Tony Conrad
Tony Conrad, a/k/a Anthony S. Conrad, born 1940 he is known in various circles as 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. When the film was shown many of the viewers in the audience became physically ill. 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 BuffaloGraduate of Harvard University (A.B., 1962, major Mathematics) and recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship his 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 audi 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.
He continues to teach at the Department of Media Study at S.U.N.Y. Buffalo.
