Tony Conrad

7/4 · April 10, 2016

"Tony Conrad, an experimental filmmaker, avant-garde musician and university educator who in the 1960s was a central figure in a flowering Lower Manhattan art movement, died on Saturday at a hospice in Cheektowaga, N.Y., near Buffalo. He was 76.

Mr. Conrad’s gallerist, Carol Greene of the Greene Naftali gallery in Manhattan, confirmed his death. She said he had been treated for prostate cancer.

Mr. Conrad was relentless and rigorous in expanding the parameters of the fields in which he worked. His early musical compositions like “Four Violins” (1964) were high-volume sustained drones. His first film, “The Flicker” (1965), created a pulsating stroboscopic effect with alternating black and white frames. It was preceded by a stern warning that the film could induce epileptic seizures in certain spectators and that audience members remained in the theater at their own risk."

"Upon moving to New York after graduating from Harvard in the early 1960s, Mr. Conrad became a catalytic figure in the Lower East Side art scene. He performed as a violinist with the composer La Monte Young’s Theater of Eternal Music, also known as the Dream Syndicate. He assembled the soundtrack for Jack Smith’s underground movie “Flaming Creatures” (in which he also appeared). And, along with John Cale — a fellow member of the Dream Syndicate — he provided backup for a band called the Primitives, which featured Lou Reed on vocals.

Mr. Reed and Mr. Cale went on to found the band the Velvet Underground, and though Mr. Conrad was never a member of it, he did contribute to it inadvertently: The group’s name was taken from the title of a lurid paperback on popular sexology that Mr. Conrad had found on the street and left in the Ludlow Street apartment he shared with Mr. Cale."

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Edited April 10, 2016 by 7/4