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

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Sergio De La Torre

2011

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© » KADIST

Mike Kelley

1996

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Burrito Bay
© » KADIST

George Kuchar

2009

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Scene I am Cuba
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Felipe Dulzaides

2006

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Strange Culture
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Lynn Hershman Leeson

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Hydroforce
© » KADIST

Liz Cohen

2011

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Forest Gathering N.2
© » KADIST

Gregory Crewdson

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© » KADIST

Doug Aitken

2009

The version of Frontier acquired by the Kadist Collection consists of a single-channel video, adapted from the monumental installation and performance that Aitken presented in Rome, by the Tiber River, in 2009...

White Angel
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Fran Herndon

1962

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Untitled (Shuffle)
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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...

Mom
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Sadie Benning

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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...

Untitled (Construction)
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Larry Bell

2007

Untitled (Construction) recalls the series of glass cubes that gained Bell international recognition in the 1960s...

Lesbian Beds
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Tammy Rae Carland

2002

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

Stanley "Tom" Durrell, Tinsmith
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Sharon Lockhart

2008

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Gary Gilpatrick, Insulator
© » KADIST

Sharon Lockhart

2008

Lockhart’s film Lunch Break investigates the present state of American labor through a close look at the everyday life of the workers at the Bath Iron Works shipyard—a private sector of the U...

Victory at Sea
© » KADIST

Colter Jacobsen

2007

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The Black Canyon Deep Semantic Image Segments
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Trevor Paglen

2020

The Black Canyon Deep Semantic Image Segments by Trevor Paglen merges traditional American landscape photography (sometimes referred as ‘frontier photography’ for sites located in the American West) with artificial intelligence and other technological advances such as computer vision...

No Title
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Félix González-Torres

1992

Behind the simplicity and beauty of this untitled photograph of a brilliantly-colored flowerbed by Félix González-Torres are two remarkable stories of love, loss, and resilience...

VertiGhost
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Lynn Hershman Leeson

2017

Using the seminal 1958 film Vertigo as a launchpad, Lynn Hershman Leeson explores the blurred lines between fact and fantasy in VertiGhost , a film commissioned by the Fine Arts Museums in San Francisco...