He's unframeable, that's the great point. I mean, you cannot frame someone who
didn't want to be framed at all. Tony Conrad is an unclassifiable artist. He was
a groundbreaking filmmaker and musician. He was a great pedagogue. Beyond this, he
was a committed cultural activist.
One of the very first concerts that I produced at The Kitchen was with Tony
Conrad to play the world premiere of what has become Ten Years On The
Infinite Plain. It's an expanded cinema performance composed of four different
projections of black and white stripes.
Alongside those projections we have three instruments - so there's the Long
String Drone which is an instrument that Tony Conrad invented. We have a bass
guitar and we have a violin and they basically are responding to the soundtrack
of Tony Conrad playing and when he was alive he would have played the violin
himself. The whole produced an experience based on length that engages with our
feeling of memory and engages with the idea of what does it mean to see a shape
changing and becoming literally alive. Ten Years Alive On An Infinite Plain
embodies the contradictory history of the museum already in its title.
Conserving doesn't mean looking back ever, it always means looking ahead
and keeping a work alive in the way that Ten Years Alive On An Infinite Plain
requires is the most challenging but also exciting experience for a conservator
and a curator in a museum.
The work really is held by a network of people but of course when a work comes
into a museum collection, we're thinking far in the future where that network
won't be there to support a work. How do we plan to think about a longer legacy
for a work like this? What we want to do is to create the
conditions for new possibilities to emerge that are still within the spirit
of Tony Conrad and within the spirit of this work and the transmitters
are a key part of that process as well as the new generation of performers. Tony
is no longer there but he was aware of the fact that he wouldn't have been around
so he made his best to create a condition for the work to be transmitted.
He didn't give any specific instruction because this was actually his attitude.
He didn't want to teach vertically, he didn't want to be authoritarian. The
beauty of Ten Years Alive On An Infinite Plain is against structures, against forms
of power and it's wonderful to celebrate Tony Conrad in that way. The instrument
I'll be performing on is known as the Long String Drone and it consists of
1 metre 55 stretch of aluminium about 2 centimetres thick and one end
of the machine head's for tuning, the other pickups and then two wooden
bridges to maintain the balance of the flat wound strings. The bass guitar
strings are tuned to C sharp and they're flat wound so that when you attack and apply
the glissando you don't get like a scraping sound you get a smooth
percussive movement upwards. So this instrument was meant to be
played just with a basis of one note
It could be played with a metal bar
like this to make [sound plays]
This is just a [Tony laughs]
It could also be played with a bow and that's the tray for the bow here.
I remember using a cylinder like this to do the work. My role in the project at
the Tate is to transmit the music to another person so that anyone can play
it. The way I was doing it was going down and then bringing the slide up to the
mark that you have there but it's basically done by ear, right? We have a drone
going on and we're hearing a C sharp drone and so it's [drone plays] I don't know if that's
a C sharp. Maybe not, no. But in the context of the music, you just tuned it with our ear. The music
isn't notated and has to be taught in oral fashion. Tony told me what to play
and then with a bit of a back and forth between the two of us we arrived at
something that we were both happy with. So that's the kind of the big
payoff maybe at some point in the second half if we're allowed to do that. Yes I noticed yesterday I considered that 'Wow George is innovating' and I quite liked it
and I was not a little jealous thinking 'why didn't I think of that?' It's so interesting
talking to people who have performed it before because so much of what they're
talking about is a type of embodied knowledge and they talk about body
memory, they talk about the memory of performing the piece coming back. I have
a document of the first performance and the Leeds performance. "Right hand started
hurting halfway through. Felt like stopping but didn't want to in case I
couldn't pick up the violin. Played like mad, everything hurts and I shook at the
end." So these are kind of physical things, the reality of what 90 minutes
does to your body. I think that's something like that those kind of
approaching it from like a physical point of view... you know as you watch it
your mind kind of plays tricks on you. Yes, yes. So just to have that written down
as well I think is really helpful. The value of being able to access this group
of people has been really extraordinary in
terms of that ability to learn from them, to have them really show us and pass on
their knowledge of this work and these instruments and what Tony Conrad was
trying to convey in this piece. I think I need like really literal
guidance but then after the big conversation yesterday where we were
chatting about everything for so long, I felt like that was really helpful just
sort of like hearing about him as a person.
Hearing his violin louder, trying to sort of like think about it a bit
differently to maybe being so rigid. When I played it I realised I hadn't
remembered just listening back, I was playing it faster than you.
It has a different feeling altogether then I suppose. But it's a pulse so it's.. I suppose everyone has their
has their like momentum. Yeah. Yeah. The real challenge of this work is to kind of
understand what needs to stay the same. What's kind of structurally part of the
work and where the variability, where the change can be and we really don't want
this work to live in the museum as a kind of fixed locked down thing so how
do we allow a work like this to kind of continue to have its life?
Where the artwork begins and ends is one of the great question that we have to
engage with when working in a museum. Is it about props? Instruments? Apparatuses? Or is
it about the pure experience? I would say in the case of 10 Years On An Infinite
Plain, it is both. What will be continuing the next days and weeks and months
perhaps is the beginning of a ripple effect that we hope will be lasting
forever and allowing the work to be alive on an infinite plain.