June 10, 1978 @1:20 - 1:27 AM, The Late Night Movie on TV: Sterns Motel in Venice, CA, 1986

A highly enigmatic figure in the history of Post-War art, Bruce Conner has been something of an 'artistic chameleon', producing works across a range of mediums, including painting, printmaking, and conceptual art, and is best known for his films and photographic works. Born in Kansas, Conner moved to San Francisco after high school where he quickly fell in with a group of diverse and vibrant artists that included Jay DeFeo, Wallace Berman and Joan Brown. An important figure in the Beat Culture, Funk art and West Coast assemblage scenes, Conner left his mark on the art scene each decade starting in the 1950s, nimbly shifting his focus and maintaining his avant garde vision. Lot 118 depicts four screenshots of late night television that cleverly highlight the tension between cinema’s intended psychedelic buzz with the humbling banality of reality, embodied by the low-budget setting. Lot 119 depicts the same television set albeit from the side, its screen unseen. In doing so, it proves that the set was plugged to the wall and the images unmanipulated, and more so, it further emphasizes the materiality of the television as a man-made object and mechanical generator of fantasy.