Tony Conrad: the Basta! Interview
by Craig Reynolds
from v1n4 (summer/fall 1998)
The Following interview with legendary avant-garde violinist, composer, media artist and academic Tony Conrad was inspired by the release of Early Minimalism Vol. 1, an essential box set of 4 CDs (one enhanced for CD–Rom capabilities) and a 96 page booklet in which Conrad effectively undercuts the official history of Mimalist music and re-orients it around an original, less-commercial set of incentives. Primarily concerning itself with attempts by Conrad's Dream Music collaborator LaMonte Young to establish singular authorship of a body of improvised music that, according to Conrad, was composed in an entirely democratic fashion, Early Minimalism boldly re-asserted Conrad's own place in the continuum of 20th Century Music while achieving for its composer cult-like status among emerging avant-garde artists and musicians. Although Conrad had been a familiar face on the art scene in Buffalo since the mid-70s, this interview was an attempt to re-acquaint younger audiences with a local legend of international magnitude.
REYNOLDS: T o begin with, I found a review of Early Minimalism on the internet in which its author made an interesting statement: "where [Philip] Glass's sleek, polished arpeggios have all the appeal of the entrance lobby of a corporate headquarters complete with potted plants and imitation leather armchairs, Conrad's work stands alone, weather–beaten in a field, a menhir, a dolmen" (Dan Warburton). I thought this was interesting because Buffalo is your home, and in many ways, living in Buffalo is like standing in a field in the middle of nowhere: you're alone, you're free, the legislators of American corporate reality have forgotten you, and that's happy. Have you considered your artistic development in terms of Buffalo's place at the margins of American life?
CONRAD: Well, I arrived in Buffalo just shortly after Hallwalls got started and also, an organization that's now gone the way of so many Buffalo institutions, Media Study/Buffalo, and it was an exciting time because of the gush of Rockefeller-inspired state financing for culture. Of course, the idea was that culture money would keep the Left busy and prevent any of that nastiness Rocky had witnessed in the sixties, and it worked to some extent. Now that all of that has been nipped in the bud, it's easier to see that the culture money really didn't sink too deep into the local population. And the result is that nowadays Hallwalls is really bringing in people in big numbers with a somewhat different kind of fare. Phil Glass experienced the same sort of evolution, I think. He came up to Buffalo a couple of times. I remember when he played the Modern Love Waltz at Hallwalls and I was so impressed with the upfront simplicity and character that that little bagatelle suggested. Constance DeJong, who, if anything, completely outshown Phil on that occasion, later had such despicable comments to make about the guy with whom she had been involved that I came to understand that just as his music in Mahabarata had turned religious, had turned spiritual, that Phil had somehow caught a whiff of the scent of money. Nothing from that point on stood in his careerist path. That's obvious.
One of the things that Buffalo has preserved, in all of us here, is a feeling of being real, and in fact we call it the City of No Illusions and make a dead cliche out of that by repeating it so often but it's really true. We have everybody here: we've got geniuses and fools, we've got successes and failures––and people who think they are successes but aren't––and we have such a powerful set of ethnic mixes and hatreds that we really stand as a mirror to the country. In the mean-time, we're always bringing outsiders in and discharging ourselves into the rest of the country like some kind of uh, well I don't want to say toxic waste [laughs] . . . like some kind of additive––an additive. And I find Buffalo people everywhere I go! It's astonishing how they wind up in just the right places, whether it's The Kitchen . . . or The Cabaret . . . whether it's a CEO or a uh, comeback musician. And we, in some ways, manage to preserve . . . somehow, this mix that we have is like a preservative that prevents any of us from really going too far in one direction or another. We have aspirations but we don't sacrifice them on the altar of success too much. We run out and make money and have our success but we don't give up our ideals. And so, I guess that this is one of the things that makes Buffalo, for me, a real American laboratory.
Now I want to turn around and face your question head–on as a media academic: I think Buffalo's demography is one of its great assets. We're full of people who are overqualified, people who will pay attention and who hate their jobs. We may be at each other's throats sometimes––black versus white, suburbs versus urban, adults versus children, the blue versus white collar and so forth but somewhere in all of this, in each part of this, there's a sense of pride and identity which gives me hope that each aspect of the community authorizes its own cultural identity and, sure enough, we can explore all kinds of different directions in music and art and writing and commerce and for that matter, pet shows and tractor-pulls and last but not least, football teams. I'm just brining all of this up because I think it's fascinating that even the most unusual cultural objects in Buffalo find their own level at some point and the person who lives next door is as likely to be a jewel thief or a symphony oboe player as they are to be an office worker or a street worker.
And by the way, as far as Phil Glass is concerned, in terms of musical technology, I am trying to figure out what went wrong, not with the man but with his music. What I'm inclined to suspect is the automaton rhythms that he has ridden . . . and you might take that as an overly general criticism . . . because the whole minimal revival that came out of Kraftwerk and divided to form, in some miraculous way, a hip–hop culture and minimal subculture in the same gesture . . . the Kraftwerk automaton rhythms seemed to open up a space that needed to be filled, whereas what Glass did seemed to me to move in some other direction that I don't really understand right now.
REYNOLDS: That’s interesting because what you’re saying reminds me of something that was said about you on a Faust website that I’d like to throw out to you: “Faust music is open, Conrad music is closed. Faust music has humour, sharp changes of direction. It moves towards you then pulls away again, making space for you to think about what is done, about the meaning of sound and the meaning of silence. Conrad music stays in one place, moving in a tiny circle that neither lets you think about the music or understand it; Instead, you simply ‘experience’ it, in the sense of having it forced onto you” (Andy Wilson). Now, I don’t agree with this at all––but I nevertheless thought it would provide an interesting opportunity for you to comment on the difference between an open and closed minimalist utterance.
CONRAD: Well, that’s a good place to remark on a couple of different things, but for me that doesn’t have much to do with the question about rhythm. I guess that my comments about rhythm were largely motivated by thoughts I’ve had about the relationship between music and military coordination of people, and the fact that hymns, anthems, marches and dances have all been used to control groups of people by coordinating their bodily movements and thoughts and sometimes that process has been very clearly linked to state power or church power or some other social force and sometimes the connection has been a little more vague. The reason I suggested I didn’t want to be more clear about the full meaning of rhythmic repetition in Glass and Reich is that I hate to put rhythm in and of itself in this particular place, where it’s bonded to state control and the domination of groups of people, but it’s very interesting . . . and one reason why I’m reluctant to that is because of the example that comes out of a situation such as the way in which South Bronx rappers bought into the Kraftwerk musical idea and used it to produce a radically self–assertive, individualist musical form built on this mechanical rhythmic repetitiveness. So, things don’t always work out the way you expect. But there are things about rhythm that deserve a tough look that they haven’t had, and it’s the kind of attention that I’ve been trying to give to harmony and the Western Tradition––myself and my studies over the last several years––but I haven’t been able to dig into rhythm in the Western tradition yet, so I’m trying to hedge my bets.
But as far as the other question that you bring up in the same breath there, which has to do with intimations that I’m involved in the same kind of autocracy, cultural autocracy, a kind of attitude imposed from within the sound that is saying, “you’re nailed to the wall, Mother Fucker!” . . . you know, like, “don’t move or think without my command!” . . . that’s a good challenge. I think that’s an important challenge. It’s a challenge that needs to be leveled at almost every kind of cultural object in the entire orbit of Western quote unquote civilization, because that autocracy is a kind of authority that is linked directly to authorship itself. You could say the same thing about any novelist or about any speaker, that their very utterance is commanding the direction of your attention and is insistent in its interpretation according to their prescription, but there are a number of things that subvert that. One is the obvious condition that people arrive at a cultural object from different cultural backgrounds. For this particular person, it seems that their way of receiving my music was such that they had found no space within it to mobilize their own invention and their own attentiveness and it froze them in the headlights. I expect that’s because of the same thing that happens with wild animals, that there’s something very unexpected that happens . . . it’s unfamiliar, and creates an environment where the person feels they’re being dominated. People have been resistant to “modern art” for the same reason: they feel that they are being manipulated by it. And, of course, in the case of modern art, there’s been some truth in that because modern art has thrived on its ability to dismember the audience into the insiders and the hoy palloy, the great unwashed––you know, the lowbrow set. I come at that question a lot more directly in my video work, and in some of my pieces from the ‘80s and late ‘70s I’ve made a very deliberate attempt to try to work with the kind of values that this particular critic is voicing––that is, trying to build special kinds of spaces for viewer authority and to build paradoxes around authorial autocracy that cause it to collapse or cause it to be displayed in its excess. And I think that’s one of the things that I’ve done that I prize the most, so in some sense I’m extremely happy that this person has come up with this critique because it’s a critique that I want to see applied to things myself. I don’t mind it being applied to Early Minimalism because this particular work is fitted into a framework of the traditions of Western composition and that whole tradition, I would claim, is susceptible to his critique. I would certainly discount any of his statements to the effect that somehow Faust is not susceptible to that critique because I think Faust is equally susceptible to that critique and, in fact, one of the interesting things that bears on this has to do with the conceptual framework in which this sort of music arose in the beginning of the 1960s. That was a time when we were looking for a space within which the listener would be empowered to occupy sound space and to move around in a completely different way. There’s very clear evidence of this in the way that John Cage wrote about Zen and his music because he described his music in related terms. He described his music as in some way akin to the random experience of sound in the environment, which the viewer could inhabit as it were and Brandon Joseph makes a case of this in some of his writing, that––as it were––Cage breaks the listener out of the cultural framework and places him or her––but since it’s a Modernist listener, him perhaps––in Nature––and that’s Nature with a capital N. So, Nature somehow penetrates the cultural wall and begins to become a part of everything. It’s like you were just there and you just listened. So, part of then our conscious response to the conditions of Cage’s challenge to the Western compositional tradition in the late ‘50s was to construct a soundscape within which, as a listener, you could find room to situate yourself and to re–situate yourself and to compose a listened response. What that means is that there needs to be some continuity within the sound and a variety of levels of structure in the timescape of the sound which allow for different kinds of things to be experienced. I was particularly absorbed by the events that happened in a short interval of time and although this music seems to be . . . you know, it’s called “drone music” and so forth and it seems to go on in an unchanging way, that description is a product of faulty listening because the music changes from micro–second to micro–second––well, from millisecond to millisecond, I correct myself––it changes from millisecond to millisecond. There’s not rhythmic activity but sub–rhythmic activity. And some rhythmic activity but very fast fluxuations and changes in the timbral environment and changes in the spatial quality and other changes which simply construct a different kind of listening space in which people can move around. Perhaps this is not narrative in the episodic way that Faust music is, and if you have a thirst for that then you have to go to the well, but there’s as much to listen for in this sound as in any other musical space.
REYNOLDS: Now, I want to ask you about some of your work specifically, starting with The Flicker. In Early Minimalism, you compared Dream Music to Andy Warhol's Empire, a film that nobody saw but everybody knew as if they had seen. In many ways, your film The Flicker is similarly legendary, and potentially as open to co-optation as Warhol's images have proven to be, in so far as the images are more or less content-less. With The Flicker, the disruption that the film engenders is cataclysmic but ironic; when I first saw it––at Artists & Models a few years ago––many people who walked into the room didn't realize a film was actually being shown and moved onto the next installation. I'm sure that in an art gallery setting, or in a screening room, the disruptive aspects of the piece would have been made more definite. Nevertheless, I was puzzled by the fact that this very disruptive work failed to disrupt these people. To what extent is The Flicker an autonomous work of art and to what extent is it dependent on the typical film language that it subverts?
CONRAD: Well, I think that to answer the first part of your question about how parallel The Flicker is to Andy Warhol's early films, those films struck me at the time as having a strong Dada, Neo–Dada quality. That is, they stunned people. They also, upon reflection, brought some kind of new visual awareness, delivered some kind of new visual awareness. What I didn't like about his films particularly . . . as a scowling young man . . . was that they weren't really very fun. What I found most elusive but amazing about movies was their ability to transport the viewer, through narrative, into a realm outside of the here and now. And so, since you asked this question in the framework of the time when the work was made, I'm trying to sort of grind the clock back and answer the way I would have at the time, and what I would have said then was that I wanted to make a movie . . . underlined––a movie, not a film––a movie that would subvert and reveal, in some way, the weakness in "abstract art." I thought The Flicker could be an "abstract film," but at the same time it could be an experience and that experience happens to have a special quality that comes about through a confederacy with the viewer. Because of that, it doesn't leave a residue of universal images that can be abstracted off and carted around with you afterwards. That makes it a little different from a kind of abstract art that can be appropriated as an institutional icon. It's a work which will collaborate with you but if you don't need it and you don't want it, it won't give you anything, and that's what makes it successful. Ignore The Flicker, it ignores you. Love it and it gives you what you see most.
REYNOLDS: Great. A slightly different question: your vision of the Dream Syndicate proposes a correlation between "Dream Music" and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s "dream" speech (and the program of social change it represented), as opposed to the "eternal" pretenses of LaMonte Young. However, the fact that your participation in this music was derailed by Young's autocratic tendencies makes me wonder how effective the socially–progressive agenda really was. It seems to me that to re–assert the progressive path followed in Dream Music, you had to author it back (by composing it into the music and by authoring the massive booklet included with the recordings). Could you comment on the disjunction between the anti–authorial stance you champion in Dream Music and the fact that you had to revert to composition in order to re–achieve it?
CONRAD: That's a good question. Well, first, to answer it, let me say that LaMonte's personal outlook never stood in the way of the music––conceptually, practically, emotionally and in the basic love of sounds. The problem arose from the circulation of our music as a cultural object in this way that is strangely unique to the era of recordings . . . but to get to the heart of your question, in the early ‘60s, things seemed a little simpler because of the misunderstandings that were so rife all over the culture map. In some way, people were much more inclined to believe in absolutes and symbolic action was taken for real. Young artists today have a much bigger problem because they can't get away with these things. A purely symbolic action will run into some pretty tough questions and that's very good. If you have a social program today, it has to be tied to results. I think the only blind spot of a comparable size in today's outlook is our acceptance of the dominant media as the be-all and end-all. That is, if you're an artist and you have a program for social change today and you can deliver that program as a media statement, everyone will believe that you have done something positive, but the relation between a media statement and true social impact remains very unclear and un–tested, unproven and unreliable. And most artists today tend to put that out of mind. After all, we can say, aren't we in America? [laughs]. Isn't this the land where media is the reality? Or the hyper-reality or the hype-or-reality? [Laughs].
REYNOLDS: Yeah, and ironically, to make a statement as a media–package is often to defuse the abrasiveness of it because once it’s sort of sent into media–orbit it becomes one with the media . . . it is media. I am concerned with what happens when various forms of subterranean pop culture are co-opted or just simply (mis)understood according to a more "traditional," or "official" use of the language(s) these forms evoked soley to subvert. On a simple pop level, something like punk rock, which in its blanket denial of certain things, because it engages in the conversation using the terms that ultimately it wants to reject, can end up on a car commercial at 8 o'clock on a Thursday, sandwiched between Friends and Seinfeld, because of the fact that it didn't stand aloof from the national media consciousness enough to really transcend it or escape it. At the same time, with the case of some Minimalist art, the fact that it stays aloof means that the media or anybody with an academic program can apply their own language to articulate it culturally. How is it possible to do something that isn't going to end up reinforcing the mean or simply being in harmony with it? How can one achieve significant disruption when one's "symbolic" gesture does not actively promote an alternate discourse, nor does it actively protect itself against co–optation?
CONRAD: Well, part of the condition in which a symbolic action doesn't work anymore is simultaneously the condition where we're recognizing that you don't ever make the last, ultimate statement and nothing is perfectly correct and nothing is perfectly finished. That's to say that we're involved in a process, not a symbolic architecture in Heaven. So, I think that we can begin to sniff out the paradoxes and contradictions in all of these forms that tie us down to cultural labels. Punk rock is a good example, it's full of those things. It's alternative but fascist, it's socially unacceptable but nostalgic, like being a hippie [laughs] or a beatnik [laughs]. It's anti–intellectual but, as Lipstick Traces, the great book, gives us to know, it's tied to some of the toughest thinking in the 20th Century. So, was it right? Was it wrong? Was it good enough? [laughs]. None of the above! [laughs].
And anything can be used by the person that cites it for their own purposes. That's one reason why I like to talk about the good stuff rather than the crappy stuff even when I take pot–shots. So, don't get me wrong, punk rock and Phil Glass and LaMonte Young are real hefty, heavy–weight targets [laughs]. The fun thing to do, I think, is to tackle the big game. Like, to go after consumerism or corporate America [laughs], which is trampling us like mice under elephants. But then again, it seems like people lie down and have elephants walk over them. Otherwise, elephants would be in trouble. Rogue elephant, rogue corporation . . .
REYNOLDS: How do you feel about the union of art, music & pop culture (as perhaps launched, seriously, in America with Warhol and his Exploding Plastic Inevitable)? Has it proceeded down the wrong path (in terms of achieving its potential in this marriage)? Is this a path not worth pursuing at all?
CONRAD: So you're saying we should ride the elephant and beat our chests like Tarzan? [laughs.]
REYNOLDS: Well, maybe. It’s better than being trampled, I guess. How do you view situations like the current one in electronic music where you have these djs who are essentially cutting–up the cultural artifacts that are records and sounds and sound–bites and texts and putting them together in new ways . . . and in some cases really breaking down some of the authoritative structures that are built into pop culture, simply by merging them with other things and sometimes mocking them and sometimes making something better out of them? I was just curious if you looked at that type of activity as true subversion or if that too is just riding the elephant?
CONRAD: Oh jeez. Well, I’m not sure I can answer that very well because that kind of activity has such a long history in music. In literature, they start talking about––and in art––they start talking about appropriation and things like that as though they were new ideas. In performance though there’s this tradition where like, a performer, any musical performer will play . . . like, say, just an average . . . like a piano player at a bar will play a Beatles song, they’ll play Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, they’ll play, you know, some Country and Western tune and in some sense, this is the same kind of thing, you know, it’s like they’re just mixing up a lot of prior things, they’re taking previous riffs and putting them together into an evening of material and there’s just so many different forms that that takes . . . because performing a piece has been institutionalized as a legitimate activity in theater and all areas of performance. Performing is legitimized as a separate activity where you don’t need to be original, so that in some way you can see pastiche popping up as an essential feature of performance almost throughout history and that there’s very little new about it and that maybe it takes different forms at different times, like I have a number of old 78RPM records where you have a band like say, The Paul Whiteman band playing what they called a medley and what that it is a pastiche, a cut–up of different tunes. [Laughs] I don’t know how that’s really different from what you’re describing as like, the latest Postmodern thing . . . except for its context. I mean I can tell you the difference . . . because if you play Paul Whiteman and then you play . . . what would be a good example?
REYNOLDS: Well, I’m just thinking about . . . I don’t know to what extent you’ve listened to, I don’t know, somebody like DJ Spooky, for example. Well, he’ll sample Stockhausen and Puff Daddy, for example, and everything in between. He subtitled himself, That Subliminal Kid, after a William Burroughs character, and Burroughs is the king of cut–up in the service of subverting control structures. In a lot of ways I would say that the difference between a medley in the old sense is that with a medley the musician is actively choosing to evoke (play) the music where it seems to me that in this kind of thing, the dj, the musician, is interacting with materials which are already out there––effecting us anyway, you know? They’re not actually creating, or activating, those numbers, they’re reacting to them, and interacting with them, and in many cases, what they’re doing is breaking down the authority that is encoded in many media–driven, pop cultural artifacts . . . I mean, sometimes. Sometimes these djs just want to make people dance . . .
CONRAD: But don’t you see the turntable as an instrument? I always thought of it as playing music . . .
REYNOLDS: Well, yeah, I do. Whereas in past eras it was enough to interact with the dominant discourse by embodying or interpreting the written score, or later, even responding to it in a less paper–bound way through improvisation, the turn–table is maybe the most potent tool for interacting with culture as an externalized kind of surface thing––and by exploiting it you can turn culture against itself, and make it say something that it does not want to allow itself to say on its own.
CONRAD: Well, I think you’ve answered your own question better than I could have . . .
REYNOLDS: [Laughing] Okay then, let’s turn the conversation back to you. I’m still interested in this question of what to do with pop culture. You write in Early Minimalism that one of the aims of Dream Music was the return of art music to the social level of pop. I mean certainly, pop culture as it exists today is very different from what it was then, and part of the reason why you were ready to embrace it, I think, was––in an ironic, humorous and kind of neo–Dadaist way––to snub your nose at “high” culture.
CONRAD: Well, as you yourself say, those days are long gone . . . but the origins of these tendencies go way back. I have, in my studies of Pythagoras, seen him as co-opting the pop culture of the day––what we call Dionysian, which any Greek would have told you was Democratic. The Apollonian opposite, which Pythagoras represented was the high culture of the aristocracy of his day and the bizarre moves of contestation and opposition between these 2 tendencies had a lot to do with the shape of, the shaping of the Western cultural enterprise. And so, the kind of idealism that we inherited, believe it or not, in a continuing stream from Plato and the Church and so forth, up to the present day, in some kind of unending opposition to the needs that there are to widen the circles of power rather than contract them, are stories that aren't ending, that didn't end in Greece and they didn't end in Rome and they didn't end in Europe and they didn't end in Buffalo either [laughs]. But give it a shot! Go get 'em! Yahoo!
REYNOLDS: Is pop culture today Pythagorean or is it Dionysian? If Pythagorean, when did the shift take place?
CONRAD: Um, I’m not going to be very good with that question because we’re really a long way from Ancient Greece and so much has changed that . . . well, a lot of things have stayed the same, that’s what’s unbelievable. When you really dig into the fabric of people’s lives in ancient times and faraway places you’re finally very startled by how similar their conditions are to your own [laughs] and how un–alien everything is. We’re only a few generations away from this. But in the midst of those generations, there are some key factors that hit us. The peculiar cultural turmoil of Ancient Greece had to do with a lot of factors but one that people may not think of, because they tend to idealize all of these things and think that somehow it was a magic––or, you know, like, innate thing––but one thing that is instructive to consider is that the Greeks almost accidentally invented the first real phonetic alphabet. They decided to use letters for their vowels. They borrowed the alphabet from Semitic peoples who used the alphabet usually as a syllabary but the Greeks used it as a phonetic alphabet . . . and with a phonetic alphabet, once you learn the poem––you know, ABCDEFG or A is for apple, B is for . . . bed [laughs]––once you learn the poem, you have the key to literacy and so, some startling things happened sort of all at once as soon as alphabetic literacy hit in that way. For example, at the same time as Pythagoras there were some other religious leaders who appeared, including . . Buddha, including . . . Zoroaster, including for that matter Lao Tze, Confucius . . . I mean [laughing], like, what was going on? You know, something happened, and perhaps there were people who emerged with these kind of hotdog ideas regularly in the past, but here, what happened was suddenly there was somebody around who could write them down, and when they were written down they seemed to amplify in their effect.
Now, zipping ahead 2.5 thousand years, you know, you find that suddenly we have this technological civilization with high–speed offset lithography, which is . . . you know, like the profusion of printed materials, the profusion of electronic materials and so forth . . . but I mean even with just newspapers basically you have media and you have a very, very different kind of relation between people and culture that’s shaped by media and capitalism––the market. And in fact now we have a world market. You know, so, to sort of like, look at this in the framework of these very early tendencies toward aestheticism or indulgence in some respect, or toward control and release, you know, because Dionysian was about release and Apollonian was more about control . . . and that goes for political as well as psychological [laughs] control and release . . . but those terms have been complicated very profoundly so I think that it’s too difficult to make a call on that question, if for no other reason than because of something like Fascism . . .
REYNOLDS: Which opens up a whole new can of worms . . . Uh, with Slapping Pythagoras you defied the law of Pythagorean musical arrangements––the proper way of doing it in the West––and subverted the whole apparatus of Western harmony––and also, the social arrangements that are mirrored and re–enforced by musical arrangements. What other things happening today do you see as effectively addressing this in a substantial way and also, doing the same type of thing and doing it well?
CONRAD: Oh, well that’s a good question. Um, like one might say, anti–Pythagorean tendencies on the cultural landscape? Uh-huh, well. You know, I could try for a snap answer but I haven’t really thought about that with any great focus and I’d rather, you know, sort of like, put it in the back of my mind and think about it for a while. Yeah, but I should. I’d like to have a snap answer there . . .
I guess what I would say offhand is this: what seems like the hallmark of the onrushing culture is a situation in which the structure of information is replacing information itself. If you want to know a fact, you don’t remember it; you learn how to find it––and in the same way I think in entertainment cultural form, the structure of the forms is replacing the significance of the substance and the tendencies in that direction go right back into Modernism and has a lot to do with this whole issue of Pythagorean structure and how that’s accommodated or what’s the word I’m looking for?––operationalized. So, the place that I would look for what you might think of as anti–Pythagorean cultural structures would be the places where there seems to be a defusion of the circles of cultural power and right now, the internet is the biggest and prime example because the corporate endgame of closing out individual voices hasn’t been played yet and we still see micro-marketing from person to person; we see people basically finding their own way to their own town meetings and shaping their own cultural forms, and so, then, in those forums you can’t describe what people are doing. But when you look at what they do you may be disappointed in some cases and elated in others. That’s a function of you, your readership and your distance from that situation. Without evaluating the specific objects at the level of their content, for me, there’s something enormously important about the structure of the processes of cultural formation that are going on within that framework and um, they’re processes that have happened in other situations. It’s not entirely new, it has to do with something vaguely called community that appears and forms, shapes . . . there are bonds and links between people with parallel and linked interests . . . and then may vanish. And so, in the past, you had little stabs at cultural autonomy in community frameworks that were defined by geography but those geographic linkages didn’t always easily stack up against the cultural content. Today, by using long–distance communications and integrating the parameters of information structure you can begin to build communities around commonalities of direction that previously wouldn’t have found fallow ground to fall on.
So that’s not what I see that works that way but it’s where to look and, in that sense, I think it’s the right answer.
There are some other forms that begin to edge out in this direction of amplifying the distance between the source of cultural authority and the center of state power and those are sights like pirate radio and, for that matter, I think possibly public access TV. And as I, in fact, said in a keynote address to a convention dealing with alternative media 10 years ago, “maybe the challenge of media artists in coming times is to find laws to break that no one has yet enacted.”
REYNOLDS: Hmmm. On the subject of time . . . to me, a very interesting aspect of Early Minimalism is that not only does it take on LaMonte Young and the composer, the author, it takes on the grand author of Time in that you muse to some extent about history existing in the present and the fact of memory or imagination, the past and the future all coming together in the present, based on the fact of absence. With LaMonte Young's pretenses to being eternal, or achieving a kind of eternal stance, your break from that is a kind of fortunate fall from grace. Do you see time as a factor in your work beyond Early Minimalism, which takes as its subject history?
CONRAD: Oh yes! In every way! [laughs].
REYNOLDS: What I'm looking for is for you to talk a little abstractly or philosophically about time and ultimately, what it means in your work and how it plays a part.
CONRAD: Hold on a second [puts phone down and comes back a few minutes later]. Hello? Yeah, I wrote this uh, little book that goes with the fantastic set that Table of the Elements published, Early Minimalism, Volume. 1? It really is an incredible set of stuff. And in that book there's a story under April that I think is just what I want to say about time. It says, uh, uh . . . it's not about long time, it's a story about short times. And uh, in fact, it's about milliseconds, and um, milliseconds are freaky because one is just like the next, so to feel just one, any one millisecond, to begin to sense a single millisecond, you need to have a way to label it, to identify it, to hold on to it, and my story says: "when I feel milliseconds passing, even a bunch of them at a time, I know that thousands more are slipping pass me, completely unobserved, sacrificed by my act of choosing to fixate on the others, which I've marked with a beginning. Why? Because each millisecond is too short to fill with a complete thought or even a simple action like flicking my eyelid. All that a millisecond can hold of me is a frame of my frozen and immobile flesh, untenanted by sensation or reflection. After the millisecond is passed and I've had time sufficing for my nerves to move, I will pretend that I was there, that the millisecond lay pinned under the grip of my attention but then, no matter how often I repeated this drama, the milliseconds keep gushing past, as undifferentiated and alien to me as the ocean brine to a person that drifts without water, seemingly without end, and without the shadow of a chance that one of them will ever bore me . . ." [Laughs].
REYNOLDS: [Laughs]. That, I think, is a pretty good way to end the interview. Thanks so much!