Tony Cokes

This engaged reading of the urban black riots of the 1960s references Guy Debord’s Situationist text, “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy,” Internationale Situationniste #10 (March 1966). Along with additional commentary adapted from Barbara Kruger and musicians Morrissey and Skinny Puppy, the text posits rioting as a refusal to participate in the logic of capital and an attempt to de-fetishize the commodity through theft and gift. Cokes asks, “How do people make history under conditions pre-established to dissuade them from intervening in it?”

"Ad Vice consists of a succession of colored projection surfaces with segments of text from the worlds of advertising, sport and popular culture." - Anita De Groot

In this meditation on contemporary race relations, two black men discuss in voiceover certain “casual” events in life and cinema that are unnoticed or discounted by whites—gestures, hesitations, stares, off-the-cuff remarks, jokes—details of an ideology of repressed racism.

Taking its name from The Notwist’s 1998 album (and no doubt also riffing on the informal term for a psychoanalyst), the ‘Shrink’ videos depict text overlaid on found footage of a pre-9/11, Rudolph Giuliani-era New York skyline. The same four songs – ‘Chemicals’, ‘No Encore’, ‘Shrink’ and ‘Your Signs’ – score a panoply of texts ranging from Susan Buck-Morss’s tome on Walter Benjamin, Dialectics of Seeing (1989), to a 1988 interview between art historian Kellie Jones and Hammons, whose blunt rejection of white cultural imperialism plays against The Notwist’s strummy guitars and rattling electronic beats. This sensory overload of music and text illustrates Cokes’s own media politics and his ideas about labour and creativity. ‘Don’t you know’, reads one of Hammons’s responses, scrolling a bit too fast, ‘chasing these stories is what it is?’ [Overview courtesy of Frieze]

Writes Cokes: "In 1984 I conceived of the idea of producing a documentary that framed its own devices. I was interested in how a woman, specifically a Black woman, would speak in a television context." In The Book of Love, Cokes' mother recounts her life through interview, stories, and song, effectively re-presenting history through the personal. Through intimate subjectivity, Cokes attempts to understand his own present and history by tracing/retracing the life of his mother. - EAI

Evil.9 combines an Internet-circulated hip-hop music video by the Canadian-German artist Mocky with an Associated Press text outlining the effect of the U.S.A. Patriot Act on the basic rights of U.S. citizens. Cokes writes: "Our unwillingness to confront the implications of our acts and the consequences of our history represent failures to take responsibility." [Overview courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix]

The second part in Cokes's Shrink! trilogy in which he "shrinks" criticism.

The third part of Cokes's Shrink! trilogy in which he "shrinks" criticism.