CAMBRIDGE, MASS.- The MIT List Visual Arts Center and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University are co-presenting Introducing Tony Conrad: A Retrospective on view October 18, 2018–January 6, 2019 (MIT List Center) and October 18–December 30, 2018 (Carpenter Center).
Throughout his six-decade career, Tony Conrad (American, 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 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 Conrad 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.
Conrad’s first film, The Flicker, 1966—a stroboscopic experiment famous for its attack on both the filmic medium and its audience’s senses—soon led to projects in which he treated film as a sculptural and performative material. 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 white emulsion paint and planned for them to be screened as slowly changing, fifty-year “films.” He invented musical instruments out of materials as humble as a Band-Aid tin or a park bench and presented these acoustical tools as sculptures themselves. In the 1980s, his ambitious films about power relations in the army and in prisons assembled large casts of collaborators. Such rollicking projects and performances (with artists including Mike Kelley, Tony Oursler, and Joe Gibbons) signaled Conrad's lifelong pioneering of cooperative approaches to art making.
Conrad was a professor in the Department of Media Study at the University of Buffalo from 1976 until his death. His regular programs for public access television, such as Homework Helpline, 1994–95, made him an influential voice in the Buffalo community. Representative examples from all of these projects are joined in this exhibition by Conrad’s last sculptures and installations, which evoked and critiqued what he perceived as an emerging culture of surveillance, control, and containment.
Introducing Tony Conrad: A Retrospective is organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY.
The Cambridge presentation is organized by Henriette Huldisch, Director of Exhibitions & Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center and Dan Byers, John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Director, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts.
The exhibition will travel to the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania in February 2019.
