tony conrad at turbine hall, tate modern, saturday 14th june

tony conrad at tate
to help me in my essay (and this is fantastic for this) and practical explorations of process as performance, temporality using time based media and responding to site- went to see tony conrad's Unprojectable: Projection and Perspective. this 60s audio-visual pioneer explores experimental process as performance and was great visually responding to the old industrial site and his own film and music history- but sound wise the drone was just too loud to really be able to watch the performance for the 1 1/2 hr duration.
you are sitting on the floor of the turbine hall, below cloth screen billowing in the wind, the light-projected image of the activity on the raised stage arena, contours, enlarges, shrinks as it moves. you can see the real people as the screen blows around making the visuals you can simulanteously see projected giant. the performance is in 3 parts; films in run through reels and drill sounds are heard as though something is being manufactured/repaired, then industrial parts appear with film again running through, and finally an string quartet appears speciailising in drone. the vantage point is interesting, you can sit either side, and the images differ, some are sharper or more gestural figurative imagery- depending on how close they are to the light source. the string instruments when sharp have a strong elegance in contrast to the wires, block shapes of the industrial objects earlier projected.

for my work- the snatching and elongating of the image, working with another sense other than purely visual and beyond dialogue, experiments with scale

in the booklet they handed out afterwards (which made me think how much do you need to know beforehand) it talked about a piece of his work, Curried 7302, 1973 in which he cooked substituting onions in a recipe, for film.