EASTER MORNING

2008 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

Bruce Conner

location: San Francisco, California
year born: 1933
gender: male
nationality: American
home town: McPherson, Kansas

Unlike many of his earlier films which often present poignant critiques of mass media and its deleterious effects on American culture, EASTER MORNING , Conner’s final video work before his death in 2008, constitutes a far more meditative filmic essay in which a limited amount of images turn into compelling, almost hypnotic visual experience. The video presents us with a reinterpretation of footage from his unreleased avant-garde film, Easter Morning Raga , from 1966. In contrast to his more famous pieces like A Movie (1958) and Crossroads (1976) which are juxtapositions of fragments from newsreels, soft-core pornography, and B movies, the images in EASTER MORNING serve as a reinterpretation of footage. Here the artist expands the images in duration, gauge, and frame rate, which results in an enigmatic visual transcendence, or “imagelessness,” and distances the viewers from their preconceptions of what they are watching. Accompanied by rhythmical music, the collision of images in EASTER MORNING is not only testament to Conner’s ability to balance order and chaos, control and chance, but further reveals his abiding interest in alternative ways of seeing and experiencing.


Bruce Conner was undoubtedly one of the key figures of America’s avant-garde art scene since his work emerged in the late 1950s. Affiliated with the beat community, he was overtly opposed to the academic establishment and worked freely in a variety of media, including drawing, sculpture, painting, collage, photography, and assemblage. However, Conner is most recognized for his films in which he created a unique visual montage through the skillful and pioneering editing of found footage.


Colors:



Nuevo Dragon City
© » KADIST

Sergio De La Torre

2008

Nuevo Dragon City is a reenactment of a historical event from 1927 in which six Chinese were either trapped or voluntarily hid themselves inside a building in northern Mexico...

This is not in Spanish
© » KADIST

Sergio De La Torre

2011

This is not in Spanish looks at the ways in which the Chinese population in Mexico navigates the daily marginalization they encounter there...

Scene I am Cuba
© » KADIST

Felipe Dulzaides

2006

I Am Cuba— “Soy Cuba” in Spanish; “Ya Kuba” in Russian—is a Soviet/Cuban film produced in 1964 by director Mikhail Kalatozov at Mosfilm...

Lesbian Beds
© » KADIST

Tammy Rae Carland

2002

Carland’s series of large-format photographs Lesbian Beds (2002) depicts beds that have been recently vacated...

Taiwan WMD - Uranium
© » KADIST

James T. Hong

2012

Taiwan WMD (Taiwan and Weapons of Mass Destruction) is part of a long-term research started in early 2010 on the history and aftermath effects of Japanese biological and chemical warfare in China during WWII, as well as the unknown history of Taiwan’s nuclear program...

Lessons of the Blood
© » KADIST

James T. Hong

2010

Lessons of the Blood by James T...

Jackass
© » KADIST

Ari Marcopoulos

2008

In Jackass (2008) by Ari Marcopoulos, his two sons, Cairo and Ethan, are pictured relaxing in a disheveled bedroom in their Sonoma home...

Strange Culture
© » KADIST

Lynn Hershman Leeson

2007

Lynn Hershman Leeson’s genre-bending documentary Strange Culture tells the story of how one man’s personal tragedy turns into persecution by a paranoid, conservative, and overzealous government...

Untitled (Wheelchair drawing)
© » KADIST

Edgar Arceneaux

2006

Untitled (Wheelchair Drawing) is a ten-foot photo transfer of the image of a wheelchair with burning embers in its seat...

Untitled (Shuffle)
© » KADIST

Wallace Berman

1969

While Untitled (Shuffle) presents the same formal characteristics as the rest of Berman’s verifax collages, this constellation of specific images inside the radio’s frames—the Star of David, Hebrew characters, biblical animals—have Jewish symbolism and attest to the artist’s lasting obsession with the kabala...

Burrito Bay
© » KADIST

George Kuchar

2009

Burrito Bay is a video by George Kuchar that follows the format of a diary or travelogue centered on a tropical trip to Acapulco, Mexico...

Person with Pillow: Desire, Lust, Fate
© » KADIST

John Baldessari

1991

The voids in Baldessari’s painted photographs are simultaneously positive and negative spaces, both additive and subtractive...

Green Box
© » KADIST

Ari Marcopoulos

1998

A photograph of a tin box full of marijuana simply titled Green Box, speaks to the constantly changing status of the substance–once taboo or illicit, now a symbol of a growing industry in Northern California...

Untitled 6/10 i-xxii
© » KADIST

Nathaniel Dorsky

2010

Dorsky’s pieces included in the Kadist Collection are small still photographs from twelve of his most important films...

Mom
© » KADIST

Sadie Benning

2017

In borrowing and subverting images from popular culture, Sadie Benning exposes the media’s role in constructing false and oppressive stereotypes of women, with regard to gender and sexual identity...

White Angel
© » KADIST

Fran Herndon

1962

Working independently, Herndon experimented at the forefront of a now-canonical method—appropriation—by painting additions into found images from magazines such as Life and Sports Illustrated in a way that imbues the resulting works with mythical significance...

Deredemiux
© » KADIST

Kadar Brock

2007

Kadar Brock creates dynamic abstract paintings that are born from a process of painting, scraping, priming, sanding, and painting again...