TONY CONRAD

Known for his experimental films, Tony Conrad (1940) is also one of the pioneers of minimalist music, particularly through his participation in the mid-1960s in the legendary Theatre of Eternal Music whose performances explored the stretching of musical time. The series of Yellow Movies that he produced in the early 1970s take the form of frames painted in black on large sheets of paper, the interior of the frames filled with different types of emulsions, mostly cheap white or yellow paint.

For Conrad, the temporality of the film corresponds to the extremely slow changes in the image, due to the yellowing of the paper and the ageing of the colours: “The change of ‘image’ in each canvas or ‘movie’ is very slow. The action is even slower when the canvases or ‘movies’ are rolled into rolls. When unrolled, they are going faster. No actual change can be noticed during the time of one brief exhibition. Changes in image and in speed of running could be noticed only after long intervals.” Each Yellow Movie is accompanied by precise information about the nature of the paper, the paint used for the emulsion and the date of its first presentation, meaning the date when the film started to run.

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