In a career that spanned five decades, most of them spent in San Francisco, Bruce Conner (1933–2008) produced a unique body of work that refused to be contained by medium or style. Whether making found-footage films, hallucinatory ink-blot graphics, enigmatic collages, or assemblages from castoffs, Conner took up genres as quickly as he abandoned them. His movements within San Francisco’s counter-cultural scenes were similarly free-wheeling; at home in beat poetry, punk music, and underground film circles, he never completely belonged to any of them. Bruce Conner belonged to Bruce Conner. Twice he announced his own death; during the last years of his life he produced a series of pseudonymous works after announcing his “retirement.” In this first book-length study of Conner’s enormously influential but insufficiently understood career, Kevin Hatch explores Conner’s work as well as his position on the geographical, cultural, and critical margins.

Rewind: Artists video in the 70s and 80s derives from a four-year research project into the history of an art form that has become the hallmark of contemporary art. Based on an archive of interviews, ephemera and archive copies of tapes and installations from the pioneering period of British video art, this anthology brings together some of the leading scholars in the field, backed by an expert panel, to lay the groundwork for a history of the people, activities, institutions and interventions that made of video art the one true avant-garde in the United Kingdom in the 20th century. Rewind is the founding text for the history of British video art; draws on a unique archive of oral history and personal experience; and opens up the archive for contemporary artists, curators, media historians and archivists.