Chances are, if you were hip enough to play San Francisco’s Avalon Ballroom in the 1960s – like the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service or Gram Parsons and the Flying Burrito Brothers did – your backdrop was a wall of moving, protoplasmic, psychedelic art.
And more than likely, Bruce Conner was its creator
“He certainly forged a fertile ground in the video and projected art that’s now become fairly common,” says Peter Loughrey, director at Los Angeles Modern Auctions (LAMA). “He really was interested in and pioneered the area long before other artists were aware of the medium.”
Come February 22, LAMA will be auctioning off eight of Conner’s hand-colored slides, used in his psychedelic light shows during the 1967 “Summer of Love” in San Francisco. They’ll be on the market for the first time since they were acquired directly from the artist that year, and Loughrey estimates they’ll fetch between $40,000 and $60,000.
They’re among a number of post-war artists represented in the auction, including Roy Lichtenstein and Lucien Freud. Paintings, sculptures and works on paper from the 1950s onward will be sold. Most are by artists who were reacting to the abstract work of Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock.
“They had developed abstract expressionism to a very refined point, and the younger generation had to think of something new – to create something new,” he says.
The results were Robert Rauschenberg’s combines, Lichtenstein’s pop parodies, Andy Warhol’s excursions into Madison Avenue commercialism – and Bruce Conner’s work in counterculture media.
“He was highly influential on an entire generation of artists emerging in the ‘70s and ‘80s – and even today,” he says. “Yves Saint Lauren just released its newest line of clothing using a lot of his work as applied to their fashion.”
Fashion, art and psychedelia up here in 2014?
“It’s really kind of shocking,” he says. “You’d think someone with a big name like that would align with Warhol, so to align around Bruce Conner is pretty fascinating – but it also works pretty well.”
While it’s true that Conner and all those bands are now long gone, their music and art are still living and breathing.
[slideshow id=1325]
