![]() ![]() Joseph’s gambit is to use the brilliant, improbable Tony Conrad as his guide through one generation’s challenge to make art after John Cage. Joseph’s admirable step outside the art historian’s typically crisp disciplinary boundaries. “ Beyond the Dream Syndicate is Branden W. James, author of The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles It’s hard to imagine, let alone find, a work in sixties’ cultural historiography of comparably broad insight and originality.”-David E. Overall his demonstration of the interrelatedness of different cultural spheres presents a radical challenge to the hermeticism of orthodox art history and to the simple-minded high/low binaries of affirmative cultural studies. The combination of its detailed scholarship across a very wide cultural field, the incisiveness of its analyses, and its ease in moving dialectically from the most precise formal details of works of art to their general social and political implications is remarkable. Ranging across film, music, and art, his new book focuses on the myriad accomplishments of Tony Conrad. “Branden Joseph has emerged as one of our most accomplished and significant cultural historians. " Beyond the Dream Syndicate is a tour de force of both interpretative and historiographic acuity."- Art Bulletin In Joseph’s hands it makes for a compelling and exemplary history."- Art Review It is also Conrad’s method with regard to his own past and that of his colleagues…. "Beyond the Dream Syndicate is in fact a vital argument for recasting in unlikely, counterintuitive or even absurd ways the cultural histories we think we know best. With its meticulous research and precise mode of argumentation, Beyond the Dream Syndicate sets an important standard for future scholars."- Texte zur Kunst Joseph has succeeded in substantially altering our notion of the so-called expanded field of art and film. ![]() An immensely engaging - and important - book."- Modern Painters "A major contribution to our thinking about this period. "Joseph writes powerfully…and with a brio most academic writers can only dream about. "A superb book."-Daniel Birnbaum, Artforum If registered, Joseph’s new mapping should disperse the ‘major’ names and terms that have for so long defined the postwar canon and its largely modernist models of theorization, models that limit the capacity to seize the expansive territory of experimentation that sparked postmodernism-pertinent now as the DNA for much contemporary art."- CAA Reviews "Joseph’s Trojan horse harbors an estimable array of ‘minor’ figures whose radical practices change history, this history, for good. Joseph moves across and between disciplinary genres of scholarship and thereby challenges the reader’s capacity to think outside familiar categories."- Leonardo "Beyond the fascinating and heretofore untold story recounted here, this book is important for the way its method mirrors its subject. Rather, by drawing on Deleuzian notions of the “minor” and the Foucauldian problematization of authorship found in Conrad’s own artistic/musical project, Early Minimalism, it disperses him into an “author function.” Neither monograph nor social history, the book takes Conrad’s collaborative interactions as a guiding thread by which to investigate the contiguous networks and discursive interconnections amongst the arts of the time. Yet Beyond the Dream Syndicate does not claim Conrad as a major but under-recognized figure. Creator of the “structural” film, The Flicker, collaborator on Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures and Normal Love, follower of Henry Flynt’s radical anti-art, member of the Theatre of Eternal Music and the first incarnation of The Velvet Underground, and early associate of Mike Kelley, Tony Oursler, and Cindy Sherman, Conrad has significantly impacted cultural developments from minimalism to underground film, “concept art,” postmodern appropriation, and the most sophisticated rock and roll. Tony Conrad is exemplary of the 1960s artist who remains inassimilable to canonic histories. ![]()
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