Bruce Conner, Looking for Mushrooms, 1959-67/1996 (Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery)
Video Art Pick: Bruce Conner: Looking for Mushrooms
June 25, 2020
Conner's fourteen-and-a-half-minute film, Looking for Mushrooms (195967/1996), combines street views of San Francisco that Conner and Bob Branaman shot in the late 1950s with scenes of rural Mexico that Conner shot during a series of mushroom-hunting? excursions between 1961 and 1962. The weeklong screening coincides with an online exhibition organized by the Camden Art Centre in London, The Botanical Mind: Art, Mysticism and The Cosmic Tree, which features Conner among some 50 other artists to investigate the significance of the plant kingdom to human life, consciousness and spirituality.
