Born 1940
Lives Buffalo
Yellow Movie 3/31–4/2/73
1973
Gull white flat interior latex and white seamless paper
295x270cm
Courtesy Galerie Daniel Buchholz
Known for work ranging from radically enveloping, droning sound compositions to hypnotic Structuralist cinema, Tony Conrad has explored similar concerns across multiple media, collaborating both with contemporaries such as Angus MacLise and John Cale and, more recently, with younger artists such as Mike Kelley and Jim O’Rourke. In The Flicker (1965–6) Conrad created a form of harmonic structure with patterns of black and white film frames representing combinations of frequencies. Partly an assault on formalist aestheticism, it is also a revelatory distillation of the cinematic experience. Conrad’s ‘Yellow Movies’ (1972–6) are painted rectangles left to yellow over time, each accompanied by the date when the work ‘began’ and the materials used – showing a preoccupation with duration that persists in the performance Window Enactment (2007). (KJ)
