Guest
Jay Sanders I’d like to start by asking you about a specific composition, Ten Years Alive on the Infinite Plain, which I’m particularly excited to see performed at The Kitchen during your upcoming retrospective. That piece, originally presented in 1972, is composed of a live string performance and features multiple film projections. Would you talk about working in those two mediums—not necessarily the crosscurrents between them—but as a way to introduce and describe your work from that period? Tony Conrad The most exciting thing today about late ’60s–early ’70s work is how it can be seen in a new light in 2005. Of course cultural work responds to the immediate environment around it at the time, but at a later point it can also function to redefine other work of its own time and to offer a different set of perspectives on what’s happening today. In 1972, Ten Years, which has a kind of new age-y title, wasn’t so much new age-y as it was driven by an effort to reclaim a spiritual territory for New York that came out of America (the West) rather than from the East. It was to acknowledge that there’s a space for contemplation, for the subjectivity of long durations and perceptually driven work within a Western framework. But in order to see how that fits into the design of the film, I have to explain a little bit about what the film really is and does.
