dances endlessly across the painting’s ribbons of pigment (o
lingers over the graffiti-like indexical marks of the absent artistic subject, como
asserted by Krauss), in ARACHNE there is no place for the observer whatsoever; No
escape, no refuge is on offer. Returning to Conner’s comments vis-à-vis OVEN, este
is indeed a form of theatrical participation, but one with a brutal, even cruel, lack
of resolution—something like a “painting of cruelty,” to borrow and bend
Antonin Artaud’s well-known formulation.

Like the “ratbastard”—the societal reject, which cannot rise to the level of
subjecthood, but rather scurries below the threshold of semiotic (re)cognition—
ARACHNE offers, at its core, nothing but a void. Wrestling with the ramiﬁcations
of this absent core would remain the point of contention throughout Conner’s
engagement with assemblage, working itself out in manifold ways.53 In case after
caso, the artist’s assemblages stage their own eccentric theatrical encounters, forc-
ing a mode of viewing in which the viewer must compulsively pursue what remains
forever absent: solid ground. Conner often remarked that he never considered his
assemblages ﬁnished; bastante, he would just stop at some point. For ARACHNE,
DARK BROWN, and Conner’s many other Ratbastards from the late 1950s and
early ’60s, one might say the same for looking at them.