Tony Conrad (the avant guard is funny)
Posted by Aeron Bergman
I invited Tony Conrad to lecture in my class at the Art Academy of Oslo today. He was charming, funny and candid about the early days of film experiments, music iconoclasm, and conceptual jokes. It is nice to see someone move fluently between several disciplines. My students and I loved the lecture. I pointed out that the marketing of the avant guard such as Fluxus is usually as serious as a tomb stone, but in fact, much of this stuff is witty, funny and life affirming. Conrad agreed and said George Maciunus told him laughing while packing his flux boxes with junk: “look, I´m sending my garbage to collectors! Ha!”
Tonight at the Oslo Cinemateket, Conrad screened a large selection of his 16mm films including Flicker, Curry Film, and Feedback film. His funny explanations of the films offset the rather reverential attitude studies of such films usually take. For Feedback Film, he said the difference between film and video appeared to be the feedback video could make. So with some ironic spite, he developed a system to make film feedback: with help from assistants, he filmed a candle, processed it, fed it back to the projector and filmed it again and fed that back into the projector in a loop. (Film still below.) With Curry Film, he cooked a film in curry. Mesmerizing, beautiful, inspiring stuff.
Short clip of the curry film
