Bruce Conner
LOOKING GLASS, 1964

Although Conner initially worked with paint and collage, in the late 1950s he began to integrate abandoned and discarded objects in work. Thrift stores and garbage cans offered the artist a cheap source of materials that carried an aura of the past and of individual lives.

In Looking Glass, a dense collage of battered pinups of nude women is juxtaposed with worn women’s stockings, lacy undergarments, and once-elegant shoes in a meditation on male desire, vanity, and mass-marketed ideals of femininity and beauty. Presiding over this unsettled and unsettling construction is a disquieting figure made of stuffed nylon pantyhose and mannequin arms with polished nails, topped by a head formed from a dead blowfish. The scratched, torn, and burned surfaces of the photographs add to the distinct sense of repulsion or frustration conveyed by this work.

Conner’s use of found materials influenced his fellow Northern California artists and inspired a widespread interest in the sculptural style now known as assemblage.

Artwork Info

Artwork title
LOOKING GLASS
Artist name
Bruce Conner
Date created
1964
Classification
sculpture
Medium
Mannequin arms, dried blowfish, painted wood, mirror, fringe, shoe, heart-shaped, cut and pasted printed papers, paint, nylon, fabric, jewelry, beads, string, doll voice box, fur, artificial flowers, feathers, garter clip, tinsel, and metal on Masonite
Dimensions
60 1/2 × 48 × 14 1/2 in. (153.67 × 121.92 × 36.83 cm)
Date acquired
1978
Credit
Collection SFMOMA
Gift of the Modern Art Council
Copyright
© Conner Family Trust, San Francisco / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Permanent URL
https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/78.69
Artwork status
Not on view at this time.

Audio Stories

Sex, desire, and LOOKING GLASS

Show TranscriptHide Transcript

transcripts

NARRATOR: 

Bruce Conner’s LOOKING GLASS reflects an unseemly aspect of the American psyche. Behind the fading fringe that embellishes this collage are objects with female identities. At the top of the piece, Conner has collected layers of old nylon stockings, stained lace, and mannequin appendages. Other items, like a talking doll and a photograph of Marilyn Monroe, are buried beneath the musty garments. In the lower area, below the mantelpiece, is an underworld of tattered soft-core pornography. Curator John Weber.  

 

JOHN WEBER:  

There is an element of voyeurism in the piece, and I think in that sense the piece has a kind of tension in it. It’s about looking, and it’s about questioning looking. It’s about dressing up, or wanting someone else to dress up for you, and it’s about a degree of discomfort with that desire.  

 

NARRATOR:  

This quintessential 1964 Conner piece, once owned by actor Dennis Hopper, is the last and largest sculptural collage the artist made.  

 

WEBER:  

He felt that people had begun to think of him as Bruce Conner, the collage artist who works with nylon stockings, and that that’s what they were expecting to see when they went to a Bruce Conner show. And so after doing this last kind of magnum opus, he quit collages, and he’s never gone back to this kind of work. 

Read MoreCollapse

Español

普通话

Other Works by Bruce Conner

See other works by Bruce Conner

Please note that artwork locations are subject to change, and not all works are on view at all times.

Only a portion of SFMOMA's collection is currently online, and the information presented here is subject to revision. Please contact us at collections@sfmoma.org to verify collection holdings and artwork information. If you are interested in receiving a high resolution image of an artwork for educational, scholarly, or publication purposes, please contact us at copyright@sfmoma.org.

This resource is for educational use and its contents may not be reproduced without permission. Please review our Terms of Use for more information.