PRESENTATION: Tony Cokes-Fragments, or just Moments
For more than three decades, in his artistic practice, Tony Cokes has explored the political ideologies of media and pop culture and its impact on society, becoming one of the most important, post-conceptual artists to emerge in recent t imes . Grounded in the experience of the visual exploitation of African American communities in film, television, advertising, and music videos, Cokes has developed a unique language for video essays since the late 1990s that vehemently rejects representative imagery.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Haus der Kunst Archive
Tony Cokes’ fast-moving audiovisual works are based on found text fragments and pop music, stemming from different times and contexts. Through the constant friction between the discursive and disparate cultural references, Cokes alters conventional forms of perception to trace historical continuities. The act of reading discourses on structural racism, capitalism, warfare, and gentrification becomes an interlaced, bodily and public experience. “Fragments, or just Moments” marks the first institutional solo exhibition of Tony Cokes in Germany and the first comprehensive collaboration between Haus der Kunst and Kunstverein Munchen. Using both buildings and archives as a starting point, Cokes ‘ commission “Some Munich Moments 1937-1972” which is shown both in the two institutions and in the public space situated between them. Drawing from archival source materials, the video investigates the interlinked history of both exhibition venues during the Nazi era and beyond . “Some Munich Moments 1937-1972” thus relates the cultural propaganda strategies of the Nazi regime to the visual identity of the 1972 Munich Olympics, which had been coded in direct opposition as “anti-fascist” and “cosmopolitan”. With “Fragments, or just Moments”, Haus der Kunst also stages a survey exhibition that brings together selected audio-visual works from Tony Cokes’ three-decade-spanning oeuvre. The exhibition displays Cokes’ ongoing preoccupation with history and temporality, and sketches a fragmented chronology through the 20th and 21st centuries, moving from the mid-1930s to the present. The fractured timeline does not unfold as a precise linear sequence, but rather demonstrates the interconnectedness, reverberations, and shifts of socio-political realities from different times. Cokes addresses the role of image and sound for ideological manipulation, warfare, exploitation, and the capitalist system inherently based on racist thinking.
“The Will and The Way…Fragment 1” (2019) expresses Cokes’ interest in the relationship between space, architecture and power relations. The work centers on the life and work of the architect Paul Revere Williams in Los Angeles. Williams, who developed over 2,500 buildings in Southern California between 1933- 75, including social housing, was the first African-American member of the American Institute of Architects. Cokes incorporates text fragments from Williams’ posthumously published autobiography set against a computer- animated backdrop simulating a water surface and hypnotic club remixes of tracks by the British rock band Radiohead. The anecdotal text, written from a first-person perspective, links personal experiences with theoretical reflections on modernist design and socio-political realities: Racial segregation is mirrored in the architect’s everyday work and collides with his notions of social justice and his own history of upward mobility. Through the architect’s conflicting relationship to the spaces he designed,which remained simultaneously closed to him as guest and resident, Cokes demonstrates how the institutionalised system of White Supremacy manifests itself in a spatial way. Opening with written lyrics by the British singer Morrissey who self-deprecatingly sings about the world of pop, “3#” (2001) presents a manifesto on pop music written by Tony Cokes himself. The formally reduced video, which presents black text on mono- chrome-orange backdrops, simultaneously marks the rejection of imagery in Cokes’ practice. With this withdrawal of visual stimuli and the concentration on sound and language, the artist turns the music video into a conceptual tool. In punchy slogans borrowed from advertising—such as “This isn’t theory, this is history”—Cokes sets out his understanding of pop music as a genuinely empty but ideological apparatus that generates different meanings and effects within specific socio-political contexts. Accompanied by a soundtrack of artist-musician Seth Price, covering a piece by the legendary German band Kraftwerk, Cokes comments on the cycle of consumption, recycling and recoding of pop music over different periods of time. In the exhibition but also through Cokes’ oeuvre, this can be traced through the recurring figure of Morrissey himself, whose songs and lyrics provoke a different political reading depending on their context.
Tony Cokes’ “Some Munich Moments 1937-1972” (2022) begins with US-American documentary filmmaker Julien Bryan’s footage of the “Haus der Deutschen Kunst” (now Haus der Kunst), shortly after its opening with the “First Great German Art Exhibition” on June 18th, 1937, as well as crowded interiors of the counter-exhibition “Degenerate Art” which opened on the following day. While the first exhibition venue presented mainly conservative academic works in which Hitler saw the Nazi’s regimes worldview represented, the defamatory show in the nearby gallery of the Hofgarten, today’s venue of the Kunst-verein, gathered more than 600 confiscated Western modern art works from collections and museums across Germany. Cokes contrasts these interlinked manifestations of Nazi art policy with footage shot by filmmaker and later SPD-politician Willi Cronauer in June 1945. Cronauer draws a meticulous map of Munich’s destroyed urban space, ranging from religious landmarks to the former Nazi Party headquarter, the so-called “Brown House”. Cokes combines the images of rubble with a techno playlist by DJ Fear N Loathing, which circulates on the video platform YouTube under the title “German Under- ground – Dark & Hard”. This dystopian collage is interrupted by a text passage that juxtaposes these collective images of Munich’s Nazi past with a cultural-political redesign of the city in the 1970s. Carried by Donna Summer’s disco hit “I Feel Love” (1977), which the US-American singer recorded in the legendary Musicland music studio in Munich’s Arabella high-rise building, excerpts are presented from Alexander Negrelli’s book “Kommando Otl Aicher” (2012). The book is dedicated to the graphic designer and co-founder of the Ulm School of Design Otl Aicher, who designed the visual identity for the 20th Olympic Games in Munich in 1972. The color scheme Cokes uses for the slides in this work was that chosen by the designer for the games. Aicher’s design concept was intended to promote a counter- image to the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, which had been instrumentalised as a platform for the Nazi’s notion of racist superiority. Through seemingly universally understandable pictograms, a ‘neutrally’ coded color scheme, and modernist typography, the objective was for West Germany to appear on the international stage as democratic and anti-fascist. In further montages, Cokes superimposes Aicher’s color scheme and contemporary EDM tracks such as Da Fresh’s “Goosebumps” (2019) and Joy Orbison’s “pinky ring” (2022) with excerpts from Hitler’s opening speech of the “First Great German Art Exhibition”, as well as excerpts from the speech given on the occasion of the “Degenerate Art” exhibition by the president of the Reich Chamber, Adolf Ziegler. Cokes traces how the speakers combined theories of racist eugenics with psychiatric discourses to prop- agate art as an expression of nationality, as well as an indicator of the health (or disease) of a nation-state. With this interconnection of moments throughout Munich’s history, Cokes continues his investigation of the relationship between power structures, racist ideologies, and image politics. The final sequence of the video displays the former “Haus der Deutschen Kunst” half-covered with a camouflage net and fully unaffected amidst the 1945 landscape of ruins.
Photo: Tony Cokes. Fragments, or just Moments, Installation view, Haus der Kunst, 2022, Photo: Maximilian Geuter
Info: Curators: Emma Enderby and Elena Setzer, Haus der Kunst, Prinzregentenstraße 1, Munich, Germany, Duration: 10/6-23/10/2022, Days & Hours: Mon, Wed & Fri-Sun 10:00-20:00, Thu 10:00-22:00, www.hausderkunst.de/
