Beyond the Dream Syndicate

"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, Tony Conrad has significantly impacted cultural developments from minimalism and underground film to "concept art," postmodern appropriation, and the most sophisticated rock and roll. Yet Beyond the Dream Syndicate does not claim Conrad as a major but underrecognized 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 into an "author function." Neither monograph nor social history, this "minor history" takes Conrad's collaborative interactions as a guiding thread by which to investigate the contiguous networks and discursive interconnections amongst the arts of time."--Jacket.