TC: The Most Interesting Man Alive
Chrysler Museum | One Memorial Place, Norfolk, Virginia
Apr. 21 - Aug. 21, 2016
Tony Oursler titled his collaborative work about Tony Conrad TC: The Most Interesting Man Alive.
Conrad did not live to see the April 21 Chrysler premiere. He died April 9 in Buffalo, N.Y., where he had taught art and media for decades. He had been fighting prostate cancer and pneumonia. "You don't know who I am," Conrad once told The Guardian, "but somehow, indirectly, you've been affected by things I did."
A movie by Tony Oursler in collaboration with Tony Conrad.
This short feature incorporates a range of cinematic, graphic, narrative and autobiographical approaches to produce a new form of biopic. The work is a performative admixture of written, oral history and improvisation sequences, shot over a period of approximately 6 months in oursler' studio in NYC . Structurally based on various notable points in the multimedia artists life from childhood through his formative creative years. Conrad, who is known for minimalist film and music as well as a wide array of creative activities performs with numerous friends and fellow artists such as Paige Serlin, Constance Dejong , Joe gibbons, Maríe Losier, Peggy Awash. Sound experiments, short poetic reenactments and dramatic scenarios combine to portray a rough, open and sometimes comic version the artists life. This project calls into question the notion of a fixed identity and looks at personal histories as building block of creative possibilities. Here the artists equate memory, and the language of production of the moving image as mailable forms capable of recombining to form new mean. They ask: are we more than a collection of stories and experience arranged in a sequences shrouded by the the mists of time? How do we become who we are?
