Tony Conrad: Completely In The Present

Date: 
Thursday, June 29, 2017 - 7:30pm
Location: 
Lyric Hall
827 Whalley Avenue
New Haven, CT 06515
Description: 
"Tony Conrad has slowly been emerging from avant-gardist obscurity over the past few years, and about time. His multifold career — as experimental film- and video-maker, composer, musician and sound artist — still looks radical and prescient a half-century after it began."
– New York Times, Sept. 2012
 
Tony Conrad: Completely in the Present is an unusual, non-fiction film examining the pioneering life and works of artist, musician, and educator, Tony Conrad. Tony Conrad is one the great American artists of our time, yet to the world at large he remains criminally underappreciated. Since the early 1960s, his films and compositions have been the stuff of legend for artists and musicians everywhere. His vast, inter-disciplinary repertoire has single-handedly created and influenced major film and compositional movements. He performed in and recorded the soundtrack to Jack Smith’s legendary Flaming Creatures; he turned the paradigm of representational cinema upside down with The Flicker; his development and practice of Just Intonation and Minimalism through his work with Stockhausen and La Monte Young still has the music establishment scratching their heads; his pivotal role in the formation of The Velvet Underground has directly or indirectly influenced everyone who has picked up a guitar since; as an early adopter of activist public access television he democratized the emerging medium of portable video. As an educator and collaborator he has inspired many artists working today.