You Could Look It Up: Tony Conrad interviewed by David Grubbs

Tony Conrad has seen the following epithets attached to his name: composer, filmmaker, video artist, media activist, writer, and educator.   In the last several years, he has found an enthusiastic audience for his amplified string music, a healthy sampling of which is documented on the four-CD set Early Minimalism: Volume One (Table of the Elements). Hand in hand with his recent music has been Conrad's research and writing about the traditions of demagoguery and antipopulism in Western music from Pythagoras to the present.

DG: Let's assume that you are an animal, like a whale, with your eyes where your ears might otherwise be.   Which is to say that you are capable of looking in two different directions at the same time, albeit with a large blind spot in the center.   With Early Minimalism , to what extent are you simultaneously looking backwards, looking forward, and enjoying the blind spot of the moment in which you're sawing away at the violin?

TC: I've been digging through a bit of nautical terminology recently because I have an interest in a word which was almost nonexistent in ancient Greek: skantagio , which means "sounding lead."   It's a part of dredging the past up into the present and, like a sperm whale, taking in a huge mouthful of stuff and spitting out the water to leave the food behind.   That idea of time as something that you see ahead or behind and then may not see at all straight ahead is an interesting metaphor.   You can think of it that way, or you can think of time being visible in all of those aspects in the present.  

DG: People are increasingly familiar with your films, particularly The Flicker and Film Feedback .   How does your recent music relate to your work in participatory, community-activist video, of which people are less familiar?

TC: The era of the modernist artist   who has become something of a minor celebrity as a participant in authorship, a big-game hunter of cultural artifacts, is coming to an end.   Today celebrity is more and more a part of product promotion.   The diffusion of information and cultural material through television and tapes and CDs and other channels is the way to bring voices into the discourse of the world.   A lot of my effort in media in the last ten years has been about that.   I've been working with public access, organizing independent collectives to produce alternative video; producing homework-helpline shows for kids in the city; and developing information systems that can link urban kids to their schools.   The way that people discover esoteric music is through their own urges to become a part of something and to participate.   Once long ago we would have said it's an urge for them to express themselves; but everything that's ironic in contemporary culture makes it obvious that nobody knows what that means any more, and with good reason.   We're talking about widening the circle of cultural power, so that people can become real players.   That doesn't mean that everybody is going to be Michael Jackson.   Don't make me laugh.   It doesn't just mean that if you don't like the TV shows you can change the channel.

DG: It's somewhere between those two.

TC: It's way beyond both.   It means that if you want to be active as a part of your world, you have to go to where your entry point is, just like on the internet.   When you read this conversation a few years from now, you may wonder what I'm talking about.   But today the internet has still got some of the traces of being a genuinely decentralized, person-oriented phenomenon.   So if you like the Dead C, you go on and wind up networking with New Zealand.   And if you like . . .

DG: . . . the real Dead Sea . . .

TC: . . . or if you like ancient Greece, you can go to Perseus and look up skantagio yourself.