Video History Project

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Tony Conrad

Tony Conrad has taught video production and interpretation at the Department of Media Study at the University of Buffalo since the 1970s. His work in video, film and music composition and performance has been widely exhibited throughout the world. He has served as a board member of Media Alliance, Squeaky Wheel and Hallwalls, and has produced hundreds of shows for cable access in Buffalo. Several of his CDs are available on Table of the Elements label at alternative record stores.

Tony Conrad (b. 1940) has taught video production and analysis in the Department of Media Study since 1976. His artistic work includes video, film, music composition, and performance. After graduating from Harvard in mathematics (A.B. 1962), Conrad moved to New York to work with performance and music composition. In the 1960s he was associated with the founding of both "minimal" music and the "underground" cinema.

His film "The Flicker" is one of the key early works of the Structural Film movement. In the 1970s he took a teaching position at Antioch College in Ohio, and subsequently relocated to Buffalo to teach at UB. Here his work has been seen at Hallwalls, Media Study/Buffalo, UB, Big Orbit, and Cornershop. His contribution to the 1988 Western New York show at the Albright Knox Art Gallery was awarded the Graphic Controls Corporation Award.

While living in Buffalo, Conrad has shown video work at the Centre Beaubourg (Paris), Tokyo Video Festival, Infermental 7 and 9, Artists Space (NYC), Montbeliard (France), Osnabruck (Germany), Anthology Cinema (NYC), National Video Festival (LA), Museum of Modern Art (NYC), San Francisco Art Institute, Japan Film/Video Festival (Tokyo), the Herbert Johnson Museum (Ithaca), and elsewhere. In 1991 he had a video retrospective at the Kitchen Center in NYC, and in 1992 he was invited to present four video installations at the prestigious international art fair Documenta IX in Kassel, Germany. His film "The Flicker" toured in an international exhibition of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art's exhibition, "The American Century."

Regional and educational media activities are important among his ongoing activities. Conrad has produced more than 250 programs for Buffalo's public access cable station, including "Studio of the Streets," which he co-hosted for two and a half years; a live "Homework Helpline" show; and many education access programs. Since the 1980s, Conrad has been active in music, performing recent works in new-music venues, museums, and clubs in the U.S. and internationally.

In 1997 and 1998 he toured New Zealand, Japan, the U.S., and Europe with cellist Alexandria Gelencser. He has composed more than a dozen recent works, primarily for solo amplified violin with amplified strings, using special tunings and scales. His recent releases include "Early Minimalism Volume 1," a four-CD set, and "Slapping Pythagoras." He has also issued two archival CDs featuring the 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 has served on boards of directors of the Buffalo public access cable TV operator (now Buffalo Neighborhood Network), Squeaky Wheel, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, and other media arts organizations; and was a founding participant of such projects as Buffalo Learning Television, the 8mm News Collective, the Upstate Media Posse, and the Buffalo Board of Education's Committee on Education Access Television.

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"Tony Conrad." Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2011. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/tony-conrad.

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Summary

Tony Conrad (b. 1940) is a video, film and music composer and performer who has taught video production and analysis in the Department of Media Study at the University of Buffalo since the 1970s (formally since 1976) and previously held a teaching position at Antioch College in the 1970s. His work includes the film The Flicker and numerous video installations and performances exhibited at venues including Hallwalls, MoMA (NYC), Centre Beaubourg (Paris) and Documenta IX (1992, Kassel), and he had a 1991 video retrospective at the Kitchen. He has produced over 250 public-access programs in Buffalo, issued recordings including Early Minimalism Volume 1 and Slapping Pythagoras, toured internationally in 1997–98, and received support from NEA, NYSCA, SUNY, The Rockefeller Foundation and NYFA.

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Last modified 17 June 2011

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