Thomas Crow, The Artist in the Counterculture: Bruce Conner to Mike Kelley and Other Tales from the Edge (2023)

Thomas Crow’s book The Artist in the Counterculture: Bruce Conner to Mike Kelley and Other Tales from the Edge reappraises West Coast art as enmeshed in the counterculture. The first five of its twelve chapters discuss Bruce Conner’s development as a multimedia artist in San Franscisco and Los Angeles producing assemblages, films, drawings, magazine illustrations, and light shows for rock concerts. The next five chapters expand Crow’s argument by appraising anti-war manifestations, Black and Latino protest work, Land Art, and West Coast conceptual practices as aspects of the counterculture. Moving forward to the late 1970s, the final two chapters review first Conner’s reemergence as a photographer documenting California punk bands and then Mike Kelley’s transplanting of Detroit’s alternative rock idealism to fuel the development of his own radical art practices.