Research Type
CuratorDate
2016Notes
In late 1977, amid a culture of protest and resistance, Bruce Conner, camera in hand, was at the Mabuhay Gardens, a largely punk rock performance venue in San Francisco’s North Beach. The stage hosted the city’s earliest experimental bands, who brought their unique radicality and rawness to the broader punk rock scene that was exploding in London, New York, and Los Angeles. Conner ran into V. Vale there and quickly became, for the next year, a contributing photographer to Vale’s magazine Search & Destroy (launched with funding from Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg). It was in those pages that RICKY WILLIAMS: SLEEPERS (1978) first appeared. Conner’s Mabuhay photographs are quiet, theatrical compositions framing an active, noisy, energetic scene. One can draw comparisons to his early collage work in the way figures and objects are arranged in each photo, and to his video work, in which he was both documentarian and contrarian.