View online November 5–20, 2016
Bruce Conner, AMERICA IS WAITING (still), 1981; courtesy Conner Family Trust, San Francisco; © Conner Family Trust, San Francisco
This varied and humorous work uses edits and juxtapositions of found footage to explore the ambiguities of consumer culture in a way that undermines the mythology of the American hero. The soundtrack, a song from David Byrne and Brian Eno’s album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981), features a sample of San Francisco talk radio host Ray Taliaferro of KGO 810 saying, “Well now, you can’t blame the people—blame the government! Take it in again! Again! Again! America is waiting for a message of some kind or another.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, what America is waiting for remains unclear in Conner’s film. Byrne and Eno approached the newly launched music video channel MTV about airing this work as part of its programming, but this proposal was not approved.
