Tony Conrad (One of the pioneers of structural filmmaking, video art, and minimalist music) is coming to Brussels, and what’s more, he’s playing, for the first time in Europe, a re-worked version of his Ten Years Alive on the Infinite Plain (1972). This “minimalist spectacle” features a projected film loop of black and white images, alongside a stellar group of string players. Earlier versions of this performance featured musicians like Jim O’Rourke (in The Kitchen, NY), but also Mick “Mike” Flower (of Vibracathedral Orchestra), Angharad Davies and Ryoko Kuwajima (at Leeds City Art Gallery, UK on Monday 3rd April 2006 – see this video for an example):
While this performance will take place at Bozar on Saturday, the day after he’s doing a performance/screening/lecture at Argos. We don’t really know what to expect (he will probably present and talk about a range of films and videos), but this video might give you a lead, it’s part of a lecture he did a few years in Brussels.
Tony’s home page
interview with Tony Conrad
Some more info on the performance (this was in a mail he sent us):
Forty-five Years on the Infinite Plain (1972-2007)
A work that relates to time but exists independent of points in time refers to the obverse side of time, beyond the possibility of measuring it with markings: duration. Yet unmeasured duration, in principle, is a kingdom entirely at the command of the recipient and his or her subjectivity.
Diedrich Diedrichsen, Time and Dream: Tony Conrad’s “Yellow Movies”
Ten Years Alive on the Infinite Plain (1972), like some other works of the psychedelic era, commingles starkly formal abstraction with introspective romanticism. Its insistent conflation of quasi-religious spectacle with materialist minimalism follows a path marked out by Rothko, Cage, Andre, and many others. Today these elements have lost their radicalism; even the political conviction of that time, that such work could make contact, through its spiritual insistence, “with the political real behind the culture of commodity and spectacle” (as Diedrichsen puts it), seems problematic and thin.
In revising “Ten” to “Forty-five”, I am addressing a broader chronological perspective, relocating to a different social allegory, and accessing the plural tools that encompass a more contemporary “minimalism.” The “subject”—that is, the viewer—is still at the center of the work; but now the polyvalence of subjectivity is recognized in a figural usage of heterophony and antiphony. A solo cello challenges the lead instrument, and the audience area is divided in half. Musical figures invoke divisiveness, over the unitary ground of the drone. There are two distinct rhythms to follow, further dividing the subject’s attention.
These elements of what would have been seen in 1972 as “confusion” instead, in today’s heterotopia, reflect and invite access to a subjectivity that is more “true to life,” more centered on the plain where we stand.
As indicated below, this piece will require five local performers and a local projectionist, in addition to Tony Conrad and MV Carbon (she’s, amongst other things, a member of Metalux! Huurah!). The performance itself will last about 95 minutes.
Music ensemble 1:
Long string instrument
Violin (Tony Conrad)
Viola or cello drone
Bass (acoustic bass or bass guitar)
Music ensemble 2:
Cello with reel-to-reel tape recorder and electronics (MV Carbon)
Violin drone
Violin or Viola drone
Bass (acoustic bass or bass guitar)
Projectionist (four projectors with loops)
The Participants will be Julia Eckhardt, Stefaan Quix, Timo van Luyck, Stefaan Smagghe, Jürgen De Blonde, Dominica Eyckmans and Els van Riel. Huurah!