Introducing Tony Conrad

Throughout his six-decade career, Tony Conrad forged a unique path through numerous artistic movements and defined a vast range of culture, including rock music and public access television. Published on the occasion of the first large-scale museum survey devoted to works he presented in museum and gallery settings, this richly illustrated catalogue offers an in-depth introduction to Conrad’s life and career, presenting new texts and the artist’s own writings about selected works dating from 1966 to 2016—his early structural films; projects in which he treated film as a sculptural and performative material; the Invented Acoustical Tools, presented as sculptures themselves; his ambitious films about power relations, set in the military and in prison; and his final sculptures and installations, which evoke and critique what he perceived as an emerging culture of surveillance, control, and containment.