This paper examines how the artists Jay DeFeo (1929-89) and Bruce Conner (1933-2008) used play as both an engine for artistic invention and a mechanism for coping with the fickle art market of 1970s San Francisco.
Starting in 1971, DeFeo enlisted Conner to help find a buyer for her massive painting The Rose (1958-66). Over the next five years, the old friends worked with increasing desperation to secure a safe and visible home for the innovative painting, which languished in a classroom at the San Francisco Art Institute until the Whitney Museum of American Art acquired it in the mid-1990s.
In addition to the professional letters they sent on behave of The Rose, DeFeo and Conner began to exchange collaged postcards with each other. These lively cards often featured a rose inserted into bizarre situations and were accompanied by equally fantastical notes describing the adventures of “Rose.” “Dear Bruce and Jay,” reads one card. “Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here. / love from Pandaland, / Rose.” These exchanges further inspired DeFeo to make a series of collages based on her nicknames for Conner.
This paper analyzes DeFeo and Conner’s exchanges through the framework of play theory. Specifically, it examines their collaged correspondence through discussions of make-believe play by Johan Huizinga, Sigmund Freud, and Donald Winnicott. Doing so reveals how collage became the artists’ “magic circle,” a space where they felt free to shatter, recombine, and, thereby, transform the bleak reality of The Rose – a task uniquely suited to the technique of montage. By making The Rose a site for make-believe, the friends fostered the social function of play – fortifying their personal bond within a largely hostile art world – and harnessed the freedom of play to fuel their artistic creativity.
About the presenterElizabeth Ferrell
Elizabeth Ferrell is a specialist in modern and contemporary art with an emphasis in post-war America. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California Berkeley in 2012 and is currently an Assistant Professor at Arcadia University. Her book manuscript, The Ring Around The Rose: Jay DeFeo and her Circle, examines collaborations that took place around The Rose, a monumental painting created by the San Francisco artist Jay DeFeo between 1958 and 1966.