For your consideration: a traveling museum show exposing new audiences to the multitalented force that was Tony Conrad.
For the currently uninitiated, this guy worked in many art forms, including film, painting, and performance. He was an early member of Fluxus and had a stint in The Velvet Underground. He created drone music with, of all things, a violin, and made seizure-rific stroboscopic films. But humor was Conrad’s most indelible quality, seen in his forays into public access television and “deep fried” movies, where he subjected film stocks to techniques normally suited to the culinary arts.
Now, to help celebrate the one-man-revolution in art and music that was Tony Conrad, a new exhibition called “Tony Conrad: A Retrospective” will be on display at Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts until December 30 (after that, it will be at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia from February until August next year, so no excuses).
In tandem with the traveling exhibition, an accompanying book has just been released through Koenig Books which collects pages of tidbits from the artist and the exhibition show in a tasteful, special-edition book. Grab a copy here and feast your eyes on a few choice photos below: