Ahead of a retrospective of his work at Anthology Film Archives in 2005, the artist and musician Tony Conrad, in conversation with Whitney Museum curator Jay Sanders for Bomb Magazine, spoke of looking back at his immense body of work. “One of the things that lifts some of the fog over my own past for me is that in this process … of going through and organizing my work, I start to see in clear outlines old stories that I began, lived through, and concluded at a certain point, and maybe set aside, but that now seem to have a certain resonance with today’s cultural environment,” he said. “And that’s incredibly encouraging for an old dog like me.”This practice of lifting the fog, especially later in life, was something of a compulsion for Conrad, who passed away on April 9, 2016. “It was never over for him, it was always alive,” says Tyler Hubby, whose documentary “Tony Conrad: Completely in the Present,” more than 20 years in the making, will premiere at the Chicago Underground Film Festival on June 1. “It was all a constantly evolving project.”Born in New Hampshire in 1940, Conrad was raised in Baltimore and Virginia and later studied mathematics at Harvard, graduating in 1962. After moving to New York, where he spent a brief period as a computer programmer, he became interested in the writings and music of experimental composer John Cage. “An idea I found very interesting was to destroy the whole concept of Western composition,” he told the Guardian in an interview in March 2016. “Get rid of the composer, and let’s make the sound accessible in whatever form to whoever wants to listen.”Conrad’s earliest work of destruction and accessibility was as a member of the Theater of Eternal Music, where he played violin alongside the composer Lamonte Young and musicians John Cale, Angus MacLise, Marian Zazeela, among others. The music they made — consisting of long drones that often required them to sustain one note for an uncomfortable length of time — was, according to Conard and Cale, the result of a democratic process: without an author, the product of the group. Young disagreed, holding on to the reportedly hundreds of hours of recordings the ensemble made in 1964 and 1965 and refusing to release them in any form, claiming sole authorship. Bootlegs have surfaced, some released many years later. But the insistence on keeping the originals archived, which Young continues to do to this day, out of reach to even members of the group, was not just a personal betrayal for Conrad, who considered Young a friend, but a betrayal of the music’s ethos, as well. Attaching a composer to music that had been designed to have none undermined the project’s original purpose and its power.Conrad’s musical production, at least what was released to the public, waned over the next few decades. He was, however, involved in several projects, including a 1973 collaboration with the German group Faust called “Outside the Dream Syndicate.” And he was instrumental in forming the Velvet Underground through his friendship with former Eternal Music member John Cale, who encouraged him to join the pre-VU group the Primitives, which also counted the artist Walter de Maria as a member. (The Velvet Underground reportedly got its name after Lou Reed saw the title of a lurid paperback written by Michael Leigh that Conrad had found in the street). Conrad’s career picked up again in the 1990s, when the artist, who had been marginalized in histories of experimental music until then, began revisiting his older material. In 1997, he released “Early Minimalism: Vol. 1.” The four-disc album featured him and a group of younger musicians working through some of the ideas of the Theatre of Eternal Music, which. although he had no access to the music he made with the original group in recorded form, remained with Conrad. “This idea of past, future, and present was very much alive for him,” Hubby says. “Someone once asked him, ‘You were playing this music in the ’60s — why are you still playing it?’ And he said, ‘It’s still interesting to me.’ ”At the same time that Conrad was making noise with the Theatre of Eternal Music, he was also beginning to make films. His entry into moving-image work was initially through his soundtrack for Jack Smith’s notorious “Flaming Creatures” (1963). Conrad’s earliest works on celluloid, including “The Flicker” (1966), were structural films that resonated with some of the ideas of duration and repetition he had been exploring in music. “I don’t think of ‘The Flicker’ as a movie as we know it today,” Conrad told Jonas Mekas, a friend and early supporter, in a 1966 interview published in the Village Voice. “It is a piece of film that is experienced by a group of people in various ways, depending on how they choose to approach it.”This is another way of saying that, for Conrad, sound and image were devoid of a fixed meaning: Everything was up in the air, fluid, constantly changing. The most interesting project in this respect was a transitional one, made during a period when Conrad had moved to Buffalo. “Women in Prison,” as it would become known, was first shot on 16mm in 1982 and 1983, featuring a group of male artists and assorted locals playing female prisoners. “[Conrad] moved up there in 1976 to teach at the University of Buffalo and by the early 1980s was living in this big, raw space that didn’t even have a proper bathroom,” says Andrew Lampert, a former archivist at Anthology Film Archives and a friend of Conrad’s. “He built a set with a few cells and shot the movie in his home.”“The jail had come out of a series of projects I had envisioned that had to do with institutionalized power, or authority, or authoritarianism,” Conrad explained in an interview featured in Hubby’s documentary. “I was fascinated with the way that there were parallels with being a parent, being a teacher, being an artist — and ordering soldiers around, ordering prisoners around, ordering students around.”Tony Oursler and Mike Kelley were among the artists who starred in the project. The two first met Conrad, whose work they were aware of, the previous year when, according to Oursler, he showed up unannounced at their front door. “[W]ithin a few days we were dressed as sad-sack enlisted men in a field along a godforsaken freeway, shooting a few scenes for Tony's movie ‘Hail the Fallen I’ (1981),” Oursler wrote in Artforum. He and Kelley began making frequent trips to Buffalo, often presenting their own work while there. It was during one of these visits that they became involved in the making of what was then simply called the “jail movie.” Scenes were filmed on the third floor of Conrad’s loft, where the set was built, and featured the two artists, along with others (including Oursler’s brother Mark), improvising scenes. The footage has a comic aspect — Conrad’s insistence on later naming it after a genre of B-movies confirms this — but is also chaotic and uncontrolled, like a restaging of Frederick Wiseman’s “Titicut Follies.” “It seems like an outlier in a way, particularly from the earlier film work, but it also fits in the bigger picture, which is very fragmented,” Lampert says. “The footage has a haphazard quality that is also reminiscent of his later videos, many of which touch on similar themes of control and order. ‘Women in Prison’ has little to do with the structural/material approach for which he is best known (as seen in ‘The Flicker,’ ‘Yellow Movies,’ and the pickled films, for instance) and much more to do with his personal, humorous, and often heady video works. It's also his last big celluloid film project.”Whitney curator Sanders, a friend of Conrad’s, calls the artist’s work during this period “portraits of institutional structures”: the military in “Hail the Fallen” (formerly called “Beholden to Victory”) and the prison system in the “Women in Prison” project. “Each had an almost comic-book-like quality and pushed absurdity while finding ingenious ways to link portrayals of power structures and control mechanisms with formal filmic devices,” Sanders says. “This period of Tony’s work is really interesting and unique in how it approached these concerns.”Work on “the jail movie” was soon halted. Conrad has said that he ran out of money and that film had become too expensive. But he also had trouble herding together his cast, who were all involved in different projects. Conrad continued teaching and began experimenting with video. His works during this period became more directly political. He engaged in such projects as “Homework Helpline,” a call-in show, aired on public-access television, for young kids to ask questions about their homework, and “Studio of the Streets,” co-hosted by Conrad for more than two years, which featured him addressing voiceless members of the local community. (Conrad reportedly produced over 250 programs for public-access television.)All this time, the unfinished “jail movie” remained a constant presence in Conrad’s life. “He eventually moved out into a proper home, but kept renting the loft for years as a second space,” Lampert explains. “It housed a lot of his stuff, but most importantly, by keeping the loft he could maintain his [jail] set. When I first visited it, in 2004, everything looked virtually untouched, as if he had just left it all as it was the day he moved out in the mid-1980s. There were Village Voice newspapers from 1987 on the floor.”At some point in the 2000s, Conrad decided that digital technology had made it feasible to continue the “jail movie.” He began to reconceive the project. In the meantime, he purchased the loft he was renting, so he could keep the set. “Tony was very interested in long-form work, particularly in his music, so transferring this fascination to a narrative film (albeit one without a real story) was perfect for him,” Lampert says. “I think that he wanted to simply pick it up where he left off, with the same cast, on the same set. The idea was that they had been stuck there for a really long time.” Some initial new footage was shot with Oursler and others, now older but playing the same characters.The project once again came to a halt in January 2012 when Mike Kelley committed suicide. His death was a blow to Conrad and many others. “While there were many other people in the film besides Mike, his loss made returning to the project difficult and painful on a lot of levels,” Lampert says. But Conrad was not ready to completely bury the film. “What happened was that Tony realized, because Mike would not be available to finish the movie, that he had to again reconceptualize what the piece was. That’s when it started moving toward this idea of the installation.”In 2013, Conrad presented “WiP” at Greene Naftali gallery. The installation featured a screening of a cut version of the original footage — six hours condensed into one — and a re-creation of the jail set. “[It] isn't an exact reproduction, but it is very close,” Lampert says. “In many ways ‘WiP’ ultimately became a piece that was as much about the set as it was about the footage shot on it.”The show at Greene Naftali was never meant to be a capstone on the project. “I think that the installation was just one iteration, and something that came to him much later in the game, meaning that he didn't think to make such a piece back in 1982,” Lampert says. “It was crafted for the occasion. It was very important to him that all the ‘WiP’ material be digitized, reviewed, and put together in a new configuration. He left behind a lot of notes on the project, and it’ll be interesting to see what form he wanted the material to take and how far along he got putting it together.”Lampert says that he and others have just begun the process of going through Conrad’s massive archive and are excited about what they will find. The original prison set still exists in Conrad’s loft in Buffalo and remains untouched. “I think that [it] should be put in a museum as an installation,” Lampert suggests. As Sanders suggests, the artist has always had a complicated relationship with the concepts of “finished” and “unfinished.” Maybe this is what Conrad had envisioned all along. Even after his death, he has found a way for the project to continue, like a never-ending feedback loop.“TONY CONRAD: Completely in the Present” will premiere at the Chicago International Film Festival on June 1. For more information on the film, click here. On June 3, the Film-Makers’ Cooperative in New York City will host a tribute to TONY CONRAD that will screen a selection of his films.
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