Tony Conrad

New York–based Minimalist composer and filmmaker Tony Conrad first presented his “Yellow Movies” at the Millennium Film Workshop in New York in 1973, a decade after Warhol’s key filmic experiments of “aesthetic endurance” and at the close of a fertile period for structural filmmaking. As an effort to extend his contemporaries’ concerns with spatial strategies and duration, but also to “systematically exhaust the formalist toolbox to the point of an end game,” Conrad’s “interventions,” as he called them, proposed to expand how cinema was defined through its most basic requirements—a screen image and duration. Consisting of giant swathes of irregularly cut paper onto which he painted black rectangles, or “screens,” with cheap house paint, the “films” Conrad produced relied on (and still do) the gradual fading of the paint as a way to “play” for a viewer’s lifetime, or longer.

For Conrad’s first solo exhibition in New York, Greene Naftali re-presents a selection of “Yellow Movies,” fifteen of the paintings on paper and four small canvases (marked by diminutive painted “screens” and labeled “35 mm format”). Resting on white or color backgrounds, the messy black outlines (meticulously lined on their interior edges) of the large screens enclose delicate-looking whites, lemony hues, and occasional bolder pigments. In one instance, two screens are stacked vertically on a colossal sheet of blue paper that spills onto the gallery floor. A double feature? Wrinkled and lightly spotted with yellows, browns, or watery grays, these cinematic paintings, which have been “playing” for more than thirty years, have aged—but they’ve aged well. “Anti-monuments” (Conrad’s description) to his attempt at shaking up experimental filmmaking’s status quo, these brilliant works appear surprisingly fresh and bring to light still-relevant Conceptual and material concerns for painters and cineasts alike.