SENORITA

Bruce Conner’s SENORITA taunts high, refined, elite culture with a work made of junk materials: torn pantyhose, a brunette wig, a tattered handkerchief sealed with a kiss of lipstick, and other garbage. In San Francisco in 1959, Conner founded an informal artists’ club, the Rat Bastard Protective Association, which allied its members with ragpickers, scavenger figures at the social margins. The crude materials of Conner’s three-dimensional collages, known as assemblages, possess a putrid character. The artist even stipulated that museums and art collectors allow dust to accumulate on them. He made SENORITA while briefly living in a semirural community outside Mexico City. Trash was much harder to come by there than in the excessively wasteful, consumerist US. For this reason, SENORITA is flatter than Conner’s previous assemblages, relying for its effects on the layering of papers, including a glittering red scrap, an image of nosegay flowers, and an engraving of the Last Judgment.