Auf Einladung von Prof. Arnold Dreyblatt / Prof. Stephan Sachs

Bruce Conner’s Atomic Sublime
San Francisco-based artist Bruce Conner made his first experimental film, A MOVIE, in 1958, at the height of national anxiety about the atomic threat. Over the following decades, his films addressedthe cultural and political fallout of the Cold War. This talk examines Conner’s filmic output over two and a half decades, from his pioneering works of „found footage“ montage, to his participation in psychedelic expanded cinema performance, to his more intimate portraits of female friends and later interest in music video. It argues that these works are expressions of the „atomic sublime“, an aesthetic that captures the paradoxical experience of „terrible beauty“ that is generated by witnessing an atomic explosion. By attending closely to the historical and cultural context of Conner’s apocalyptic cinema, this talk proposes a reconsideration of postwar American art’s engagement with the aesthetics of „the sublime“.
Johanna Gosse is a historian of modern & contemporary art specializing in postwar experimental film and media.
From 2015-2017, she was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University in New York. In the forthcoming academic year, she will be Scholar-in-Residence in the Center for Western Civilization, Thought, and Policy and the Department of Art & Art History at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her writing has appeared in various journals (Camera Obscura, Art Journal, Moving Image Review & Art Journal), edited collections, and exhibition catalogues, and her current book project on the American artist Ray Johnson was awarded an Arts Writers Grant from Creative Capital and the Andy Warhol Foundation in 2015. In January, 2017 she lectured on Ray Johnson at the Muthesius in the Symposium, „Black Mountain as Multiverse“.

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