A Paletuft of Grass

(No date). A unique collaborative work of art by Conner & McClure, signed by the poet & artist, formerly in the collection of Donald Allen. In 1959, Bruce Conner (b. 1933) & Michael McClure proposed that "artists and poets repudiate the term beat and call themselves 'rat bastards' instead, and they announced the formation of the Rat Bastard Protective Society, the name intended as a playful allusion to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Membership of the Rat Bastards included Joan Brown, Jay DeFeo, Defeo's husband Wally Hedrick, and Wallace Berman from Los Angeles. Conner later came to feel imprisoned by the art he produced.... (He) rebelled against the fetishized art commodity by bringing his dealer in New York, ... boxes of found objects simply thrown together without any particular order.... In 1965 Conner 'dropped out' of the art world. For several years he developed the light show concept at the Avalon Ballroom.... He then worked with Dennis Hopper developing motion pictures. He influenced the decor and editing style of Hopper's 1969 film Easy Rider. In 1974 Conner felt that he did not have an aggressive enough personality for Hollywood and returned to exhibition in galleries. He preferred to be a marginalized figure.... When asked for photographs of himself for catalogs or art magazines, he sent pictures of other people." - Richard Candida Smith, Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California (University of California Press, 1995), pp. 168-169, 204. Conner & McClure collaborated on numerous projects, not the least memorable of which was a play entitled "The Authentic Radio Life of Bruce Conner and Snoutburbler", published in Gargoyle Cartoons (Delacorte Press, 1971). The collage is in excellent condition.. CONNER, Bruce.. Original collage by Bruce Conner, 25 1/2" x 13 1/2", featuring hand-written text by McClure on a thin piece of linen which has been glued onto an original black & white wood-cut printed on thin rice-paper which is in turn glued over a sheet of gold foil, mounted on matte board. The collage is in excellent condition.