Frieze: Tony Conrad Thought of Everything

Tony Conrad Thought of Everything
By Shiv Kotecha for Frieze
May 15, 2019

No one ignored technology’s prescriptive limits better than Tony Conrad. In his six-decade long career as a composer, filmmaker, installation artist, activist and teacher, Conrad agitated countless aesthetic, sensory and perceptual regimes. In Introducing Tony Conrad: A Retrospective at the ICA, Philadelphia, Conrad’s scamp-like approach to mainstream media’s surveillance tactics, the art world’s cultural hubris and academia’s authoritarian push towards professionalization are magnificently displayed. No medium of expression passed Conrad by without becoming a site of aesthetic intervention and epistemological questioning: ‘Hold the sound’, Conrad asks his audience, and discover ‘what kind of things there are in there’.

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