Throughout his six-decade career, Tony Conrad (1940–2016) forged his own path through numerous artistic movements, from Fluxus to the Pictures Generation and beyond. Conrad, a 1962 graduate of Harvard University, made visits to both Harvard and MIT over the years to present his work, and he had formative experiences at both universities.
Although he was best known for his pioneering contributions to both minimal music and structural film in the 1960s, his work helped define a vast range of culture, including rock music and public television. He once declared in an interview, “You don’t know who I am, but somehow, indirectly, you’ve been affected by things I did.” Introducing Tony Conrad: A Retrospective, the first large-scale museum survey devoted to artworks Conrad presented in museum and gallery settings, is part of an ongoing reappraisal of his creative achievement. Indeed, because of the extraordinary scope of Conrad’s contributions to art and culture, this retrospective may yet be seen as only an “introduction.” Inspired by the spoken, written and performed introductions Conrad regularly used to help frame screenings and presentations of his works, it shows the artist to be an unparalleled innovator in the mediums of painting, sculpture, film, video, performance and installation, tenaciously working to challenge the boundaries between artistic categories.
Enlarge the imageTony Conrad and HFA Director Haden Guest in 2008 (c) Marcus Halevi
Conrad’s first experience in film came from his creative partnership with Jack Smith as the sound designer for Smith’s best known works, Scotch Tape (1959-62), Flaming Creatures (1963), and Normal Love (1963-64). Conrad’s musical work informed his breakthrough film debut, The Flicker—a radical reduction of the cinema to its most essential properties: light and darkness, black and white, sound and silence—that brought film fully into the emergent minimalist art movement. With subsequent works such as Straight and Narrow (1970), Coming Attractions (1970) and Four Square (1971), Conrad created some of the purest and, to this day, most arresting examples of structural film.
Enlarge the imageTony Conrad performing at the HFA in 2008 (c) Marcus Halevi
Testing his audiences as well as the sculptural and performative limits of film, Conrad continued to turn up the volume on theatricality, mystery and a certain off-beat humor. In Sukiyaki Film (1973), for instance, Conrad rapidly stir-fried film and hurled it at the screen, and in his Yellow Movies (1972–73), he coated paper surfaces with cheap paint and presented them as slowly changing “films.” He invented musical instruments out of film and other materials, even a Band-Aid tin, and presented these acoustical tools as sculptures themselves. In the 1980s, his ambitious films about power relations in the army and in prisons critiqued what he perceived as an emerging culture of surveillance, control and containment. Engaging directly with urgent issues, his collaborative programs for public access television in 1990s made him an influential voice within the community. In addition to this film series, these bodies of work will be highlighted through different examples on view at both the Carpenter Center and MIT List Visual Arts Center.
This film series is part of Introducing Tony Conrad: A Retrospective. Originally organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery with the support of the University at Buffalo Art Galleries, this multi-part exhibition is on view at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and the MIT List Visual Arts Center from October 17 – January 6.
