Tony Conrad
Also Known As: Anthony Conrad, Anthony Schmalz "Tony" Conrad, Anthony Schmalz Conrad
Biography: Anthony Schmalz "Tony" Conrad was an American avant-garde video artist, experimental filmmaker, musician, composer, sound artist, teacher, and writer. Active in a variety of media since the early 1960s, he was a pioneer of both structural film and drone music. He performed and collaborated with a wide range of artists over the course of his career, most prominently La Monte Young's 1960s New York experimental music group Theatre of Eternal Music.
Department: Directing
Place of Birth: Concord, New Hampshire, USA
Adult: No
Birthday: July 03, 1940
Age: 84 years old
Gender: Male
Deathday: April 09, 2016
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Known For:
The Velvet Underground
Overview: Experience the iconic rock band's legacy in the first major documentary to tell their story. Directed with the era’s avant-garde spirit by Todd Haynes, this kaleidoscopic oral history combines exclusive interviews with dazzling archival footage.
Genres: Documentary Music
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2021-10-15
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Palace of Error
Overview: “A theory discourse among three participants, enacted in silhouette.” –Tony Conrad
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1982-01-01
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Home Movies 1971-81
Overview: Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: xx
Release Date: 1985-01-01
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Tiding over till Tomorrow
Overview: Originally debuted in 1977, where it took the form of a dual slide projection with live piano accompaniment by the artist. In the 2012 installation version at the Buffalo AKG, the slides were transferred to digital projection and Conrad’s live accompaniment was replaced by a contemporaneous recording of him playing piano. The piano accompaniment belongs to a larger durational performance project that Conrad called Music and the Mind of the World. Between 1976 and 1982, the artist—who was known as a violinist and had no formal piano training—recorded himself experimenting at length on the piano. The photographs that make up Tiding over till Tomorrow were taken by Conrad and are joined by a number of enigmatic texts slides by the artist Anne Turyn.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1977-01-01
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Tony Conrad: DreaMinimalist
Overview: The latest in Marie Losier's ongoing series of film portraits of avant-garde directors (George and Mike Kuchar, Guy Maddin, Richard Foreman), DreaMinimalist offers an insightful and hilarious encounter with Conrad as he sings, dances and remembers his youth and his association with Jack Smith. - Harvard Film Archive
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2008-01-10
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Lower East Side 12.12.12: Tony Conrad Interviewed by Michael Cohen
Overview: Tony Conrad interviewed on the streets of NYC.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2012-01-01
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Tony Conrad: Completely in the Present
Overview: Feature documentary on the pioneering life and work of iconoclastic filmmaker/musician/composer/artist Tony Conrad.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2016-06-01
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365 Day Project
Overview: This exhibition focuses on Jonas Mekas’ 365 Day Project, a succession of films and videos in calendar form. Every day as of January 1st, 2007 and for an entire year, as indicated in the title, a large public (the artist's friends, as well as unknowns) were invited to view a diary of short films of various lengths (from one to twenty minutes) on the Internet. A movie was posted each day, adding to the previously posted pieces, resulting altogether in nearly thirty-eight hours of moving images.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2007-12-31
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Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis
Overview: In this entrancing documentary on performance artist, photographer and underground filmmaker Jack Smith, photographs and rare clips of Smith's performances and films punctuate interviews with artists, critics, friends and foes to create an engaging portrait of the artist. Widely known for his banned queer erotica film Flaming Creatures, Smith was an innovator and firebrand who influenced artists such as Andy Warhol and John Waters.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2007-04-11
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Birth of a Nation
Overview: Filmmaker Jonas Mekas films 160 underground film people over four decades.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1997-08-06
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Normal Love
Overview: The feature length Normal Love is Jack Smith’s follow up to his now legendary film Flaming Creatures. This vivid, full-color homage to B-movies is a dizzying display of camp that clearly affirms Smith’s role as the driving force behind underground cinema and performance art of the post-war era. The cast includes Mario Montez, Diane de Prima, Tiny Tim, Francis Francine, Beverley Grant and John Vaccaro. Smith was known to constantly re-edit the film, often during screenings as it was still unspooling from the projector.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1963-01-01
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Teddy Tells Jokes
Overview: This exquisite single shot is a complement to Combat Status Go. Here the viewer is positioned casually, even though every other element in the film experiences a painful precision: piano, gun, wardrobe; conversation directed at (and across the bow of) the viewer; timing, direction, gaze. —Tony Conrad
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1980-01-01
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In Line
Overview: A trisection of the spectators’ power over their own image language: word, trance, and command are installed as valences of the artist’s license, revealed as figures of parental authority. How peculiar that people like being an audience because they enjoy their submission to the authority of the program. This ritual of being dominated is a conspiracy with themselves that we enjoy but refuse to acknowledge. “Oh, no. I don’t like TV because I’m submissive; it’s because it makes me feel good.” The programs are always carefully crafted to be sensitive to people’s selfprotectiveness, even if they offer a good scare, or a good cry. Well, if this is all true, what happens when, by chance, you submit to a program that refuses to be polite about your closet masochism? That tells all? —Tony Conrad
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1985-01-01
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Joan of Arc
Overview: The story of Joan of Arc as applied to the present revolution in arts and more. The Gothic is applied to the War in Vietnam. The film is experimental in the sense that in it the visual becomes tactile.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1967-01-10
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The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda
Overview: At the court of the Yellow Emperor, the Majoon Traveler & Lady Firefly appear in the Hall of Unconscious Magnetism.
Genres: Fantasy
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1968-01-07
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Escape From Rented Island: The Lost Paradise of Jack Smith
Overview: In his essay film, Jerry Tartaglia, longtime archivist and restorer of the film estate of queer New York underground, experimental film, and performance legend Jack Smith, deals less with Smith’s life than with his work, analyzing Smith’s aesthetic idiosyncrasies in 21 thematic chapters. It's a film essay about the artist’s work, rather than a documentary about his life. An unmediated vision of Jack Smith, an invitation to join him in his lost paradise.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2017-01-26
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Accordion
Overview: “A man, an accordion, a ladder, and a video camera. It’s as simple as that.” - Andrew Lampert
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1981-01-01
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Diaries, Notes, and Sketches
Overview: An epic portrait of the New York avant-garde art scene of the 60s.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2013-11-23
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Grandma Baba and Little Boris
Overview: Tradition, mystical revelation, the passing on of family secrets--all that is lost in translation. In this magical fairytale Grandma Baba struggles with the impossibility of telling what needs to be told. How can she pass on the traditions and stories of the Old Country to Little Boris, especially when Old Bandy Legs, a mercurial old magician, is vying to tell his stories? A humorous and whimsical tale made with puzzle pieces that never exactly fit together. Includes a stunning performance by Buffalo, NY as Mother Russia.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2000-01-01
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Music in the Afternoon
Overview: Fellow violinist and artist Tony Conrad, in collaboration with software engineer Tom Demeyer, made for Steina the instrument seen in this title. Conrad and the Vasulkas all taught at the University at Buffalo in the Media Study Department from 1976 to 1979.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2002-01-01
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The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye
Overview: An intimate, affecting portrait of the life and work of ground-breaking performance artist and music pioneer Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV) and his wife and collaborator, Lady Jaye, centered around the daring sexual transformations the pair underwent for their 'Pandrogyne' project.
Genres: Documentary Music
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2012-03-08
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The Genius
Overview: A ramshackle underground SF satire set and shot in the self-absorbed art world of lower Manhattan, written, produced, and directed by Joe Gibbons, who also plays one of the lead parts. Gibbons plays a mad scientist who's developed a technique for transferring personalities from one person's body to another; he becomes obsessed with an outlaw artist (played by performance artist Karen Finley) who destroys paintings in various galleries as a form of anarchist, anticapitalist protest.
Genres: Comedy Crime Science Fiction
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1993-04-02
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Scanty Claus
Overview: Mrs. Claus complains because Santa is away.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2002-01-01
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Grading Tips for Teachers
Overview: Tony Conrad provides useful & alternative grading tips for teachers. Made in Buffalo, NY.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2003-01-01
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