Eating certain mushrooms induces a kind of intense but illegitimate knowledge, one that strikes like lightning and operates beyond everyday consciousness and academic rationality to rapidly illuminate something that would otherwise take years of reflection or meditation to acquire: the knowledge attributed to countercultures. In 2008, when the Museum Ludwig in Cologne mounted an exhibition on art and counterculture in San Francisco from 1955 to 1968, it was titled after a film by Bruce Conner: “Looking For Mushrooms”1. Not only because of this film, but in light of his entire body of work, Conner personified the blend of bohemian culture, new forms of artistic production, an extreme degree of social and cultural mobility, and highly individual artistic expression widely associated with San Francisco. He exemplified many aspects of the scene: poetic, political, highly individual, and critical responses; found-footage film; strange documentations; music of the most disparate kinds; enigmatic surrealist drawings; concentrated meditation practices; and frivolous provocations.
Yet the film “Looking For Mushrooms” (1959-67/1996) is in many respects an exception in Conner’s work. It is in color, it openly refers to drugs, and it features a Beatles song (“Tomorrow Never Knows”) that enunciates something like a program for what one might call the “mystical realization” for which San Francisco stood in those years and that also plays a central role in Conner’s work: “Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream!” Conner was rarely this unambiguous – not because he was trying to hide but because “mystical realization” for him was always connected with a dialectical optical or figure-ground illusion in which, in the detachment from the world of the switched-off reasoning mind, a particularly clear realization exists that is also politically rational.
Conner always sought to defend his work against reduction to the purely local. His subjects, slogans, and main pictorial elements – from the mushroom cloud to Marilyn Monroe, from found advertisements and elements of everyday culture to pointed references to dance, movement, and pop music – are more universal components of a Western culture in transition to globalization than attempts to play on the stereotype of a liberated San Francisco in its golden age. Conner also rejected the notion that he was a pioneer of the music video or even invented the genre, as some of his contemporaries have maintained.2
Conner was a psychedelic and a realist in equal measure. As the technological arts of the twentieth century began to usher in a new era of sound and image, he began to perforate the sphere of art with little pinpricks of the real. And yet for Conner, this reality that seizes and assaults us like children who do not yet think in interpretive schemas was always also a form of mystical transgression, situated somewhere between the epiphanies of aesthetic experience (which remain in the realm of reflection) and the emphatic interruptions of everyday consciousness afforded by psychedelic drugs and ritual-religious disciplines such as the mushrooms of his title. Although mystical experiences can often be described as a feeling of being overwhelmed by the reality of the real, realistic and mystical conceptions of art are antagonists because of the social and antisocial aims with which they are associated. This is different for Conner in a particular way (although he never held the concept of reality in especially high regard) but in a more general sense it is also different for historical practices between poetry and jazz that are fittingly associated with San Francisco, as well as for the concepts and traditions of a politics of music developed in certain jazz, rock, and minimal music milieus in the first three decades after World War II: the drones and phase-shifted pieces of La Monte Young and Terry Riley, spiritualist free jazz, and the new rock music of the East and West Coasts, which had a great deal in common despite the cultural opposition between the sunglass-wearers from New York (the Velvet Underground) and the friendly hippie improvisers from San Francisco (the Grateful Dead).3
One of the bases of psychedelic aesthetics is the fundamental decontextualizing of perceptual objects under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs or similar states engendered by other means. The strengthening of the senses eclipses the everyday meaning and knowledge of, for example, a coffee cup or a shoe to such an extent that its pure form pushes to the fore almost completely unhindered. That pure form then seems either ridiculous and funny or sublime; often, the impression alternates between the two extremes. In psychedelic poster art or in Art Nouveau-influenced album-cover graphics connected with psychedelics, these extremes are mediated by the use of rich ornamentation: ornaments are the classic connecting link between the meaningful form of a useful object and its abstract or pure form. But they are not charged or funny or full of tension; they pacify the contrast.
Another technique – the use of strobe lights or their effects – attacks the continuity of perception itself, as paradigmatically demonstrated by Conner’s contemporary Tony Conrad in his film The Flicker (1965). In many of his films, Conner also worked with flickering light effects that juxtapose extreme degrees of brightness in fractions of a second, so that the continuity of the visual context is lost. These are also moments in which there is nothing to be seen: the screen no longer appears as a space of animated illusion but as a determining source for interpreting the real world of the auditorium. The strobe effect also relates to the primal scene of understanding symbols, Sigmund Freud’s fort-da game, which was theoretically foundational for Jacques Lacan; it is used to teach very young children not just that there is a difference between presence and absence but also that what is absent can be made present by a specific representative, a symbol. The degree of presence of what is shown (and signified) by film and the illumination and stimulation of the viewer is the shared preoccupation of mystics and realists, as well as of those who combine the two, like Conner.
One particular dialectical image – that of the atomic blast – combines overly bright illumination with the reality of the illuminated public and removes light from its abstract role as a filmmaking tool, linking it directly to one of the central aspects of the human condition in the postwar period. The image (or more accurately, images) of the atomic blast is a leitmotif in Conner’s cinematic output, referring allegorically to a particular type of truth and insight that was important not just for him but for an entire generation of mostly American artists: the realization that, in contrast to the European tradition and the debate between poésie pure and poésie engagée, which took place in France at roughly the same time as the Beat movement, the sudden, mystical light of a realization and the latter’s political character are not opposites.
Mystical insight does not shed light on political realities incidentally: by its very nature it is opposed to false representation of the world in mass culture and mass media, and by religious and cultural institutions. By dint of that opposition, it stands on the side of a higher political truth. This notion is prefigured by U.S. traditions of mystical anarchism. But in the 1950s, the decade that shaped Conner poetically and artistically, it found a new expression in Beat culture’s opposition to the anti-Communist America of the McCarthy and Eisenhower era. Conner’s friend Allen Ginsberg is perhaps the most famous exponent; he explicitly championed the connection between a mystical-spiritualist and an anticapitalist, left-wing lifestyle and “knowledge style”.
In Conner’s case, however, this is more complicated, since the practice he developed of working with found material seems precisely to accept ideology’s images, or at least to accord them relevance. What may be his best-known found-footage work, “A Movie” (1958), produced at the beginning of his career, surveys the entire repertoire of cinema’s first half-century: acrobatics and other sensations; war; chase scenes and other depictions of movement and speed; and sex. The use of narrative structures to organize these moving images is presented as an undertaking both superficial and irrelevant. The film begins with the “End of Part Four” and includes other jokes involving ordinal numbers. Conner’s classic has been repeatedly compared to other experimental films and found-footage works. From today’s perspective, however, it is much more plausible to regard “A Movie” as an early version of Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-98), particularly in the context of the summary of that film’s eight episodes in the first twenty minutes of Godard’s Notre musique (Our Music, 2004): a headlong journey through typologies of visual attraction in which the seemingly dynamic and libidinous structure of the desire connected with the moving image appears as directly linked to concrete content. The way cowboys and Indians on horseback – as empty forms removed from their narrative context – generate a highly specific form of moving battle and also have a meaning is a phenomenon that can also be seen in Conner; indeed, the association of the flash of light with the nuclear explosion is even more fundamental and more powerful.
If such a simultaneous insight into reality links to political discovery in a deeply anti-ideological sense, then how is this aided by the images (and sounds) of the very same mass culture that – to remain within Buddhist and mystical metaphors of cognition – is constantly weaving the veil of Maya and hence working to prevent realization and spread ideology? The commonality between mystical realization and enlightening political insight into manipulative images and narration relies on an idea of false consciousness that involves two misconceptions: one of the political situation, the other regarding one’s own (finite) existence. Consumerism, in this model of false consciousness, prevents not only the perception of capitalism – which produces it and slides it in front of its own contradictions – but also the perception of one’s own personal physical and psychological existence, which is sedated by superficial gratifications.
And yet these very same movie and newsreel images that propagate the normality of Fordist consumer culture and that Conner uses in his found-footage films offer the only possibility for referring in film – ex negativo – to a realm behind it, to something these images conceal. It would be a mistake to seek to show the real itself. Instead, the fracture within the ideological text must develop an epiphanic impact. This idea of cinematic montage differs from those expressed in dadaist collages or Soviet ideas of filmic montage as an instrument of enlightenment, in that there is no switching from one context to another (for example, the profane realm of advertising and the lofty sphere of high art). In the Dada era, the individual contexts and image types were still more easily identifiable. In Conner’s work, by contrast, the entire procedure is directed against a false whole that appears to Beat thinking, as well as to the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School of the time, as a totality.4 Hence it must be contested at the level of any and all continuities.
A major problem of such struggles – and again, this was better understood in the United States on the eve of the emergence of Pop art than it was in Frankfurt – is the advance decision they involve. Can we know – and should we know – that movie and television images represent something false? Is this even an accurate description? A parade of film and TV clips that recognizably seek to document a truth value as something else or in reference to something else would be dull. The effort to denounce what is always already false about ideological images spells the demise of critical art, and as counterpropaganda it is governed by the same logic as the cultural-industrial production of ideology itself. Instead, the goal – and here the Buddhist metaphor is helpful – is to show the veil as veil; and this of course means first in its bizarre beauty and second in its lack of connection to reality.
At the same time, however – Conner was particularly clear-sighted about this – the process of sticking images together always results in a continuity of some kind. We are accustomed to experiencing any series of images as meaningful and given; at the very least, we assume that there is an intact subjectivity and intentionality responsible for their sequence. Hence there can be no absolute avoidance of continuity; but perhaps there can be an active, purposeful design. For the gulf between the television images becomes all the larger – the gap that perhaps lets a hint of reality through yawns all the wider – the more that continuity is not just the result of the sequence of the images and the black and ultrabright inserts, the more another continuity is created: that of music.
In “Cosmic Ray” (1961), the first of his films in which music operates in a pivotal way, Conner used what is probably Ray Charles’s most famous hit, “What’d I Say”, a staple of classic soul and R&B. The song is a product of the culture industry as well as the absolute opposite, the product of a social community in the grip of historical experiences: the African American community on the eve of the civil rights era. In all its power and charm, however, it stands for more than the alternation between appearance and reality. The thing that becomes true and available to experience in this music is also what Conner sought to accomplish for the flow of found images: in their new combination, the corrupted mass media images also recover their nature as photographic images. They once again become photographed, filmed images that can shed their customary function. Thus, the terrible beauty of atomic blasts changes from the terrible fact that their beauty is used for trivializing and ideological propaganda to the actual but mysterious beauty of an event that puts the existence of human beings on the planet in question. Similarly, in “Marilyn Times Five” (1968-73), the fake Marilyn from a cheap 1940s stag movie becomes the true Marilyn, on one hand because she is musicalized by repetition against the conventional narration, and on the other because the excerpt’s repetition enables the cheaper production values of the film from which the found material is taken to fortify the element of photographic materiality against the cultural-industrial myth. The material from the Kennedy assassination in “Report” (1963-67) functions in a similar way.
To return to our opening question: How could Conner’s practice make use of such disparate musical worlds? The preliminary answer is that this practice took a wide variety of forms. For example, Conner, whose mandala drawings and other works were used by Terry Riley as album covers for his releases on the Cortical Foundation’s “Organ of Corti” series5, worked with the famous minimal music pioneer at a time when the status of the images had already gained a certain clarity and no longer represented assemblages of seemingly heterogeneous material. In “Crossroads” (1976), Conner’s most famous work involving original images of U.S. nuclear tests, Riley’s music is employed in classically dramatic fashion. Also participating is Patrick Gleeson, known for his electronic contributions to the electrified jazz-rock of the 1970s (by Herbie Hancock, Eddie Henderson, Lenny White, and others). Here the music supports a gesture that already operates beyond the dialectical “tipping points” that are the life blood of “A Movie”. It may be that the images’ credibility had effectively been restored by the cleansing preparatory work of the collage-like pieces.
By contrast, the tipping points and their dialectical dance in “A Movie” benefit from the composition “Pini di Roma” by Ottorino Respighi, which already sounded like typical movie music before Conner used it, having been employed with conviction in Disney films and with ambivalence by Kenneth Anger in “Fireworks” (1947). This music is superficially eventful and good at connecting things; yet it exposes its illusory character through its overly vital and effervescent opulence. Between the exuberance that helps to penetrate to the truthfulness of the images in “A Movie”; the power of Ray Charles in “Cosmic Ray” (and its reworking as an installation, “Three Screen Ray”, 2006); and the rapt concentration of “Crossroads” or of “Easter Morning Raga” (1966), which is devoted to Indian music and was also reworked as “Easter Morning” (2008), in which raga is replaced by Riley’s minimal classic “In C”, lie Conner’s works with dancer and singer Toni Basil. With “Breakaway” (1966), Conner for the first time inverted the principle of borrowing from music an alternate vehicle for stabilizing or strengthening sequences of images; here the aim is to align the music (Basil’s hit song of the same name) with images of his own that go together with the dance and performance of the protagonist.6
This development also paralleled changes in the counterculture between the early and late 1960s: from the abstract experiments with expanded media at the San Francisco Tape Music Center, to Conner’s involvement in psychedelic light shows at the Avalon Ballroom, which were still primarily abstract but were built around rock improvisation more than electronic experimentation, and finally to the gradual shift of attention to the musicians themselves as people and their performance. In its effect on Conner’s cinematic notions of rhythm, the innovative blending of classical modernist elements with rock and hippie movements in Toni Basil’s choreography is not unlike the impression made on him earlier by Ray Charles and R&B. Also, it was ultimately Basil who introduced Conner to artists from the new scene at the end of the following decade, especially Devo, for whom he composed a film like a music video for the song “Mongoloid”.
In the late 1970s, Conner, who was so closely linked to the development of the San Francisco counterculture from the Beat days onward, who was close friends with leading figures like Allen Ginsberg and even closer friends with Michael McClure through the expanded arts phenomenon of the early 1960s and the hippie culture of later in the decade, took a series of photographs at San Francisco’s punk club Mabuhay Gardens that first appeared in the famous punk fanzine Search and Destroy.7 In these photographs, he was not in search of the typical protagonists of a new San Francisco subculture, and he was clearly not a participant, as he had been in the earlier movement. Some of the groups he photographed were L.A. bands like Negative Trend or U.X.A., while others were local celebrities like the Mutants, who were unknown outside San Francisco. The best known of the local bands – from the Dead Kennedys to Tuxedomoon – do not appear in these photographs, but the great New York band Suicide does (it was artistically related in spirit). Conner was not interested in producing a survey, but rather – as in his work with Basil – an astonished focus on human possibilities emerging unexpectedly, in this case from an aggressive negation of the entire countercultural prehistory for which San Francisco was famous and with which Conner himself was so intimately linked. They are all live photographs without any special choreography, by-products of performative abandon, not high points but found objects apparently discovered by a gaze that thought it had found something like a new species in a setting where one could no longer count on making such discoveries in the late 1970s: the stages of rock clubs.
Devo was an art-punk band, and they knew what they had in Conner. They were familiar with his work. But through them, he too gained entry to the emerging world of punk and post-punk culture, ultimately producing two films for a project that did musically almost exactly what he himself had done in many of his films: use found material to produce a commentary on that material. In this project, however – My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by David Byrne and Brian Eno – the focus is not just on the found object as a secondary artifact that is interesting because it has already made a detour through the sphere of circulation. It is also on what a recording picks up before any interpretation, ideology, or mass-cultural exploitation. Byrne, the leader of the Talking Heads, and the band’s producer, Brian Eno, had retreated to make an album with a number of other musicians and rearranged musical found objects that were primarily recorded from global radio. Their aim was to study a particular ideology, the various forms of organized rituals in and around music that the two musicians encountered. Here Conner returned with special virtuosity to elements familiar from his early works: the flickering of light and dark, strong white light, suns, abstract elements from didactic films completely devoid of context, industrial and other physical marks on film. In short, he activated the musical elements of his rhythmic found-footage strategy, but not his earlier play with meaning, truth, and ideology. That play could be safely left to the musical project, which, as Byrne and Eno themselves have explained, had learned from Conner what it means to work with found material; or as they say in the liner notes for the 2006 reissue: “His work was sampling before that word existed, as was this record.“8 It is telling nonetheless that the musical project also takes up the central question Conner consistently asked: What is the connection between interruption, abruptness, the loss or switching of contexts, and religious or mystical forms of insight? And how can these moments of fortunate interruption or loss of context be preserved within a different continuity?
- See Barbara Engelbach, Friderike Wappler, and Hans Winkler, Looking for Mushrooms: Beat Poets, Hippies, Funk, Minimal Art, San Francisco 1955-1968, exh. cat. (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2008). ↩︎
- In an interview for a video on the making of the music video for Devo’s “Mongoloid”, Toni Basil relates that Conner would get “cranky” whenever he was credited with having invented the music video. See “Bruce Conner: MONGOLOID, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2013”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fzq_4G60A58. ↩︎
- For example, both bands – the Grateful Dead and the Velvet Underground – were previously called the Warlocks, before they came up with the names under which they became famous. ↩︎
- Theodor W. Adorno, “The Whole Is the False”, in Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005), 50. ↩︎
- See Terry Riley, Olson III and Poppy Nogoods All Night Flight (Cortical Foundation, 1999 and 1996, respectively). ↩︎
- Conner started work on “Breakaway” in October 1964; Basil recorded the song “Breakaway” in 1966. ↩︎
- See Bruce Conner: Mabuhay Gardens, exh. cat. (Düsseldorf: NRW-Forum Kultur und Wirtschaft, 2006). ↩︎
- David Byrne and Brian Eno, “The Making of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts”, liner notes in CD booklet (EMI Virgin, 2006). ↩︎