Since visiting “It’s All
True,” Bruce Conner’s first full retrospective at the MoMA, I haven’t been able
to stop thinking about “Easter Morning” (2008). The film manages to stand out
from an immense oeuvre (and a packed exhibition space) that spans assemblages
to painting and drawing to film. For the piece, Conner reworked footage from
his 1966 Super 8 film “Easter Morning Raga,” digitalizing the 8mm footage to
expand the images. The result appears like a stop motion picture, with frames
that move in rhythm to the trancelike instrumental chant of Terry Riley’s composition
“In C” (1964). Various lens flares act as a kind of compositional force,
driving the movement of the shots through close-ups of plants, burning candles,
and a nude woman. The humming pace of the cuts work with the sound and the
sometimes blue, sometimes honey amber light to build towards the culminating
feeling that the film has somehow transcended the sum of its parts.
Conner envisioned “Easter
Morning” as a “metaphysical quest for renewal,” and the piece acts as a
triumphant closing act to a retrospective – and a life – filled with anxious
questions about the destructive consequences of human power. The reworked
version manages to both lift away from the sixties-era themes of the original,
as well as act as a significant contrast to the apocalyptic fear dominating the rest of the exhibition. Perhaps
it’s this contrast that, for me, buoys up the memorability of the film. With
his final work, Conner seems to suggest that the best way to resolve a life
filled with a fear of death is to learn to accept it.
BRUCE CONNER: EASTER
MORNING
2008, 8mm/Digital, color/sound, 10min.
Music:
“In C” by Terry Riley
IT’S ALL TRUE
Through October 2
Museum of Modern Art
Organized by the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Co-curated by Stuart Comer,
Chief Curator, Department of Media and Performance Art, The Museum of Modern
Art, New York; Laura Hoptman, Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture,
MoMA; Rudolf Frieling, Curator of Media Arts, SFMOMA; Gary Garrels, The Elise
S. Haas Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture, SFMOMA; with Rachel Federman,
Assistant Curator, Painting and Sculpture, SFMOMA.
While I enjoyed your thoroughness in describing the film that resonated with you the most, I think that it could have been useful to state some other aspects of the exhibition, since it did hold (like you said) works ranging from over fifty years of his paintings, drawings, assemblages and films. In order to give the reader a full sense of the overall feel of the exhibit, even if you only included it in one sentence. Other than that I found the review gave us a great sense of his film and how it engaged the viewer.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your review. The retrospective at The MoMA is wonderfully overwhelming with several rooms of dense anxiety producing work that spans many mediums and decades. It could easily leave a viewer with questions to wrestle with for days and weeks after their visit.
ReplyDeleteI find your description of the show's final work, Easter Morning Raga, to be thorough and sensitive. Death is a reoccuring them in Conner's videos, but acceptance of death only seemed to be present in Easter Morning Raga. I think the feeling of acceptance could be attributed to the color and musical composition as your writing describes.
Overall, I found this review to be engaging, descriptive, and accurate.