(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Tony Conrad: Completely in the Present
Directed / photo: Tyler Hubby
What exactly is sound? And what is the connection between music and sound – when does sound turn into music, and when does chaos, noise, take over for the music? Such questions go right into the heart of Tony Conrad's practice. His soundmaking balances on the boundary of the musical, as many will perceive it, since rhythm and composition are reduced to a minimum: a few notes that are kept for a long time, then gradually slid into new phrases. The first time I heard him – it was talk of the piece Four Violins (1964) – I thought about the tuning of instruments, the mildly cacophonous, often trying sound of instruments that must be finely tuned before music is performed. For Conrad, there is no performance, or perhaps we should say that the mood is the performance: By staying in the mood, which is the music's prelude or beginning, he immerses himself in what music is and how the instruments sound in free dressage. His works balance the boundary between an eternal beginning – because there is never a clear theme, motif or climax – and an infinite immersion in sonic details. "I make this music because I love things that last a long, long time," Conrad tells me Completely in the Present, the new movie about his life and art, which will be shown during the Ultima festival this month.
Anti Professional. When Conrad began experimenting with this form of music in the late fifties and throughout the first half of the sixties, it was natural to see it as a sonic counterpart to the minimalism of visual art. Thus, among other things, Donald Judd reduced the sculpture to blocks of reduced shapes, which referred more to themselves than any figure in reality, Conrad located similar sonic "blocks" of sound distanced from the narrative, rhythmic, harmonic and composed. Unlike minimalist composers like Philip Glass – who admittedly relied on reduced sound elements and repetition, but who have a symphonic, st
orslagent drag through him – Conrad will in no way be a composer or professional musician. "I wanted to finish composing, I wanted to be anti-professional," he says. Still, there's something more about Conrad that does not come out so clearly in this film, but which is still there, if you listen. If we listen more closely, for example Four Violins, as I mentioned above, it is not a piece of composed music as we know it, but it still appears as a substantial sound stream, because it collects tones and moods from so many different sound sources in an exploratory and lingering way. To me it sounds like a sound collage, meditatively presented in the long run, or maybe I should say the procrastination – because it is a bit of both folk music tones, something punk-like and rusty, but first and foremost mesmerizing and ritual in this (as you hear) more and more touching, polyphonic and languorous soundscape. It's all about a contemplative state that the listener ends up in, a meditation driven by the sound as a mantra, which of course also corresponds well with the music as an extended beginning.
Into the core. Corresponding reductions appeared in Conrad's film debut The Flicker (1966), which alternated between whites and blacks frames which led to a mesmerizing strobe light. A light rhythm that was not so much in itself as it was a mirror for the viewer of the film. The film has been compared to John Cage's piece of music 4:33, which consisted of silence, or, more precisely, the whole setting round music performance – piano, pianist, audience, stage – but no music performed. The absent sound performance thus became a framing mechanism for anyone other sound that may appear in the 4 minutes and 33 seconds of conventional music for was played.
Conrad does not have the high-tension ambition of other contemporary artists: he just wanted to play, have fun, and do things as cheaply as possible.
In a similar way was Flicker an elliptical film that did not show any narrative image flow or tell any fictional narrative, but which showed the frame itself, the screen, the background, yes, the light that the film route consists of. This is how the film became a backdrop for the viewer own fantasies, whatever might appear while watching the film, as was the case with Cage's piece of music. Again, it is a matter of penetrating to the core of what the medium itself is, both as a cultural category and a tangible presentation medium for images. Conrad's films and music are reflective works that reflect the actual listening or viewing as an institution, simultaneous as it individualizes and localizes the fantasy world of each spectator by failing to give us a fiction we can get lost in.
Play. The funny thing here is, of course, that when we see or hear a "work", we expect something interesting – an object, a series of images or a rhythm – but instead a mirror is held up for both us and the institution we are part of as spectators. Conrad was as interested in ending the pompous film director's story as he was in putting an end to composing in music. He therefore continues to make films like Flicker – films consisting of alternating between horizontal and vertical stripes, for example. Minimalism here is extremely simple, but Conrad does not have the high-tension ambition of other contemporary artists: he just wanted to play, have fun, and make things as cheap as possible and easy to produce. At least that's what he says himself. Again, for their own part, these are something more, especially understood as ritually driven works with analytical effect, since they lead to an in-depth study of both the medium and the viewer himself.
Love. Another highlight, which must be said to be a stroke of genius, is Yellow Movie (1973). He had decided to do something wilder and more lengthy than Andy Warhol's films that lasted 24 hours, and would not give up until he managed to invent a film that lasted 50 years. This was technically impossible after all sun marks – then as now – but the solution was as simple as it was conceptually inventive: He painted a yellow painting, but categorized it as a film. The film was the 50-year decay of the yellow surface. The painting film was the story of the gradual degeneration of paint. In other words, the moving image was rudely and with a twinkle in the eye translated into a hybrid category of artwork between painting and the traditional, projected movement image.
Conrad was, in the best sense of the word, an amateur. We often think that amateurs are those who do not know something properly or pretend to know something, but, as Edward Said repeatedly remarked, the amateur is rather a person who shows care for what he does, rather than thinking about money and career. Specialization and professionalization often lead intellectuals and artists away from the care of thinking or creating art, while the amateur is uncompromising since he does not have to pay attention to keep a career going or please colleagues and critics. The word amateur also comes from love, which means love. This misguided amateurism permeated not only the music and movies Conrad worked on, but how he lived. He wanted to be as in contact as possible with, and within, the current economy. He did not want to be a wage worker – yes, he was even uninterested in becoming a famous artist. All of this may seem like a coquettish pose, high-level stalking, but Conrad was not a cheater, rather an artist who did what he did primarily because he loved it.
Tony Conrad – Completely in the Present appears daily on ANX North Workshop in Oslo in the period 7. – 17. September, as well as Thursday to Sunday in the period 18 September – 2. October.
