Tony Conrad's artistic career can be seen as an everlasting battle against the obstructive effects of rules and authority. A critical thinker, he has understood like few others the supple ways by which these rules prevail over the social fabric; he was able to dismantle, and later respond to those restraints in a creative and often humorous way. One-intonation music, “cooked” films and others that take a lifetime to shoot, acoustic tools, the edges of the screen and the camera frame, hierarchy, the absence of social representation or the aging process and the inevitability of death, are the subjects of Conrad’s work, who has been regarded as one of the most influential artists of the last fifty years.