Movies: Tony Cokes

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 ideol...

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 ...

"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...

A personal film about a city that may only exist in a film or on TV; a film about various dreams about Calcutta. It starts with a variation on the first image of Francis Ford Coppola's ‘Apocalypse Now’ and takes the spectator along through a strange ...

Video work on the Civil Rights Movement borrowing its core text from “Notes from Selma: On Non-Visibility” by the Alabama collective Our Literal Speed, mixing this text with lyrics and soundtracking by singer and songwriter Morrissey....

Starting with a consideration of the Tompkins Square Park Riot of 1988, in New York’s East Village, Cokes’ video expands to a broader critique of the role artists have come to play as a force of gentrification in cities worldwide....

"Evil.11 (The Katrina Debacle) is a text animated essay about the Bush Administration's response to the 2005 Hurricane Katrina disaster. The text is based on an e-mail I received in Korea in the immediate aftermath of the events. Juxtaposing three so...

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 conf...

Evil.5: Grin and Bear (No Responsibility Mix) continues Cokes’s investigation of the uses of appropriated text and pop music as a form of political critique. Employing a deliberately didactic approach, Cokes challenges the Bush administration’s polic...

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

Writes Cokes, "Evil.12 is a 12-minute video animation with sound. The text is excerpted from Brian Massumi's essay 'Fear (The Spectrum Said),' which discusses the Bush Administration's terror alert color-coding system as a method to modulate public a...

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 ...

Evil.35: Carlin/Owners (2012), uses text from comedian George Carlin set to music by the post-punk band Gang of Four....

No Sell Out employs desktop video to position images of Malcolm X in tension with commercial culture. It is a result of a series of loaded questions we ask ourselves, and now wish to impose on viewers. Mr. X is the serialized signifier that sparks pr...

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

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 – ...