Creativity Quote by Tony Conrad

Picketing looks like raw civic emotion made visible, but Conrad clocks it as choreography: a set of actions so standardized they stop being “expression” and become a code. The sign, the line, the leaflet, the repetitive march - they read as public speech, yet they function less like a conversation than a broadcast. That’s the bite in “conspicuously formal”: picketing is a ritual with recognizable props, meant to be legible at a distance, to strangers, to cameras, to institutions. It’s politics performed in a format optimized for being seen.

Calling it “indirect communication” is Conrad’s quiet provocation. The picketer rarely expects to persuade the person walking past; the real audience is dispersed and layered: media, employers, legislators, donors, one’s own side. The literature isn’t just information, it’s proof of organization, proof of seriousness, proof that a movement can reproduce itself. Even “for or against something” flattens ideology into a binary suitable for signage. The form pressures the message into slogans, and slogans into identity.

As an artist associated with postwar experimental scenes, Conrad is sensitive to how systems of meaning are built from repeated gestures. He’s also registering how dissent can become a recognizable aesthetic - one that institutions learn to tolerate, manage, even commodify. The quote doesn’t dismiss picketing; it strips it of romantic immediacy and forces a harder question: when protest is mediated by form, who is it really talking to, and what does it unintentionally say?