Beyond the Dream Syndicate

Branden W. Joseph

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

"Pivoting on Tony Conrad's seminal role as artist and theorist, this groundbreaking book reexamines the post-Cagean milieu of early sixties New York where visual art, music, film, and performance increasingly overlapped and hybridized. Richly detailed, scrupulously researched, Joseph's brilliant analysis deploys a Foucauldian model to reformulate crucial questions of artistic authorship, tease out the political and social implications of Conrad's prescient production and interactions with his peers, and reconfigure a broad swathe of American vanguard culture so that the imbrication of these artists' practices in structures of power stands newly revealed."-- Lynne Cooke, curator, Dia Art Foundation "Branden Joseph has emerged as one of our most accomplished and significant cultural historians. Ranging across film, music, and art, his new book focuses on the myriad accomplishments of Tony Conrad. 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. 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. It's hard to imagine, let alone find, a work in sixties' cultural historiography of comparably broad insight and originality." David E. James , author of The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles "Branden W. Joseph has emerged as one of our most accomplished and significant cultural historians. Ranging across film, music, and art, his new book focuses on the myriad accomplishments of Tony Conrad. It's hard to imagine, let alone find, a work in 1960s cultural historiography of comparably broad insight and originality." David E. James , author of The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles " Beyond the Dream Syndicate is Branden W. Joseph"s admirable step outside the art historian"s typically crisp disciplinary boundaries. 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. In the course of this expedition, we encounter rigorous meditations on minimalist music and visual art, Henry Flynt"s Concept Art, daily life with Jack Smith, the hilarious head-on collisions that resulted in the Primitives and the Velvet Underground, and the stroboscopic consequences of Conrad"s 1966 film The Flicker. This is a highly original, rewarding book, and one that will catch people by surprise. I imagine that this is a book for which many people have unconsciously been waiting." David Grubbs , Drag City recording artist "In the avant-garde, Conrad knows no peers. He is so fundamentalist that his only rival in the whole of the Universal music scene could be Sky Saxon of the Seeds." Julian Cope , Krautrocksampler