Bruce Conner arrived in San Francisco in 1957, soon finding
himself part of the city’s burgeoning avant-garde Beat culture of artists, writers, and poets. His first solo shows in San Francisco
in 1958 and 1959 featured paintings, drawings, prints, collages,
assemblages, and sculpture. He later added photography, films,
and printmaking to his repertoire, inviting speculation that he was avoiding the art world’s inclination to identify every
artist with a style and biographical myth. This was certainly in
keeping with his lifelong resistance to and sometimes obsession
with self-identity (famously using a thumbprint in lieu of a
signature and later employing pseudonyms: “Emily Feather,”
“Diogenes Lucero,” and “Bombhead”). Although he allowed other
artists to make images of him, Conner never made self-portraits. It was not until the 1990s, when he created two engraving
collages, that he treated the subject of an artist’s portrait more
directly. Portrait 1/19/92 depicts a well-dressed nineteenth-
century artist seated at an easel, palette and brushes in hand. His image is framed with engraving fragments depicting stormy
landscapes, rocky outcroppings, and an erupting volcano (echoed
in the image on his canvas). The artist’s head, composed of thick
blocks of rock, has no discernible human features, including eyes.
Instead, cutout images of eyes float in the maelstrom of paint on the palette. Conner was apparently identifying those artists as “blockheads,” with heads “full of rocks,” whose limited artistic
vision emanates solely from the tools of a traditional craft and whose art is based only on imitating nature or history. (Karin Breuer)