Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Book in excellent unread/unused condition. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> Jay DeFeo (1929-1989) and Bruce Conner (1933-2008) enjoyed one of the great artists’ friendships of the second half of the twentieth century. In 1994 five years after DeFeo’s death Conner memorialized their relationship in a short essay which was published in Grand Street the following year. It was accompanied by eight of DeFeo’s photocollages from the 1970s half of which had been addressed to him. Entitled “A Conversation” Conner’s text is tender uncharacteristically so for an artist who delighted in public subterfuge had difficulty maintaining friendships and insisted that the titles of his works-all of them-be written in all caps. “The collages here that are titled ‘for Bruce Conner” he wrote “have reference to the marathon telephone conversations we indulged in between San Francisco and her northern house. Both of us needed to be talked through a per- ceived crisis of identity within our work. I mailed her the dial from a telephone with my phone number printed in the center. She cut out a figure that refers to the full body photograms I had recently made and attached the dial to the figure as though it were the telephone. I had become the telephone.” (LL)