Feature: A Deck of Cards by Bruce Conner and Michael McClure
The artist and filmmaker Bruce Conner (1933–2008) and the writer and filmmaker Michael McClure (1932–2020) were lifelong friends. They attended high school and college together in Kansas, and both settled in San Francisco. There, they became significant figures in the city’s countercultural art scene, and collaborated on projects that married McClure’s conceptual poetry-making practice with Conner’s experiments in visual art.
In 1975 Conner and McClure began working on a deck of cards for creating poetry from random strings of words. Each card was decorated with an inkblot drawing by Conner on one side and an inkblot border on the other, with two words selected by McClure pasted in the space within the border. The project delighted in chance, both in the inkblots––created through a meticulous process involving many tiny folds––and the poems that would be produced by laying out the cards.
Additional words McClure selected for the cards
Conner was interested in the inkblot as a kind of alternative signature, an idea that was manifest in a type of Victorian autograph book that transformed the writer’s signature into a ghostly inkblot. Conner owned one of these books, titled The Ghost of My Friends, and he incorporated it into an assemblage called GREAT EXPECTATIONS (1995).
Conner also made use of a rubber signature stamp that allowed him to “sign” his works. The stamp was eventually incorporated into an assemblage.
The inkblot deck is similar to a collaboration the artists produced in 1970 called CARDS. A set of twenty-five square cards were printed with a lithograph after one of Conner’s felt-tip mandala drawings on one side, and four random words selected by McClure on the other. Like DECK, the cards were designed to be used to create conceptual poetry. Produced in an edition of fifty, CARDS is a limited edition multiple.
DECK was also intended to be produced as an edition using lithographic prints after Conner’s inkblots, but the project was never completed. The unique drawings now exist as small stand-alone works of art, and a selection of these are available in the gallery’s viewing room.
All images (with the exception of the signature inkblot) © Conner Family Trust, San Francisco, California