<p>The artist packs social critique into text-heavy slideshows on colorful screens. But the works’ pop-music soundtracks are what drive his potent messages home and move us most<strong></strong></p>

Evan Moffitt

Tony Cokes: ‘There are certain things that only sound can or should do’

<p>‘What do you mean, a “#FreeBritney movement”?’ the artist Tony Cokes wondered in November 2021, when news broke that pop star Britney Spears’s 13-year conservatorship had been annulled. He recounted this moment in an interview during the recent opening of the 58th Carnegie International exhibition in Pittsburgh, which includes his latest work, <em>Free Britney?</em> (2022). Over slides of text, to a score of chronologically ordered selections from her discography, the video portrays the multi-platinum singer’s efforts to fight her alleged oppressors. Cokes, hardly a devoted fan of Spears’s music, nonetheless became fascinated by the notion that someone so publicly visible could have been imprisoned privately for half of her adult life. He was fascinated, too, by the fact that self-proclaimed soldiers of the ‘Britney Army’ had long been interpreting her lyrics as a covert SOS.</p>

<p>Perhaps the most universal form of cultural expression, music has often been used to subvert power structures. It’s also helped to reinforce them. Since the late 1980s, these social and political reverberations have been at the core of Cokes’s work. With a critical ear, he picks apart musical genres and their histories, studying how they have liberated or repressed their listeners. <em>Free Britney?</em>, like almost all his oeuvre, adopts the text-heavy, PowerPoint-like, slideshow format for which he has become internationally renowned. As Spears’s lyrics align almost too serendipitously with her court testimony quoted in the slides, her distress becomes difficult to ignore: ‘My loneliness is killing me’ (<em>&hellip;Baby One More Time</em>, 1999); ‘You might think that I won’t make it on my own’ (<em>Stronger</em>, 2000); ‘I don’t wanna be so damn protected’ (<em>Overprotected</em>, 2001).</p><p>That sense of confinement, which I perceived in Spears’s music for the first time while watching Cokes’s video, has been his subject before. <em>Evil.16 (Torture.Musik)</em> (2009–11) pairs pop and rock anthems with texts in white font, describing the torture methods used by United States interrogators in the ‘War on Terror’, against a patriotic red and blue background. (Britney Spears gets a cameo here, too.) We learn that pop music has been played in cells at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp to deprive prisoners of their sleep. Songs you might hear at a mall or at an American football game are exposed for their illegal use as weapons.</p>

<p>What happens when the music we love is used to incite violence? Or when the musicians we admire take a sharp right turn? For <em>Face Value</em> (2018), an editioned series of light-box sculptures that are in the collection of the&nbsp;Art Institute of Chicago&nbsp;and will be presented at&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1148/Greene-Naftali" target="_blank">Greene Naftali</a>’s booth at&nbsp;<a href="https://parisplus.artbasel.com/" target="_blank">Paris + par Art Basel</a>, Cokes quotes David Bowie, Lars von Trier, and Kanye West comparing themselves favorably to Adolf Hitler. (‘I think I might’ve been a bloody good Hitler,’ Bowie said in a 1976 interview with <em style="background-color: initial;">Rolling Stone</em>. ‘I’d be an excellent dictator. Very eccentric and quite mad.’) As their words shrink and grow across sequentially ordered tiles, resembling the slides of Cokes’s videos, we’re forced to ask ourselves: Should we take such megalomania literally? Or does artistic genius free people from the obligations of political correctness? In <em style="background-color: initial;">The Morrissey Problem</em> (2019), Cokes turns to journalist Joshua Surtees for an answer. Words from a furious fan letter Surtees addressed to The Smiths’ front man – once a hero of queer, leftist counterculture, now a champion of the alt-right – flash across the screen: ‘Supporting far-right parties has nothing to do with art and everything to do with bigotry.’</p>

<p>Recently, Cokes has been studying an era when the far right had quite a lot to do with art. Two new videos for the Munich-based institutions Haus der Kunst and Kunstverein München sample speeches given by museum leadership at the opening of the ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition that the Nazis orchestrated in the city in 1937. Their denunciations of Modernism alternate with footage of Munich reduced to rubble after the Second World War – a somewhat unusual gesture for Cokes, who has mostly avoided using archival footage since the 1980s. The pairing seems to suggest, as W.E.B. Du Bois put it in <em>John Brown: A Biography </em>(1909), that ‘the cost of liberty is less than the price of repression’. There’s a jarring disjuncture, meanwhile, between the hatred in Hitler’s voice and the dulcet tones of Donna Summer singing <em>I Feel Love </em>(1977).</p><p>‘I don’t do period soundtracks,’ Cokes told me. ‘The music may be stuff I was listening to while I was working on the project, but [it’s] not necessarily meant to evoke the period, because I think there’s some interesting work that certain displacements or lack of alignments can do.’ Cokes often begins with text and only a vague notion of what music might accompany it; then, he says, ‘I go back and forth in layers.’ Ahistorical pairings, like Donna Summer and Nazi Germany, are a ‘weird kind of time travel’ – one that draws unexpected connections between eras and, perhaps, brings us closer, empathetically, to past traumas.</p>

<p>Some of these misalignments can be difficult to discern. See, for instance, <em>Mikrohaus, or the black Atlantic?</em> (2006–08), which quotes from the writings of music theorist Philip Sherburne on the birth of ‘microhouse’, an intersection of minimal techno and house that emerged, almost simultaneously, in 1980s Detroit and Berlin. For the score, Cokes says, ‘I wanted the exclusions to be as important as the inclusions.’ The story of techno, as told by German producers, often ignores its Black American roots. But, like most things, Cokes notes, ‘It’s more complicated than that. I happen to think that it’s not simply a question of appropriation or misappropriation. Techno and house are hybrids themselves. They were circulated and combined with other forms, relations and affective states.’ Cokes’s own appropriation, in turn, reflects back on this condition intrinsic to his favorite musical genre.</p><p>‘On Clubbing, Mourning, and Critique’, Cokes’s summer 2022 exhibition at Greene Naftali, included several works both about and scored by electronic dance music. <em>SM BNGRZ 1 + 2 </em>(2021), for instance, borrows its interwoven accounts of acid house in 1990s Britain from Rainald Goetz’s 1998 novel <em>Rave</em> and a 1999 academic study by Jeremy Gilbert and Ewan Pearson, <em>Discographies: Dance Music Cultures and the Politics of Sound</em>. The selected quotes account for a time when avant-garde musical production occurred not in the metropolitan center of London but in the postindustrial northwest, inverting a long-held cultural imbalance along class lines. One writer praises the ability of acid house ‘to seduce one into the loss of one’s identity or selfhood’, while another notes its ‘refusal of representation and, consequently, a refusal of identity’; underneath this, a destabilizing bass line wobbles. Testimonials of first raves segue into commentary on the apparently unironic appropriation of heterosexual love songs as gay club anthems. All these strains amount less to a theory of rave than a primer for thinking about how to be and dance together – an urgent necessity following months of pandemic-enforced separation.</p>

<p>After a long suspension of nightlife, Cokes’s videos can have a bodily effect. ‘I find it interesting seeing people trying to navigate whether to dance or tap their feet, or what kind of thing that they can or should do in an art space,’ he says. I, too, found myself resisting the urge to dance – evidence of the powerful economy of his work. With the proliferation of digital screens, their simple form can feel disarmingly familiar, until their brutal facts hit you in the face. This signature, Cokes says, relates to his ‘complicated, and sometimes antagonistic, relationship with the visual. There are certain things that only sound can or should do.’</p><p>Tony Cokes is represented by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1148/Greene-Naftali" target="_blank">Greene Naftali</a>, New York City. His work is on view at Haus der Kunst in Munich until December 4, 2022, and at Carnegie International in Pittsburgh until April 2, 2023.&nbsp;</p><p><a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1148/Greene-Naftali">Greene Naftali</a> will participate in the Galeries sector of Paris+ par Art Basel, from Thursday, October 20 to Sunday, October 23, 2022.</p><p>Evan Moffitt is a writer, editor, and critic based in New York City.</p><p>Captions for full-bleed images, from top:&nbsp;1. Tony Cokes, billboard <em style="background-color: initial;">MACRO</em>, Rome. Courtesy of the artist and&nbsp;Greene Naftali, New York City.&nbsp;2. Desktop view:&nbsp;Installation view of Tony Cokes, <em style="background-color: initial;">Evil</em><em style="background-color: initial;">.16 (Torture.Musik)</em> (2009–11)<em style="background-color: initial;">, </em>in the&nbsp;exhibition&nbsp;'Evil, Mediation, and Power' at Bergen Kunsthalle,&nbsp;Bergen, 2018. Mobile view:&nbsp;Installation view of Tony Cokes, <em style="background-color: initial;">Evil</em><em style="background-color: initial;">.16 (Torture.Musik)</em> (2009–11)<em style="background-color: initial;">, </em>in the exhibition 'If Ur Reading This It’s 2 Late: Vol I' at&nbsp;Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London, 2019. Photo by Andy Stagg. 3.&nbsp;Tony Cokes, Billboard commission for <em style="background-color: initial;">This isn't theory. This is history</em>., MACRO Contemporary Art Museum, Rome, 2021.</p>

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The artist packs social critique into text-heavy slideshows on colorful screens. But the works’ pop-music soundtracks are what drive his potent messages home and move us most

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