Tony Conrad
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Tony Conrad, a/k/a Anthony S. Conrad, (b.1940) is an avant-garde video artist, experimental filmmaker, musician/composer, sound artist, teacher and writer.
Along with John Cale, Angus MacLise, La Monte Young, and Marian Zazeela Conrad was a co-founder of the Theater of Eternal Music, which utilized non-Western musical forms and sustained sound to produce what they called dream music. Their collective work Day of Niagara (1965) is one of the earliest examples of the work of the new minimal composers/performers. The Flicker (1966) is considered a key early work of the structural film movement. It consists of only completely black and completely white images, thus producing the title's flicker when projected. When the film was shown some viewers in the audience became physically ill (flickers can produce epileptic attacks in a tiny percentage of people). Conrad began working in video and performance in the 1970s while teaching at Antioch College in Ohio and the Center for Media Studies, State University of New York (S.U.N.Y.) at Buffalo.
A graduate of Harvard University (A.B., 1962, major Mathematics) and recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship, 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.
Recently he 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, and "Slapping Pythagoras." He has also issued two archival CDs featuring the work of late New York filmmaker Jack Smith. 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.
Conrad continues to teach at the Department of Media Study at S.U.N.Y. Buffalo.
External links
- Interview with Tony Conrad, 1996 (http://media.hyperreal.org/zines/est/intervs/conrad.html)
- The Tony Conrad Project (http://www.geocities.com/hstencil/tonyconradintro.html)