Tony Conrad: An artist of the avant-garde and everyday
As someone who embraced both “the kitchen table and the avant-garde,” in the words of curator Dan Byers, Tony Conrad ’62 was never a gallery darling. Instead, the multimedia artist believed in making the creative process as accessible as possible — and ended up pushing the boundaries of film, sculpture, video, and music along the way. The artist’s work is being celebrated in “Introducing Tony Conrad: A Retrospective” at Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (through Dec. 30) and MIT’s List Visual Arts Center (through Jan. 6). The description by Byers, the John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Director of Carpenter Center, can be taken literally. The exhibit, which was organized by Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery, reveals all the humor that juxtaposition implies. On the lower level of the Carpenter exhibit (organized by Byers and List curator Henriette Huldisch), Conrad’s work “Pickled Film” is just that: celluloid loops fixed forever in Mason...