‘Challenge, dichotomy, aggression, opposition’: Tony Conrad
How to briefly introduce Tony Conrad? You could easily do it yourself by googling his name and come across a string of breathtaking references and countercultural links. You would find out that Tony Conrad is a composer who actually disposes the composer. Ever since the early sixties, he has been on the threshold of the avant-garde, continuously stretching the political and social implications of his radical art. I meet Tony Conrad, the composer, filmmaker, video artist, media activist, writer, and educator, in the context of Washington DC’s best kept secret, Sonic Circuits, a festival of experimental music where he was performing, aggressively but adventurously, with his recent musical companion Violent Raid.
I’ve been fascinated by your view of music as an experiential environment that you create for people to participate in. How do you see that exactly?
Tony Conrad: “I see that in a variety of ways. For example, music has a unique relationship to space, unlike many other forms of cultural expression. It is unrelenting and pitiless in the way that it surrounds people in the space and pokes into their bodies, occupies and causes their bodies to react. It’s a horrifyingly intimate kind of thing. That’s one kind of a relationship, and then another one of course is the political consequence of that. Music can be adopted and used in a veiled way to implement the designs of those who are in authority.”
Isn’t music something abstract? Where does the political element come in?
Conrad: “That’s a very complicated thing, because it happens on different levels and these levels don’t seem to be integrated. It happens in capitalism also. There are people who go to the store and buy things and they think that that is capitalism. Then there are other people who are actually investing money in elaborate corporate systems and they think that’s capitalism. These two levels don’t connect except through money, and this turns out to be very effective. With music, it’s a similar thing. There is the person who is listening to a song, the words, the beat, the music, the nostalgia, and all of the personal reactions it brings forth. This seems completely unrelated to the theoretical conditions in which larger structures sometimes seemingly automatically fulfill those needs. In the European tradition, there is a sense that concerts, music being played by orchestras while the audience is just listening, were always there and that this is almost a fact of nature. We begin to see more clearly now, as this institution is being threatened, that it was a temporary thing that only lasted for a few hundred years. If we look very carefully at it, we can see that there are reasons why this institution was brought into existence and that these reasons have to do with the way the society was organized into powerful states.”
So, there is a connection between all these components?
Conrad: “Yes, there is a connection between a soulful person going to a concert in 1830, listening to Chopin, and the way that the orchestra was organized so that power structures could be used to control emotional states among large groups of people. If you want to understand that connection, you will have to dig really hard because these traditions are so strong that people even resist understanding these things. It becomes more clear in the area of music theory, because in theory people deal more directly with these questions. In relation to the kind of music that I play, I like to see it as having less issues of unity and more issues of openness. The sound becomes an example of itself that is useful to the opening and understanding of structural relations by the viewer and by the performers. Other people who play music that’s long duration music, think that it is hopelessly unified and sacred and that it has no relation to anything at all on this earth. That sort of idealism isolates it from the social and the political.”
There is a lot of tension when you are performing.
Conrad: “Well, I am rooted in the avant-garde tradition, whereas Violent Raid has a punk background. These are two different traditions that contain elements of challenge, dichotomy, aggression, opposition, ways of regarding the audience with a great deal of ambivalence. Within the early avant-garde tradition I was close to, which was around the Fluxus period, the audience was really treated like a body of people that you could take advantage of and insult.”
Fluxus indeed still incorporated a very traditional Western conception of performer versus audience.
Conrad: “I’m more interested in reaching into a broader political and social framework. In a concert that I recently played in Brussels, we performed a revised work of mine from 1972. For the revision I wanted to create a new sense of dialectic or dialogical relation. There were two groups of musicians that played differently, both adopting elements of a minimal background tradition but also involving the oppositional performance skills that have been developed in recent practices. The New York Times mentioned in an article that the French speaking and the Dutch speaking people in Belgium hate each other. I don’t believe this to be true, but there’s an element of dialogical system that relates to how people self-identify. In our performance we adopted themes from the two national hymns, ‘Le Chant des Wallons’ and ‘De Vlaamse Leeuw’. So, we have these two elements that we introduce gradually into the antiphony so that people in the audience are drawn to self-identify in different ways with the music and with the performance. I’m interested in this attitudinal shift through which the listener is not only positioned as either outsider or insider. In this case we invoked a condition in which the tension in the music performance is actually transposed into the audience as a body. I’m very interested in working with this kind of situation, because I think that this is a way of exploring the relation between politics and music. Not in the way of dominating people from above or in the way of simply saying ‘here is my song, the earth is green, don’t kill animals, don’t be mean, you don’t know what you have seen until you come around to green’ (Laughing).”
Your music is not easy; it challenges people to think differently about what the concept of music can be. At the same time you are against elitism. How do you see these big contradictions coming together?
Conrad: “That’s an important idea! What we’re doing is in some sense elitist, but you have to look really at what elitism means, and what it is, and why you want to define things in those terms. We are participating in a system of living which is clearly elite in relation to most of the people in the world, just to begin with. But, within the system that we’re involved with here, I don’t think that it is so much a condition of separation on the basis of some kind of stigmatization as it is a manipulation of community.”
What is in your view the job of an artist?
Conrad: “Well, I’ve been quoted for saying something that I really like and so I can say it again: I think the job of an artist is to break laws that haven’t been written yet. That’s not the only thing to do, because that suggests that it is simply a kind of unitary activity. It seems that in the contemporary world artists need to self-recognize and identify as a community in order to keep the dream alive, to recognize that there is a constructive rule in various levels of the social order for people to do something outside of the excepted stream of commodity production. Although, the lines are crossed, obviously, some important work is produced by huge Hollywood studios. But, I’m talking about individual artists.”
Do you feel it’s still possible to be radical these days? The beginning of the Sixties and the Seventies seem so different, wasn’t it a time when it was still possible to change people’s expectations and perceptions, whereas now everything seems to have already been done?
Conrad: “When I got involved with the culture rocket, there was a kind of acceptance, understanding, of progress. There was a general idea that something was developing, that things were changing in some meaningful way. I think part of what you’re getting at is that it’s not exactly clear what that would mean today, except in the way that we speak about technology moving ahead, which was happening back then too, but here we are talking about some fundamental shift in artistic perceptions. People were happy with that, but the question is whether it really happened or not. It was self-perceived so it did happen that way. Today people are less inclined to think in those terms and that earlier period becomes iconic of this quality of the changeability of things. It’s easy for us to retain this idea that there was progress, but I’m not sure there really was. If you look at the things that were achieved and that did move ahead in these earlier times, and compare them to the opportunities today, I would say that there are exactly the same opportunities as there were before. If you don’t see what they are, that is because you’re not the one who is taking them.”
Here for Tony Conrad’s website.
This text appeared first in a different version in hART, a magazine on contemporary art in Belgium and its surroundings.
