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Wayfinding / Jay Sanders I feel very fortunate to have been close with exhibition From Minimalism to Algorithm in Tony Conrad when he was first actively show- 2016. That same year, he revisited : ing in galleries and museums beginning in Prescription and Collapsed Temporality, 1976 the mid-2000s. His jocular glee and bemused (pages 191–203)—a lecture in the form of nine irreverence would define these moments, his prerecorded, simultaneously played tapes—as presence sweeping an air of disruption into the a performance for Brooklyn’s Light Industry. sanctity of contemporary museum spaces. In Applying his own dexterously shifting this late-career era, Conrad was ever hyper- interrogations, Conrad insistently dressed active across many parallel tracks—teaching, down the constructions and suppositions that performing music (alone and in numerous allow art to self-assuredly propel itself through collaborations), devising new visual art under- narratives of formal radicality using adjectives takings, penning deeply incisive texts including that attest to what an artwork does and what his years-in-the-making assessment of Western happens to its imagined viewers. Implicit in music history,1 and reinvigorating projects from this was a deep suspicion of the normative his past. In his half century of art activities, he within any self-conscious avant-garde. Much moved actively between disparate artistic com- conceptual art, for instance, appeared to him munities and their stratifications—inside and as a sanctioned rehashing (with the buy-in of out, fringe and center, seemingly never stuck in institutions and critics) of earlier, more overtly a single scene—suggesting that his was a differ- problematic efforts to which he had been in ent kind of organizing principle, a different core proximity and in which he had participated. pursuit. Likewise, he avoided working the kind of The same held true with what he conversation- stable position that allowed assuredness to seep ally dubbed “so-called ” and in. I remember him more than once pantomim- his grappling with how canons and art worlds ing the cow-milking motion while describing formulate, grow, and self-replicate. Conrad’s what it is to capitalize on one’s own novelty. work, while it undoubtedly contributed to the As Conrad’s 1970s work began appearing definitions those canons adopted, protracted in art galleries and museums around 2005, he their terms through his own use of very long veered more overtly into the orbit represented durations—so much so that his approach by this exhibition and catalogue. It was not lost might be more aptly characterized as patho- on him that the Yellow Movies, 1972–73 (see logical (toward medium, form, or culture), pages 132–55), were the billowing sails that deploying abjection to contend with more spirited him into the contemporary art world.2 conventional notions of progress. It was through his own reappraisal of these It must be remembered that, from the start, particular works that he reckoned with con- Conrad had gravitated to the least institution- temporary painting discourse and relational ally defined art forms: and aesthetics’ transitive reading of art as service. music. Opportunities such as music commis- The near-mythological status and rediscov- sions or exhibition invitations were fundamen- ery of the Yellow Movies from the perceived tally absent from his art practice throughout shadows of the film underground set these most of his life, and indeed there were various factors as new givens for his ongoing work. points in his career when he had no assumed Aware that time was ticking, Conrad plunged audience, no expectant critic to hail or even resources from their surprising late-in-life sales recount his innovations. Instead, his efforts into restorations of other pasts, as he rapidly emerged in much more local, incidental, home- assessed then-latent projects to reevaluate, grown scenarios born from his own sense of solidify, and even complete. cultural tinkering and indigenous investigative A museum survey at this moment must, as tendencies. His experiments rarely yielded this one does, not only build from the artist’s definite outcomes (nor, as one might imagine, own unique effort to surface and animate his any income) but were instead open-ended sys- past, but also encompass the real-time revela- tems in themselves. Many of his larger-scale tions he delivered for specific scenarios around productions, meanwhile, assumed a state of this time. For example, four fabric panels were permanent incompleteness. One might think the stand-in chalkboards for a series of March here of his various film projects of the 1980s, 2008 talks Conrad gave at the Brooklyn ware- which took on such archetypes as family, house space West Nile to publicly dictate his prison, or the military to define both their extensive research on the philosophical history subjects and their formal working methods of music (fig. 18). The hanging bench piece of production, as well as their relationship to Quartet, 2008 (fig. 140), was fashioned to tour an audience. (Such ramshackle parodies saw in a traveling exhibition of visual art selected him inspire and align with the likes of Ericka by the band Sonic Youth entitled Sonic Youth Beckman, , and Mike Kelley.) etc.: Sensational Fix. An early computer Given this, his trove of work and personal his- tory constituted, very actively for him, a mam- Fig. 17. Conrad installing the March 10, 1973, “world premiere exhibition” of Tony Conrad: output, H, 1965 (fig. 31), was deployed as Twenty New Movies, , , 1973. Photo: Jerry Tartaglia. 32 33 his contribution to The Kitchen’s ambitious moth array of demonstrational objects forged Conrad’s earliest forays. His first film, The example is, Is there anywhere to get to? Over Flicker, 1966, for example, composed of vary- and over the answer would be yes, because ing frequencies of stroboscopic, alternating anywhere, truly anywhere, could for Conrad white and black film frames, acted directly on be a place to start. This was astounding to me, his audience’s physiological reactive systems like watching someone rub sticks—or really in overtly aggressive ways. This too was anything—together to spark a flame. But also the case with the music he made within the no, because he didn’t rank sites. He had made (, active and real choices at early points in his life , , Angus MacLise, to decouple art from conventional ambition, to and Conrad), which purposely sought to induce not rely on the validation of dominant, mon- psychedelic, hypnotic trance states and aural eyed, power-centric institutions as measures hallucinations. Moreover, these productions of his own efforts. Resisting that gravitational offered a means to explicitly dismantle the pull, Conrad left a legacy that will reside not so artist-­as-author, relocating the creative moment much in the hermetic safety of official archives, to the body of the receiver, and chucking but in the dynamic bodies and surrounds of the authority over the transom. artistic communities that he imbued with life. One of his major music projects, Early Minimalism, came starkly to light in the early This text has been expanded from a version that appeared in Texte Zur Kunst 103, “Poetry” and mid-1990s—after some thirty years in the (September 2016). making—as a work of overt protest.3 Denied access by Young to the sequestered record- ings of the Theatre of Eternal Music due to Notes contentions over their authorship, Conrad was

compelled to go back in time, month by month 1. “What Music Did” (unpublished manuscript, 2002–16), (April 1965, May 1965, June 1965) and, from this Tony Conrad Archives, Buffalo, New York. place of memory, to recompose and record new 2. Conrad made the Yellow Movies by painting the Fig. 18. Conrad delivering his four-part Sunday Music Seminar The Harmonic Series and music that posited itself as simulations of this rectangular image of a movie screen on large sheets Applied Basic Arithmetic as Bases for Musical Practices, West Nile, Brooklyn, March 16, of seamless backdrop paper with inexpensive white or impossible-to-hear early work. It was composi- 23, and 30, 2008. Photo (top left): Jay Sanders. All other photos: Ted Conrad. off-white house paint so that the gradual yellowing of the WAYFINDING tion-as-recuperation, and through it he came to paint itself over years would constitute the “movie.” claim the entire bundle of convolution, con- 3. Conrad’s Early Minimalism: Volume One was pub- flict, and cultural imagining—of then and now, lished as a CD box set in 1997 by .

JAY SANDERS in highly specific historical and social contexts One of Conrad’s many passions was and the correspondence between the two—as 4. We can hear a very different side of Conrad’s music with the release of Music and the Mind of the World, 1976–82, (scenes), any of which could be yanked out revealing what had already implicitly been constituting this new work. When, around this a massive, multiyear project that encapsulates more than and examined to reveal both a particular place decided for us well before the first film frame time, he began to play live concerts again (after two hundred hours of recordings of his untrained forays and time and its own instantaneous estrange- was shot or the opening note of music was a hiatus of many years), he did so from behind on the piano. It is available at musicandthemindofthe. ment—what gets projected as fantasy and fact penned, making visible the means of control the veil of a white fabric sheet, against which world for the first time thanks to artist , a and how ideas and art activities re-adhere to he identified as being deeply hardwired within his shadow, projected via a bare light bulb, flut- friend of Conrad’s who, while staying with him in Buffalo, ever-evolving contemporary concerns. artistic tools themselves. For him, devices— tered and danced as a further mythic allusion. offered to publish it online in its entirety. While his later gallery shows, such as Tony whether a modular synthesizer, a violin, a The wily and seductive monolithic beauty Conrad (Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles, 2007), projector, a can of film, or a movie theater— of his “dream music” was unmatched, but Invented Acoustical Tools: Instruments 1966– were already their own (and therefore some- Conrad was no less invested in the tone and 2012 (Galerie Buchholz, Cologne and Berlin, body else’s) compositions. So his work, he delivery of his work, modulating it through 2012), and WiP (Greene Naftali, New York, felt, would need to employ absurdist means to a broad spectrum of possibilities, even at 2013), offered the culminating forms for many sidestep such inevitabilities. For the same rea- times seeking to cultivate boredom or offering of his more unwieldy and unbounded major son, he often turned to foundational cultural displays of overt amateurism, reveling in the works, for years it had rather been his in-per- histories—Filippo Brunelleschi’s perspectival capering and serious fun of it all.4 As I came son film and video screenings—show-and-tell architectural constructs, the cosmic-musical to know him and his work more intimately, I extravaganzas—that provided his audiences notions of Pythagoras, or the modern orches- experienced something of a recurring epiph- with unexpected and often bewildering gems tra’s militaristic formation by Jean-Baptiste any: time and again, on countless occasions, (for more on these, see pages 247–51). In New Lully—in order to excavate how power, influ- I was struck by how he comported himself York, an evening screening at Millennium Film ence, mysticism, and other forces evolved to with a uniquely comprehensive set of personal Workshop, , or The shape our present art forms. An oppressive, ethics that very naturally fueled the methodical, Kitchen would see him zigzagging through a faulty foundation might be postulated any- disruptive, and deeply sardonic ways in which circuitous, never-to-be-repeated path, narrating where, and from there Conrad could extrapo- he approached so many things in his life and the genesis, applied problematics, and produc- late and stage the roads not taken, imagining his artmaking. There’s a very early photo of a tion conditions of each wildly unique project through his work what an alternate form young Tony Conrad wearing a handmade sign while juggling the technical hiccups caused might look or sound like had these histories or around his neck that reads, “Fight the snob art when he inevitably arrived with far too many philosophies played out differently. of the social climbers!” (fig. 49), and something media formats for even the most dexterous It’s fair to say that notions of cultural in that articulation, as provocative and exag- projectionist to handle—the specific works authorship and its differentiation of roles—the gerated as it might have been, rings precisely likely chosen, and in extreme cases even shot, spaces between a composition, its creator, true to his ethos. The fundamental question earlier that day. and its receivers—were already at work in 34 35 that comes to my mind through his ongoing