Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage by Tyrus Miller | ART LIES:

A Contemporary Art Quarterly 8/30/10 6:22 PM

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Issue 63

Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage
by Branden W. Joseph, Zone Books, 2008

- Tyrus Miller -

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Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage by Tyrus Miller | ART LIES: A Contemporary Art Quarterly 8/30/10 6:22 PM

Imagine watching a documentary film that revisits familiar landmarks of artistic and cultural history of New
York in the 1960s: John Cage’s embrace of chance and non-intentional process, Robert Morris’ minimalist
sculptures, La Monte Young’s word pieces, Yoko Ono’s gallery, Fluxus events, Warhol’s Factory,
“underground film,” the Exploding Plastic Inevitable and the Velvet Underground, William Burroughs’
paranoic politics of language, and new performance from Happenings to the Living Theater, from Yvonne
Rainer to Jack Smith. Now imagine slowing down this film, not by half but by a slightly off-center interval.
A strange phenomenon occurs: details once invisible come to our attention. New connections appear.
Suddenly we notice presences and associations not previously evident. A letter from Robert Morris is sitting

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Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage by Tyrus Miller | ART LIES: A Contemporary Art Quarterly 8/30/10 6:22 PM

on the table where John Cage is doing an interview. Cage listens to an auditory device in Morris’ studio.
Burroughs’ Soft Machine is on La Monte Young’s bookshelf, wedged between a jazz album and the latest
issue of Film Culture. David Tudor performs Cage at the Living Theater…and who are the shadowy figures
in the back of the room? Voices murmur under others, like the subliminal quavers of tones held at long
duration.

My fanciful description of a film run at, say, 7/16 speed captures the experience of reading Beyond the
Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage, an elegant, meticulously researched history of the
golden years of artistic experimentation between 1959 and 1966. Joseph refocuses the historical machine by
shifting its pivot to a crucial yet “minor” figure in the established canon of the sixties avant-garde—
minimalist musician and experimental filmmaker Tony Conrad. As a multitalented artist and fellow traveler
of such notables as La Monte Young, Henry Flynt, Jack Smith and John Cage, Conrad always had a degree
of prominence within the New York art world. Our estimation of his importance has only increased over the
years, as he has inspired younger artists such as Mike Kelley and Tony Oursler, and engaged in a critically
sophisticated remapping of the past with his recordings on the Table of the Elements label.

Joseph’s aim, however, is not to convince us that Conrad’s music is “really more important” than Cage’s or
that he was the “real inventor” of underground film’s characteristics instead of Brakhage and Warhol.
Rather, it is to suggest that many minor histories—mostly untold, some not even perceived—remain
entwined within the apparently singular art history of the 1960s we have received, a tale of individual
breakthroughs, major figures, distinct movements and proprietary influences. To unsettle images of the past,
Joseph conjures the minor phantom of Conrad within major scenes: with Young drawing the resonances out
of a sustained tone, with Flynt picketing Stockhausen at Lincoln Center, with Jack Smith at the filming of
Flaming Creatures, with Lou Reed at a late-night recording session with the Primitives and so on
throughout the book. Like Zelig infiltrating the sixties avant-garde, the nerdy, bespectacled Conrad seems to
show up everywhere. For those who thought they knew this period, the result can be disorienting,
disconcerting and often astonishing. I recommend a close, lingering look at Joseph’s book. See if you can
spot Conrad for yourself.

Tyrus Miller is Professor of Literature and Associate Dean of Graduate Studies at the University of
California at Santa Cruz.

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