Tony Conrad

Anthony Schmalz Conrad (March 7, 1940 – April 9, 2016) was an American video artist, experimental filmmaker, musician, composer, sound artist, teacher, and writer. Active in a variety of media since the early 1960s, he was a pioneer of both drone music and structural film.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> As a musician, he was an important figure in the New York minimalist scene of the 1960s, during which time he performed as part of the Theatre of Eternal Music (along with John Cale, La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Terry Riley, and others).<ref name="gramophone">Template:Cite web</ref> He became recognized as a filmmaker for his 1966 film The Flicker. He performed and collaborated with a wide range of artists over the course of his career.

Biography

Early life

Anthony Schmaltz Conrad was born on March 7, 1940, in Concord, New Hampshire, to Mary Elizabeth Parfitt and Arthur Emil Conrad, and raised in Baldwin, Maryland, and Northern Virginia.<ref name="nyt" /> His father worked with Everett Warner in designing dazzle camouflage for the United States Navy during World War II.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Conrad's high school violin lessons with symphony violist Ronald Knudsen introduced him to just intonation and double stop playing.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> After briefly studying violin at Baltimore's Peabody Conservatory, Conrad graduated from Harvard University in 1962 with a degree in mathematics.<ref name="nyt"/><ref name=":0">Template:Cite web</ref> While studying at Harvard, Conrad was exposed to the ideas of experimental composers John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. After working as a computer programmer, Conrad became involved in New York City's avant-garde arts scene.<ref name="nyt" />

1960s

After moving to New York, Conrad became an early member of La Monte Young's Theatre of Eternal Music, alongside John Cale, Angus MacLise, Marian Zazeela, and later Terry Riley.<ref>Patrick Nickleson, The Names of Minimalism: Authorship, Art Music, and Historiography in Dispute, University of Michigan Press, pp. 56-58</ref> The Theatre of Eternal Music utilized just intonation and drones to produce what the group called "dream music"; Conrad's mathematical knowledge contributed to the Theatre's systematization of just intervals, and he also encouraged the ensemble to adopt electronic amplification.<ref name="nyt"/><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> Conrad would later leave the Theatre in a dispute over Young's attempt to assert more deliberate compositional influence over their performances and refusal to grant him or Cale shared credit for the ensemble's music or access to its recordings; in 1990, he protested a concert by his former bandleader with a manifesto titled "Composer La Monte Young Does Not Understand 'His' Work" outlining his grievances and accusing Young of "orientalism and [a] romanticized personality cult mark[ing] him among the most regressive of contemporary artists."<ref name="nyt2">Template:Cite news</ref>

In 1963, he joined his former Harvard classmate and Fluxus associate Henry Flynt in his anti-art demonstrations against "elitist" New York cultural institutions.<ref>Interview with Henry Flynt in The Village Voice, September 10th, 1964, by Susan Goodman, "Anti-Art Pickets Pick on Stockhausen" .</ref>

In 1964, Conrad and Cale were recruited by Pickwick Records to serve as a backing band, The Primitives, to perform the Lou Reed-penned single "The Ostrich"/"Sneaky Pete". Conrad and Cale played guitar and bass guitar, artist Walter de Maria played percussion, and Reed sang. Conrad and Cale's instruments were tuned to Reed's "Ostrich tuning", with every string the same pitch class. After the Primitives disbanded, Cale and Reed formed the Velvet Underground.<ref> Template:Cite web </ref> Conrad was indirectly responsible for the name of The Velvet Underground, although he was never a member of the group; after moving into Conrad's old apartment on Ludlow Street in Manhattan's Lower East Side, Reed and Cale found a copy of The Velvet Underground which Conrad had left in the apartment, and took its name for the band.<ref> Template:Cite news </ref>

In 1966, Conrad produced the film The Flicker, consisting almost entirely of alternating black and white frames producing varying stroboscopic effects. The Flicker is considered a pioneering example of structural film.<ref name="30yearsofusindicinema">THIRTY YEARS OF AMERICAN INDEPENDENT CINEMA ON EXHIBITION (1979) on MoMA.org</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

1970s

Conrad's first musical release under his own name was a collaboration with German krautrock band Faust, Outside the Dream Syndicate, released by Caroline Records in 1973. This remains his best known musical work and is considered a classic of minimalist music and drone music.<ref name="nyt"/><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

One of Conrad's early films was Coming Attractions, made with his then-partner Beverly Grant, which was released in 1970. This film led indirectly to the founding of Syntonic Research and the Environments series of natural sound recordings.<ref name="nyt"/> Grant and Conrad further worked on two films: Straight and Narrow (1970) and Four Square (1971).

Yellow Movies was a project of Conrad's in 1973 consisting of twenty "movies" consisting of rectangular borders painted in black house paint on large pieces of photographic paper, effectively framing each sizable expanse of emulsion whereby the physical aging and transformation of the emulsion itself would constitute a definitively slow-motion moving picture over such an extended period of time.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Conrad deepened his involvement in video and performance in the 1970s as a professor at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where he replaced the filmmaker Paul Sharits. In 1976, Conrad joined the faculty at the Center for Media Studies at the University at Buffalo.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> While in Buffalo, Conrad was part of a scene that included Sharits, as well as Hollis Frampton, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Peter Weibel, James Blue, Cathy Steffan and Gerald O'Grady. Their practices in film, video, performance, and other forms were documented in the 2008 book Buffalo Heads: Media Study, Media Practice, Media Pioneers, 1973–1990, edited by Vasulka and Weibel.<ref name="Buffalo Heads">Template:Cite book</ref>

In the mid-1970s, Conrad began performing film. With Sukiyaki Film he decided that the film should be prepared immediately before viewing. Sukiyaki was chosen as the paradigm for the work because it is a dish often cooked immediately before eating, in front of the diners. Conrad cooked sukiyaki in front of an audience with egg, meat, vegetables, and 16mm film, "projected" onto the screen behind him.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Later life

The record label Table of the Elements released a number of Conrad's archival recordings in the 1990s and 2000s, including Four Violins (1964),<ref name="nyt"/> Fantastic Glissando, and Joan of Arc.<ref name="pitchfork2">Template:Cite web</ref> Slapping Pythagoras, an album of new music commissioned by Table of the Elements, was recorded with Jim O'Rourke and Steve Albini at Electrical Audio and released in 1995.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Early Minimalism, Vol. 1, released in 1997, was an attempt to reconstruct the sound of Theatre of Eternal Music recordings withheld by La Monte Young.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> He also issued two archival CDs featuring the work of late New York filmmaker Jack Smith, with whom he was associated in the 1960s.<ref name="brooklynrail">Template:Cite web</ref>

Conrad collaborated with artists such as Charlemagne Palestine,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Genesis P-Orridge, Keiji Haino, Jim O'Rourke, David Grubbs, C Spencer Yeh, Tovah Olson, MV Carbon, and numerous others.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Conrad was chosen by Animal Collective to perform at the All Tomorrow's Parties festival that they curated in May 2011.<ref name="factmag">Template:Cite web</ref> In 2012, Conrad was part of the line-up of the touring avant-garde festival Sonic Protest that took place in five cities in France.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> In 2013, Conrad visited Genoa to open his first solo exhibition in Italy.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Conrad performing in Paris, 2012.

Conrad's work has been shown at many museums including the Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; the Louvre in Paris; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; and many others.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Specifically, his film The Flicker was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art's exhibition, The American Century; he participated in the 2006 Whitney Biennial; and one of his Yellow Paintings was featured in the museum's 2015–2016 exhibition "Collected by Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner."<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

In 2018 the Buffalo AKG Art Museum exhibited Introducing Tony Conrad: A Retrospective;<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> the exhibit showed works from his six-decade long career.  The show later traveled to MIT’s List Visual Arts Center and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University from October 2018 to January 2019, and the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania in February 2019.  The catalog was edited by Cathleen Chaffee Template:ISBN

Conrad continued to teach in the Department of Media Study at Buffalo until his death.<ref name=":0" /><ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Several of his students there formed the indie rock band Mercury Rev in 1989.<ref name="conrad">Template:Cite news</ref>

Death

Conrad died at a hospice in Cheektowaga, New York, on April 9, 2016, after receiving treatment for prostate cancer.<ref name=":0" /><ref name="buffalo-news">Template:Cite web</ref>

Conrad's estate is represented by the Greene Naftali Gallery in New York and the Galerie Bucholz in Cologne.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Partial discography

• Outside the Dream Syndicate (with Faust) (Caroline, 1973)
• Slapping Pythagoras (Table of the Elements, 1995)
• The Japanese Room at La Pagode / May (split with Gastr del Sol) (Table of the Elements, 1995)
• Four Violins (1964) (Table of the Elements, 1996)
• Early Minimalism Volume One (Table of the Elements, 1997)
• Inside the Dream Syndicate Volume I: Day of Niagara (with John Cale, Angus MacLise, La Monte Young, and Marian Zazeela) (Table of the Elements, [Recorded 1965] 2000)
• Fantastic Glissando (Table of the Elements, 2003)
• Joan of Arc (Table of the Elements, [Recorded 1968] 2006)
• An Aural Symbiotic Mystery (with Charlemagne Palestine) (Sub Rosa, 2006)
• Taking Issue (with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge) (Dais Records, 2009)
• XXX Macarena (with Jutta Koether and John Miller) (From the Nursery and Primary Information, 2010)
• Ten Years Alive on the Infinite Plain (Superior Viaduct, 2017)<ref name="Tony Conrad Discography">Template:Cite web</ref>

External links

• Tony Conrad at Galerie Buchholz
• Tony Conrad Website
• Interview with Tony Conrad, 1996
• "About Tony Conrad" from the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany
• Template:Webarchive
• Tony Conrad in the Video Data Bank
• {https://film-makerscoop.com/filmmakers/tony-conrad/bio Tony Conrad] at The Film-Makers' Cooperative
• Tony Conrad's MySpace Page
• Tony Conrad faculty page at University at Buffalo
• Yellow Movies via moma.org

Video

• PUNKCAST#1143-02 Live @ Swiss Institute NYC on May 2, 2007. (Flash)