June 22–29: Screening of Bruce Conner’s LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS

Presented by Paula Cooper Gallery and Camden Art Centre, stream Conner’s acclaimed film throughout the week of June 22nd.

Bruce Conner, LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS (Riley Version), 1959–67/1996, 16mm to 35mm blow-up, color, sound, 14.5min. Digitally restored, 2016. Music by Terry Riley: "Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band," 1968 - BMA - Publisher: Ancient Word Music

Bruce Conner’s fourteen-and-a-half-minute film, LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS (1959–67/1996), is one of the first in which the artist used footage that he shot himself rather than previously existing clips of found footage. Turning the camera onto his own personal world, the film shows scenes of his life with Jean Conner as they wandered the streets of San Francisco and embarked on a series of mushroom-hunting excursions through the Mexican countryside.

The weeklong screening of LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS coincides with an online exhibition organized by the Camden Art Centre in London, titled “The Botanical Mind: Art, Mysticism and The Cosmic Tree.” The presentation brings together the work of Bruce Conner and over 50 other artists to investigate the ongoing significance of the plant kingdom to human life, consciousness and spirituality. View the exhibition here.

Paula Cooper Gallery is also presenting work by Bruce Conner in a viewing room of his 1975 DECK drawings. Conner’s iterative and peripatetic approach to these works is reflective of his broader practice and collage mentality. As in LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS as well as his other films, drawings, prints, and sculpture, an artwork might look like this today and tomorrow look like that. Visit the Viewing Room here.

LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS (1959-1967) is a psychedelic travelogue film that documents a series of “trips” through rural Mexico and urban America. Conner combined street views of San Francisco shot in the late 1950s with scenes of rural Oaxaca captured during his “mushroom-hunting” excursions between 1961 and 1962, when Bruce and his wife, Jean, were living in Mexico City. On at least one of these trips, the Conners were joined by Timothy Leary, the ex-Harvard professor and soon-to-be leading proponent of psychedelic drugs. Whereas an earlier version of the film was silent and played on a loop, in 1967 Conner added a rock ’n’ roll soundtrack, The Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” off their 1966 album Revolver. Conner often noted that this version of LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS (along with COSMIC RAY) was rented by advertising agencies, which were presumably interested in his use of rapid-fire editing and strobe effects to generate visual disorientation and subliminal messages. In 1996, Conner revised the film once again: he used an optical printer to expand its length from three to fourteen-and-a-half-minutes, and added a new soundtrack, Terry Riley's "Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band," to create a more meditative, but no less hypnotizing, iteration of the mushroom hunt.

—– Johanna Gosse, Art Historian