Beyond the Dream Syndicate - by Branden W Joseph (Paperback)

About the Book

Examining Tony Conrad's collaborative interactions as a guiding thread by which to investigate the contiguous networks and discursive interconnections in 1960s art.

Book Synopsis

Tony Conrad is exemplary of the 1960s artist who remains inassimilable to canonic histories. 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. Yet Beyond the Dream Syndicate does not claim Conrad as a major but under-recognized figure.

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.

Review Quotes

"Beyond the Dream Syndicate is a tour de force of both interpretative and historiographic acuity."-- "Art Bulletin"

"A major contribution to our thinking about this period. An immensely engaging -- and important -- book."-- "Modern Painters"

"A superb book."---Daniel Birnbaum, Artforum

"Beyond the fascinating and heretofore untold story recounted here, this book is important for the way its method mirrors its subject. Joseph moves across and between disciplinary genres of scholarship and thereby challenges the reader's capacity to think outside familiar categories."-- "Leonardo"

"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. It is also Conrad's method with regard to his own past and that of his colleagues... . In Joseph's hands it makes for a compelling and exemplary history."-- "Art Review"

"Joseph writes powerfully...and with a brio most academic writers can only dream about. A major book."-- "The Wire"

"Joseph's Trojan horse harbors an estimable array of 'minor' figures whose radical practices change history, this history, for good. 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"

"Necessary and timely. Joseph has succeeded in substantially altering our notion of the so-called expanded field of art and film. With its meticulous research and precise mode of argumentation, Beyond the Dream Syndicate sets an important standard for future scholars."-- "Texte zur Kunst"