| Tony Conrad | |
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Tony Conrad at the DeStijl/Freedom From Festival in Minneapolis-Saint Paul in October 2003. |
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| Born | Anthony S. Conrad 1940 Concord, New Hampshire |
| Nationality | United States |
| Occupation | Experimental filmmaker, musician/composer |
| Website | |
| tonyconrad.net | |
Tony Conrad (born Anthony S. Conrad in 1940 in Concord, New Hampshire) is an American avant-garde video artist, experimental filmmaker, musician/composer, sound artist, teacher and writer. His father was Arthur Conrad, who worked with Everett Warner during World War II in designing dazzle camouflage for the US Navy.[1]
Conrad is a graduate of Harvard University (A.B., 1962, major Mathematics).
Support for Conrad's work has come from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the State University of New York, The Rockefeller Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.
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Conrad's most famous film, The Flicker (1966), is considered a key early work of the structural film movement. The film consists of only completely black and completely white images, which, as the title suggests, produces a flicker when projected. When the film was first screened several viewers in the audience became physically ill. (Rapid flashes produce epileptic attacks in a small percentage of population.) Conrad began to work in video and performance in the 1970s as a professor at Antioch College in Ohio and the Center for Media Studies at the University at Buffalo.
Conrad's work has been shown at many museums including the Museum of Modern Art and P.S. 1 in New York City. In 1991, he had a video retrospective at The Kitchen, an artist-run-organization in New York City. His film The Flicker was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art's exhibition, The American Century. In 2006, the full hour-long recording of Conrad's Joan of Arc was released, a 1968 recording for the soundtrack to Piero Heliczer's like-named short film.
Conrad has been a faculty member in the State University of New York at Buffalo since 1976. He continues to teach there in the Department of Media Study[2] as well as work on many notable B&W film image projects with Princess G. St. Mary.
In music, Conrad was an early (though not original) member of the Theatre of Eternal Music, nicknamed The Dream Syndicate, which included John Cale, Angus MacLise, La Monte Young, and Marian Zazeela, and utilized just intonation and sustained sound (drones) to produce what the group called "dream music" (and is now called drone music).
The Theater of Eternal Music performed pieces consisting of long extended tones, in which the performers sustained harmonically related pitches for the duration of each piece. Often, Young performed complex improvisations on saxophone or voice. In recent years, Young (who retains many original recordings) has claimed authorship for the "compositions" the group performed. However, Conrad has characterized those works as collaboration for which he, Angus MacLise, and John Cale should share collective credit. These views remain a source of contention for Conrad and, to a lesser extent, Cale among the former participants in the group.
Conrad's first musical release, and only release for many years, was a 1972 collaboration with the German "Krautrock" group Faust, Outside the Dream Syndicate, published by Caroline (UK) in 1973. This remains his best known musical work and is considered a classic of minimalist music and drone music.
Recently, Conrad has composed more than a dozen audio works with special scales and tuning for solo amplified violin with amplified strings. Recent releases include Early Minimalism Volume 1, a four-CD set, Slapping Pythagoras, Four Violins (recorded in the 1960s), Outside the Dream Syndicate Alive (with Faust, from London 1995), and Fantastic Glissando. He also issued two archival CDs featuring the work of late New York filmmaker Jack Smith, with whom he was associated in the 1960s. [3] He released the 1968 recording of Joan of Arc in 2006. Conrad played together with Rhys Chatham in an early ensemble. Conrad has been chosen by Animal Collective to perform at the All Tomorrow's Parties festival that they will curate in May 2011.[4]
Conrad is known as being indirectly responsible for the name of The Velvet Underground, although he was not an actual member of the famous group. Lou Reed and John Cale found a book entitled The Velvet Underground, which had belonged to Conrad, after moving into his old apartment on Ludlow Street in New York City.