Tony Cokes: Words and Spaces
Ellen Maria Gorrissen Lecture
The American Academy in Berlin
May 4, 1:30 PM EST
In this talk, Tony Cokes discussed the text-animated artworks he’s been creating over the past decade, featuring statements such as “Disco isn’t dead. It has gone to war” and “If UR Reading This It’s 2 Late.” These “video essays,” as he calls them, are built around Cokes’s interests in pop music, sonic cultures, political rhetoric, and the relationship between criticism and the everyday experience of race. Rather than considering individual works in isolation, Cokes discussed his constellations of works in large-scale installation spaces and his evolving desire to situate his art in the public sphere. Such “public readings” of textual material, he says, offer “a minor, embodied antidote to the ubiquity of advertising and to the increasingly privatized reading habits inculcated via the internet and mobile devices.”
To watch a recording of the conversation, please click here.
Above: Tony Cokes, Installation view: Collision/Coalition, The Shed, New York, June 19 – August 25, 2019. Photo: Stan Narten. Courtesy the artist; Greene Naftali, New York; Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles; and Electronic Arts Intermix, New York.