Bruce Conner: Three Screen Ray

On Saturday, September 14, the Citadelpark mutates into a sultry arena for a new GHOST x Monterey – a carousel of explosive live performances, music, mappings and audiovisual art. As part of this edition, Art Cinema OFFoff presents the three-channel film installation Three Screen Ray (2006) by the seminal avant-garde filmmaker Bruce Conner (1933−2008) on the facade of the entrance to the nuclear bunker that’s located in the park. 

The screening location adds to the experience of this work. Bruce Conner reached puberty in sync with the A‑bomb, the Cold War and the arrival of a TV in every American home. The mushroom cloud is one of the signature images in many of his works (A Movie, Cosmic Ray, Crossroads). The Ghent bunker served as the provincial nuclear and biological crisis center during the Cold War. With a battery of measuring instruments, the air was constantly screened for radioactive particles and traces of chemical or biological weapons. The charts and maps monitoring possible nuclear attacks are still preserved in the OPS room. 

Three Screen Ray is a re-imagined and expanded version of Cosmic Ray (1961), Conner’s landmark collage film that essentially invented the genre of the music video. Like the original single-screen version, Three Screen Ray​’s soundtrack features a sexually charged, live recording of Ray Charles’s 1959 hit song ​“What’d I Say” set to an ecstatic, fast-paced collage of preexisting and original imagery, including newsreel footage of bomb explosions, cartoons, television commercials, fireworks, flashing lights and his signature use of countdown leader. A tour de force of editing and film techniques, the film itself is manipulated by Conner with hole punches and ink stains. The central image is of Cosmic Ray, featuring Conner’s multiple exposures of a woman (Kansas-born artist Beth Pewther) dancing in various states of undress. 

Conner had this idea of an expanded version of Cosmic Ray very early on. In 1965, he reworked the single projection film as a silent, three-screen 8mm film projection using three unsynchronized films of different lengths, called Eve-Ray-Forever (1965, 2006). Precisely cut to the re-included Ray Charles soundtrack, Three Screen Ray is the synchronized final iteration of these works and the sum of his filmic oeuvre. Images meet, diverge and meet again. In collaboration with his longtime editor, Michelle Silva, Conner created the visual equivalent of a cinematic slot machine.

Our time frame in the GHOST schedule is between 22:30 and 23:00, but the installation will be continuously on view in loop during the evening and night!

Thank you to Michelle Silva and the Bruce Conner Family Trust