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7.22 Tony Cokes
Evil.81: Is This Amrkkka?: DJ Joe Nice Speaks

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7.22 Tony Cokes
Evil.81: Is This Amrkkka?: DJ Joe Nice Speaks
15.2.–14.4.22
North American artist Tony Cokes has been working with the video essay as a medium since the 1990s. His practice explores discourses of structural racism against Black people, social critique, capitalism, and war, considering them in both their historical and contemporary dimensions. More
Cokes’s videos consist primarily of animated texts presented against an image or monochrome background with a pop music soundtrack. For them, the artist draws on his own archive: a compilation of images, films, pieces of music and text extracts from mass media, the Internet, pop culture, politics, and philosophy. Fundamental to his artistic method is the decoupling of word and image. Cokes takes a post-Conceptual approach to the sign systems of language and image, engaging in strategies that can be traced to Conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s. His earliest work in this vein was Black Celebration (1988), a seminal video merging newsreel footage of riots in urban Black neighborhoods in Boston, Detroit, Newark, and Watts in 1965 to the sound of songs by the Canadian industrial band Skinny Puppy. Incorporated texts include those by Morrissey, Martin L. Gore, Barbara Kruger, Situationist International. Cokes’s sampling and recontextualization process points to the necessity of deconstructing media for any kind of emancipatory politics and empowerment, as it enables counter-readings of stereotypical representations.

The video Evil.81: Is This Amrkkka?: DJ Joe Nice Speaks (2021) is part of Coke’s Evil series (ongoing since 2003), a group of works investigating conflicting notions of evil in the past and present. The quotes seen here—fragmented individual sentences and questions spliced against alternating solid-red or blue backgrounds—is based on the transcript of a video interview with African American DJ and “ambassador” of the UK dubstep sound, Joe Nice. The video was recorded following the tragic death of Andrew Brown Jr., a Black man shot and killed by white police officers in the small town of Elizabeth City, North Carolina on April 21, 2021. Nice’s monologue condemns the fatal failures of policing in Black communities, raises questions about apparent inconsistencies in Brown’s case, and accuses the police and judiciary of concealing evidence in what amounts to a cover-up. He goes on to criticize historically-entrenched structural racism against Black people, with frequent references to US President Joe Biden and other liberal politicians whom he views as both ineffective and ultimately indifferent to the concerns and interests of their Black constituents. The text itself is characterized by such word repetitions and questions as “We demand justice. We demand justice now, we demand the release of these tapes of Andrew Brown Jr.” or “What are you doing for the people? More specifically, what are you doing for Black people?”. The result is a rhythmic, song-like maelstrom of accusations mixed with demands for clarification and justice. 

Cokes combines the written text with samples from over ten different pieces of music, many of them politically-motivated protest songs with a rap, reggae or dub sound. Audible tracks include “Can’t Trust It” by Public Enemy, “Babylon Makes the Rules” by Steel Pulse and “Wicked” by Ice Cube. Songs interact following a set dramaturgy conceived by the artist; the progression opens up a pop-cultural and political narrative (about the Black community in America), complete with topical, relevant references that show the need to interpret it from a present-day point of view. In his use of contrasting text and sound elements from various media contexts, Cokes’s video essays become condensed time capsules, giving rise to new narratives whose appellative character makes them all the more forceful and urgent in the mind of the viewer. After all, this work (like most videos in Cokes’s Evil series) ultimately centers on the long history of “non-visibility” experienced by Black Americans and their lack of representation in the United States—problems that persist to this day.

The viewer becomes both the interpreter and the connecting link, as it is their sensory and spatial perception that lends the videos both temporality and physical presence, particularly in a public space. At the same time, the simultaneity and overlapping of text and music elements poses a constant, deliberate challenge; it overloads the viewer’s senses as they are reading and listening, effectively thwarting any passive attempt to make sense of what they are seeing. In doing so, it enables an experience of selective perception and, consequently, a more layered reading/interpretation. This multidimensional and ambivalent approach—a hallmark of Tony Cokes’s works—is how the artist makes the exemplary explicit. Just as words and music echo in the mind, so too does the call to critically question one’s own thoughts and actions, and to object to the perpetuation of hegemonic systems and historiographies.

Tony Cokes (b. 1956 in Richmond, Virginia, lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island, US) is Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. Recent international exhibitions include those at Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, New York (2021); MACRO Contemporary Art Museum, Rome (2021); MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2020); ARGOS centre for audiovisual arts, Brussels (2020); and BAK – basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht (2020). His work has featured in group exhibitions and screenings at Kunsthalle Wien (2021); La Casa Encendida, Madrid (2021); the 34th Bienal de São Paulo (2021); School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2021); and The Kitchen, New York (2020). Cokes’s work has screened at a number of film and media art festivals including Rotterdam International Film Festival; Rencontres Internationales, Paris/Berlin/Madrid; Freewaves, Los Angeles; and Oberhausen International Short Film Festival. Haus der Kunst and Kunstverein München in Munich are collaborating on a presentation that will constitute Tony Cokes’s first institutional solo exhibition in Germany (3.6.–23.10.2022).

Evil.81: Is This Amrkkka?: DJ Joe Nice Speaks, 2021
Video, color, sound
19:00 min.
Text Cynthia Krell
Translation Amy Patton
Photo Ines Könitz

Commissioned by MACRO Rome:
“This Isn’t Theory. This Is History.”
Text Joe Nice
Youtube 4/29/21
„Andrew Brown Protester BLASTS Biden When in the Hell Are You Helping Black People“
Music MRVN G, ISHN SND, MSP, PE, LKJ, KRPTC MNDS, GTH TRD, CNSLDTDx2, ICEQB, STL PLZ
Editor Stephen Croker
Concept & design Tony Cokes

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