The Enigma Machine

Help is on the way!' cries the besieged Rufus T. Firefly, the President of Freedonia, better known as Groucho, towards the end of the anarchic Marx brothers flick, Duck Soup (1933).

Suddenly the screen cuts to hastily edited stock footage of his increasingly improbable rescuers - fire engines hurtle from their stations, a large squad of motor-cycles tears down a dusty road, a swarm of marathon runners pounds by, cyclists pedal frantically, swimmers scythe through the water, baboons scurry across a bridge, elephants stampede through a forest and, finally, a vast pod of dolphins vaults surreally through the ocean.

To those who are familiar with Bruce Conner's first film, A Movie (1958), it should come as no surprise that this sequence was an early inspiration. The absurdist use of stock footage would become Conner's trademark and allow him to create a rich language of visual puns from old newsreels, documentaries and show reels that, as well as engendering genuinely funny experimental films, also allowed him to gain effects that were as emotionally resonant as they were deeply complex. As with his use of found material for his collage and assemblage work, his freeing of images from their original constraints developed new, often wilfully obscure, networks of meaning. Conner emancipated not just the body of film but its guts too. Film's 'hidden images' - the countdown leader, 'the native blackness' of film, as Conner describes the darkness between frames - were all used to distance the viewer from the work, and destroy any audience preconceptions of what they were watching.

The director's credit at the beginning of A Movie stays on screen for a brazenly insolent 31 seconds. As well as marking an early step in Conner's lifelong obsession with authorship, it also acts as a warning: 'prepare yourselves', it seems to say. Its magnificent poise is abruptly cut off by the appearance of the countdown numbers. Random words - 'Start', 'Head' - spurt like orders on to the screen; hidden images spewing forth as if the film had escaped from the projection machine. As the countdown reaches its culmination, we spy another film secret, a glimpse of a woman in a state of undress, wearing only a garter belt. The grandiose claims of the director's credit have been undercut by this titillation, and the audience has gone from being distanced to indulging in 'What the Butler Saw' antics. The words 'The End' appear, but it is now that the movie proper begins.

With any preconceptions devastated within the first minute, Conner's purloined cast of thousands appears on screen: half-forgotten cowboys and effervescent pin-up girls, military footage from uncertain wars and racing car drivers from antique races. They all carry their origin with them, yet by their reassignment a new result is lent to their inevitable and immutable actions. It begins with an archetypal movie image - an old Cowboys and Indians film. In rapid succession Cowboys chase Indians, an elephant charges towards the camera, the wheels of a locomotive are shown spinning wildly, armoured tanks appear leaping through the air. Speed is everything and the rush of images has become as important as the individual shots themselves. A submarine captain culled from a wartime propaganda film looks through his periscope and sees a scantily clad model. A torpedo is fired and explodes into a mushroom cloud. Male warrior lust has detonated an orgasm that threatens to consume all, and the viewer is left in a curious post-coital glow watching the sumptuous horror of the atomic bomb unfurl like a smoke ring. To the tune of Ottorino Respighi's Pines of Rome (1924), we witness the slapstick death of the world. Water-skiers coll, cyclists race on tiny clown bicycles, Theodore Roosevelt rants apoplectically to the camera. Almost imperceptibly the mood changes from one of high jinks to one of tragedy. Fatal accidents increasingly mix with more humorous ones, Zeppelins previously seen hovering gracefully in the sky catch fire. Children cry, soldiers' bodies lie rotting on the battlefield, the centre cannot hold.

Yet if the present consequences of the human death urge are as visible as a mushroom cloud, the future that Conner paints is beautifully opaque and serene. The film ends by abruptly cutting to an underwater shot, as if the world of technology, speed and fire had been submerged by a cleansing deluge. A beaver is shown swimming, and then a scuba diver transplanted from a Jacques Cousteau film disappears into the wreck of a ship. Is this a new start? A new ark? Its dislocation from the previous action is eerily reminiscent of the protagonist's strange deathbed vision of the desert in Werner Herzog's The Enigma of Kasper Hauser (1974). It is inexplicable, yet it is a symbol that life persists.

Cosmic Ray (1961) and Breakaway (1966) display Conner at perhaps his most influential and ecstatic, synchronizing sight and sound to create what he called 'a total perceptual monopoly and dictatorship over the audience'. Through a mixture of varying film speeds, rapid editing and blurring of movement, the dancer Antonia Basil is shown moving wildly across the screen. To the hard beat of the title song and its lyrics of 'I'm going to break away from all the chains that bind', she at times seems to break free not only from her clothes, but from the film itself, her body becoming little more than a white blur as she transforms into a spirit. Such editing techniques - rapid cuts, close synchronization of sound and film - have been avidly assimilated by the mass media. From advertising agencies buying reels of his films to music videos appropriating his brisk - and inexpensive - form of visual excitement, Conner's work has become a standard reference for the 'ironic' tone in filmmaking. (In 1978 he joined the fray himself when he made Mongoloid for the band Devo.)

Marilyn Times Five (1968-73) marked a change of pace in Conner's film work, but the register is similar. Marilyn Monroe's breathy version of 'I'm Through with Love' loops over a striptease film featuring a Monroe look-alike. Yet the pornographic intentions are subverted into a tableau that is gracefully looped back on itself. Filled with repetitions and slow camera sweeps over her body, 'Marilyn' is turned from porn star to portrait, as the reclining pose of the model, accentuated by the grainy texture of the film, transforms her into the Classical nude. Indeed her play with an apple, which she rolls languorously down her body, in addition the sound-track's insistent exhortations that she is 'through with love', lends her a mythical depth that suggests a languishing Eve, weary after a life spent in the Garden of Earthly Delights. When we are greeted with extended darkness before the fifth and final playing of the song, it seems not so much titillation as exhaustion through ennui. The last scene of the film, in which Marilyn lies crumpled on the floor, motionless, leaves us in little doubt that we have witnessed not just a fall from grace but a death. She has 'bid adieu to love' for good.

Conner's The White Rose (1967) has a similar elegiac tone, turning the extraction of Jay De Feo's monumental 1,000-kilogramme painting The Rose (1958-66) from her apartment by removal men (or 'angelic hosts', as Conner claimed in the film's subtitle) into something melancholic and strangely mystical. With ropes and pulleys the workmen look as if they are moving a sacred object from its shrine out into the real world. To the mournful and enigmatic tones of Miles Davis, the removal of this idol, to which De Feo devoted eight years of her life, is imbued with sadness. At one point it seems to block out the sun, creating a corona around itself as if causing a solar eclipse. The movie seems to depict an obscure ritual, a pageant of some kind to a god departing its temple.

While the films may constitute his best-known work, Conner has worked in many media, as was most recently seen in the comprehensive yet deliberately open-ended exhibition at the Walker Art Center, '2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story Part Two'. Here Conner the assemblage-maker, was displayed alongside Conner the photographer, the sculptor, the painter, the Conceptualist, the tapestry maker and the engraver. These many different facets to his art, and the immensity of his personal cosmology - his quest to glue 'the world down and make it mine' - remind one of his lifetime obsession with the power of names and identity (the latest stage of which saw Conner retire his own name from his work at the age of 65). The name, as Conner has declared, 'is the emblem that you have the least control over'. In the past he has refused to sign his artworks, even providing his New York dealer with a rubber signature stamp that allowed him to 'sign' them by proxy. He has exhibited under pseudonyms, most notably in 'The Dennis Hopper One Man Show' series, and from the mid-1950s to 1964 would not allow a recognizable photograph of him to be taken. When he was eventually photographed in 1964, it was surrounded by a bevy of bikini-clad models in front of an advertisement for 'Bruce Conner's Physical Services', a business with which he happened to share a name.

Perhaps the most enigmatic of all Conner's works are the collages he has created from 19th-century biblical prints - 'cartoons' reminiscent of Wallace Berman's cabbalistic-tinged work. In Blindman's Bluff (1987-2003), on show in late 2003 at the Susan Inglett Gallery, New York, three children are depicted playing the game. A cowled figure sits on a stoop dejectedly. A man stands with a bell jar in place of his head, but inside the jar is a liver. A figure on the left of the picture holds up another bell jar containing a sphere, tempting the liver-headed man to follow him through the door. In the background a family looks on worriedly. It is obscure and funny - a Symbolist ode to mortality as portrayed by the Marx brothers.

Surprisingly, in a rare moment of explication, Conner has suggested that its inscrutable character is closely related to his own very private concerns after being diagnosed with a terminal liver disease in the 1980s. It seems strange that his work, at once so immediate and hidden, should be revealed to have such a personal tone. Yet, as Conner has said, 'I try to create work that might be considered to have a universal context but still they get to be very personal to me and very obscure. [But] I can knock out a little bit of that obscurity here and there.' These ruminations on the emblematic nature of things seem to be reflected in his deep curiosity with symbols in general, clearly seen in his inkblot drawings, in which the paper is covered with an encyclopaedic array of delicate symmetrical symbols reminiscent of Rorschach inkblot tests. Indeed, in a similar manner to the overwhelming jump-cut imagery of his films, these drawings seem to form a wall of repressed impulses and neuroses, suggesting that if a facet of consciousness can be gained from looking at one of these patterns, then maybe an entire consciousness can be found lurking behind the multiplicity of symbols gathered there.