A key figure in the San Francisco Beat scene in the late 1950s, Mr. Conner first became known for his assemblages made from women's nylon stockings, parts of furniture, broken dolls, fur, costume jewelry, paint, photographs and candles. These works, created between 1957 and 1964, had the aggressive appearance of avant-garde sculpture but at the same time seemed old and musty, like broken-down junk found in a forgotten attic or props for a scary Hitchcock-like movie. They were a vehement rejection of the optimistic, consumerist spirit of mainstream American society.
In the late 1950s, Mr. Conner also began an influential parallel career as an experimental filmmaker. Under the influence of his friend and fellow filmmaker Stan Brakhage, he created collages of found and new footage.
Mr. Conner's first and best-known film, A Movie (1958), is a 12-minute sequence of clips from old movies, newsreels and other sources set to lushly romantic music. Intermittently funny, erotic, horrifying and tragic, it is a wry commentary on the conventions and clichs of commercial media and a poetic, alternative vision of what filmmaking can be. (Some credit Mr. Conner as a major influence on MTV-style music videos.) In 1991, A Movie was selected for preservation by the United States National Film Registry at the Library of Congress.
After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Mr. Conner began work on a film called Report (1967), which consisted of images and sounds taken from television coverage of the event interspersed with commercial imagery. Another film regarded as an avant-garde classic is Crossroads, (1977) in which official footage of a hydrogen bomb explosion on Bikini Atoll replays repeatedly at increasingly slower speeds to mesmerizing and paradoxically beautiful effect.
America Is Waiting, (1982) a three-minute film Mr. Conner made in collaboration with the musicians David Byrne and Brian Eno, is one of several of his films that can be seen on YouTube.com.
A restlessly inventive and unpredictable artist who avoided typecasting and irascibly resisted the demands of the commercial gallery system, Mr. Conner worked in a surprising variety of media and styles from the 1960s on. He created intricate mandala drawings using felt-tip pens and, using cut-up old engravings, did collages reminiscent of works by Max Ernst. In the 1970s, he made ghostly photograms of his own body, and from the late 70s on he produced delicate ink-blot drawings -- grids of small, Rorschach-like shapes executed by blotting small puddles of ink between the folds of accordion-pleated sheets of paper.
