SOUND ARTS, SUTURES
& PSEUDOPODS An
Interview with Tony Conrad
by Luke
Jaaniste
Tony
Conrad is considered one of
the first "minimal" composer/performers,
associated in his early period with La
Monte Young, John Cale, Henry Flynt and
legendary New York underground filmmaker,
Jack Smith. Conrad is also acknowleged
as a pioneer of structuralist filmmaking
(his 1960s film The Flicker is
one of the key early works of the "structural"
film movement), and in recent years he
has presented and performed at festivals
and events worldwide.
Conrad has worked in music composition,
video, film, and performance and has taught
video production and analysis in the Department
of Media Study of the State University
of New York at Buffalo since 1976. During
the last ten
years, Conrad has focused on music and
performing recent works in new music venues,
museums and clubs in the US and internationally.
He has composed more than a dozen works,
primarily for solo amplified violin with
amplified strings, using special tunings
and scales.
Luke Jaaniste speaks with Tony Conrad
about then and now.
What are the main similarities
between sound arts and music in the 1960s
and the 1970s and today? What are the
main differences?
There is a big difference between nostalgia,
on the one hand, and finding uses for
the past, on the other hand. Because the
1960s were the first years in which it
became possible for experimental artists
on very small budgets to document their
work at all accurately – with video
and audio recorders, in particular –
it is tempting to look back wistfully
at these records and see them as offering
a window onto a lost, romantic "reality."
However, I prefer instead to see this
"window" as a suggestion that
cultural invention today is not unique;
that marginal cultural production has
probably been an unrecorded presence over
a vast scope of time and space, while
only that cultural production which has
been linked to systems of power has been
recorded, sustained, and mythologised.
It is significant today that quasi-urban
"communities" of marginal arts
and music can spring up in the global
context of the internet, multiplying the
ways opposition to hegemonic cultural
systems can be configured. And if past
cultural initiatives can stand in as models
of remote and inviolable practices, as
models for what alternative cultural formations
are (or might be) possible, then the record
of the 1960s (and other times) may prove
in fact to be very useful.
What
do you think are the most interesting
directions in sound arts today, and why?
Sound arts is a vast landscape. Looking
out there, you can see hordes of hustlers
pushing their Sisyphian balls of "rock"
up the money hill. And at the same time,
you can still find other people trucking
along the old pothole-filled highway of
academic serialism and bleep-blop music.
But as we wander toward these market-bound
and tradition-bound people, coming at
them as we do from every direction on
the map, today we find that they seem
a bit quaint, rather than heroic or portentous.
I think this is because we're coming at
them from a thousand interesting directions.
On the global charts, there are hybrid
musics boiling up almost everywhere. People
used to look at these weird spliced
cultures with the attitude that cultural
"purity" was disappearing, but
now, today, there are new directions for
approaching mixed musics, and I think
this is an excellent development. One
person might hear Kronkong as post-colonial
music; another person could hear Hip Hop
as a branch of Krautrock; someone else
might hear cellphone ringers as electronic
pop. The spew of recorded sound everywhere
has jaded all of us, and we only hear
stuff the way we want to, making
our own decisions about it, because the
"consumerist" idea of "choice"
has backfired, exploded.Too much Top 40
has vaporised musical culture, blown it
all over a worldwide, freeform, multidimensional
perceptual map. In that space, a lot of
the directions are sutures or pseudopods,
and most of them are interesting. Art
critic Tony Godfrey has suggested that
much contemporary work is simply a reworking
of ideas conceived in the 1960/70s –
that the work today is simply more polished,
with higher production qualities (for
him this is a negative thing). What's
your opinion?
Some work today is, of course, really
polished versions of previous stuff. The
most famous example of this trend in Western
music is JS Bach, whose sons were shaping
the new idiom while the old man fussed
over the older principles of baroque style.
However, today something very interesting
is happening at the other end of the spectrum
entirely, because of the relative perfection
of recording technologies. People are
finding it more and more possible to take
"bad" production values seriously,
or even to more or less ignore production
value as a critical factor altogether.
Maybe this "aesthetic" of acceptance
began at the bottom end of the economic
spectrum – when people listened
carefully to "bad" early recordings
of bebop or country blues. Maybe it began
with John Cage's cutups and music made
with toys. Maybe it began with punk. In
any case, I am hearing a lot of liberated
usages of "bad" sounds today
– "bad" versions of earlier
work, ideas, and techniques. And some
of this stuff is certainly opening our
access to fresh and unexplored ways of
listening.
How
have you been able to sustain your own
practice over the decades? Can you list
some strategies and methodologies that
keep you going as an artist?
What else should anybody say?
Listen.
Think.
Care.
Do.
How
similar or dissimilar is your current
practice to your early years of working
as an artist? In what ways is it different?
What are some reasons for any changes?
In 1974 I became a college teacher. At
some point I decided to try to change,
rather than destroy, music or film, by
creating work that could intervene disruptively
into the field's critical machinery. I
also have had the experience of changing
the basis I had for inventing images –
from a problem-solving approach to an
understanding involved with ideas of social
power. Overall, my sense of time has changed,
as my own experience has begun to encompass
a greater historical scope. As people
have died around me, I have (ironically)
seen more reason to save and sustain my
own output, whether or not it is valued
by others.
I have spent a lot of time seeing value
in working as an "animator"
– one who abets the productive activity
of others, rather than exercising their
own ego – and giving up my public
role as an "artist" per se.
This change brought me more or less into
line with some ideas that have recently
surfaced under the rubric "relational
aesthetics." I have decided, too,
that a good idea might be to reveal the
relationships that culture has had with
state or other systems of power in the
West, and to revisit historical junctures
in music with a purposeful attitude that
might point out how music has been complicitous
with various power structures. But of
course, this is only skimming over the
surface of a deep sea of changes, full
of cross-currents and eddies.
