The Brooklyn Rail

Tony Cokes consumes media with a singular zeal. The video works which he has become known for incorporate text from a dizzyingly wide range of sources—speeches, books, newspapers, archives, Twitter feeds. Unfolding on the screen against bright, changing monochromatic backgrounds, flashes of text are overlaid with songs from an equally impressive range of musical genres and tones, drawn from Cokes’s wide and deep knowledge of music history. The resulting assemblages of text, music, and color foment experiential fields of complexity and tension. Bitingly philosophical in his pursuits, Cokes carefully layers social and political critique into the antagonisms or agreements between music and text.

Cokes’s latest video installation, currently on view at Dia Bridgehampton, threads together histories of spirituality, conceptual art, and the built environment of the museum. Produced in dialogue with an installation of the minimalist artist Dan Flavin on the upper floor of the museum, Cokes’s installation reframes minimalist and conceptual art as energetically plentiful and sonically alive. Gospel and techno are set against texts from the institution’s archival past and intellectual present, which brim with new possibilities as they are recontextualized and revivified, brilliantly cast in the light of Cokes’s interventions.

Zoë Hopkins (Rail): First and foremost, a sincere thank you for making time. I want to just dive straight into things. To begin, can you give a brief framing of the two video channels in your piece DFAI.01-05 (2023) as it is currently installed at Dia Bridgehampton? What were the sources—particularly the textual elements—involved in this project and why did you choose to involve them?

Tony Cokes: Okay, I had a number of texts that provided context on the histories and functions of the space in which the exhibition takes place. I was particularly interested in the history, if you will, of the Dan Flavin Art Institute—which is now the Dia Bridgehampton—as a former Black Baptist church. And I was also interested in how certain artifacts of that history were preserved in a room off the main installation space. It had an influence on maybe the other material that I recruited to the project. Some of the text was taken from a long series of interviews with Heiner Friedrich, who was one of the founders of Dia. I was intrigued by the combination of aesthetics, politics, and spirituality in his approach to art practice and to the founding of that institution. I was also kind of looking to a number of other texts, including a book about celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the church, which was in the 1940s. So, a long time ago, but it still maybe has certain resonances. I was interested in both the naming of the people involved in the church, and the commercial sponsors of this commemorative book. I thought it would bring a broader context into play, a kind of deeper and unexpected history. So that was another textual element. And the other is, perhaps, writing about and writing of, Dan Flavin on his practice. So those were kind of basic elements. I juxtapose them in fragments, as I often do. That’s part of the reason that it’s a two channel work: I specifically wanted to use the space in a way that would give greater complexity to the arguments and the positionalities of the different texts.

Rail: Right, dialogue is always embedded in your work, whether it’s between screens and the texts unfolding on them, between songs, or between song and text. I’ve always appreciated that in your work, music and text are kind of co-conspirators in a production of meaning. I was particularly fascinated by the vastness of your music choices in this most recent work, which ranges from R&B to techno and house to gospel. What influenced your musical decisions here? What relationships did you want to set into motion between the songs you’ve selected, and between the songs and the text?

Cokes: Yeah, I think with this project, as with a lot of my work, I was particularly interested in the possibility of using the sonic register as a form of re- and-de-contextualization of the visual and textual elements. In this case, I started off with a massive playlist, and I knew I wanted the music to be varied. I also wanted the work, in some way or another, to reference gospel idioms, but not necessarily only gospel idioms. So I became interested in musical groups like Floorplan. You know, Robert Hood has a very explicit link to gospel and church traditions. And then works like Geeez ‘N’ Gosh, which sample gospel music but put it in a really glitchy, early 2000s context. And, of course, you have someone like, our friend from Cleveland, Mourning [A] BLKstar. Ever since I first encountered their work, I found it amazing. I didn’t get to use it in the project I initially wanted to use it in. So I think that was one of the first things that I chose. Then I narrowed the tracks down more and more and began to think about what it would be like to have a single soundtrack for a two-channel work. And it seemed very much like there was a way in which those sounds and their relationship to gospel traditions. They proposed an interesting series of histories that complement and complicate the arguments and utterances in the text. But yeah, it’s always been of interest for me. I’m always trying to find music that will amplify and complicate one’s reading of the textual material. There was an almost sixty-year musical time span, which was also different than the historical timeframe of the Dia and the installation of Flavin’s work in the building. So, I thought that in having those two histories in two different forms—or several different forms—they would resonate against each other. It seems like that was the case for some viewers.

Rail: Absolutely. I was struck, though, by a moment where the text and music resonate with one another. At the end of DFAI.01–05, a quote shows up that I think is culled from one of the songs that is played in the gallery: "We must shock this nation with the power of love." There’s a resulting moment of explicit alignment between sound and text. I found that fascinating.

Cokes: Yeah, that track is by Burial. He samples an African American preacher who is giving an introduction, I think at the 2012 Democratic Convention. So there’s a political context, as well as a spiritual context. That felt really important. I wanted to bring the song in at the end of the video because it sort of brings everything together. The idea of a direct sonic connection to church traditions and forms was kind of important, and it was also great that the song is kind of from a electronic music techno context.

Rail: I want to return to and linger with the point you made about gospel. I recently learned that during his youth, Flavin himself studied for the priesthood for about five years. That part of his biography of curse made me think of the kind of spiritual metaphysics that repeatedly surfaces in DFAI.01-05, both in the texts that you’ve sourced from and in the music that you’re using. There’s also the fact that the building Dia Bridgehampton currently occupies was once a church, that spirituality is literally built into the site. I want to talk about this cadence of spirituality and religiosity, and parse through your view of the relation between conceptual art practice and the spiritual.

Cokes: I mean, it’s something I don’t think I’ve explored in my work in a kind of explicit way until now. In some ways it came from my thinking about the importance of light as a medium in Flavin’s work. And what it meant to have spent time with his work at Dia in that gallery upstairs. I was thinking, in large measure, would it be possible to explicate and extend some of the things that go on upstairs into the downstairs, where my work is now displayed? In fact, often when you look from outside the museum at the upstairs floor, there’s light emanating from Flavin’s work. And I wondered, would it be possible to tune and approximate that in some way? So, I had the idea of gelling the windows. I was also thinking about the light bleed that would ensue from having the projections inside this space and have them extend over the walls. That’s another reason why I think I was drawn to having two different channels at once. So that that would intensify that filling of the space and amplify the phenomenon of light. Light has always been an important aspect of my work, but it kind of came to a very different place within the confines of what turned out to be a relatively small space. So, it was kind of interesting to try to find ways to enhance the differences that one could produce.

Rail: Certainly. That dialogue between upper and lower floors, between your work and Flavin’s, brings me to a certain chicken and egg question. What came first in your focus on Flavin? Was it the knowledge that your work would be installed at Dia nearby his? Or were you already thinking about his work before you knew that Dia would be in the picture?

Cokes: You know, that’s a very, very interesting question. I’ve been thinking for quite some time about my relationships to certain tropes and phenomena having to do with minimal and conceptual art. But I hadn’t really been explicitly thinking about Flavin until the possibility of this commission. And yet, it was kind of uncanny. When I did my first site visit, it was like, there’s this interesting phenomenon that I could intervene in and be in relationship to. But I hadn’t actually been thinking specifically about Flavin’s work before then. I often think the encounter with a space and its history or its attributes kind of lead the way. I sometimes have very specific ideas about histories and practices. But often, seeing a specific work or space—or knowing things about the history of a space—provides a certain type of focus and amplification for those general considerations. I’m currently working on a project that’s almost finished, which also deals with legacies and with an encounter with a work that I hadn’t previously been familiar with. So it’s continuing. And in large measure, it was kind of thinking about that kind of relationality. And I thought, well, I’ve done one, maybe I can try another. So.

Rail: That’s so rich. I love that this spatial encounter with Dia galvanized the emergence of this deep interest in an artist’s body of work that is a fascination that was perhaps latent, not yet conscious. This makes me think about the different texts that you’ve sourced for this installation, many of which I believe, are drawn from the archives at Dia.

Cokes: I like having material to sift through in order to make work. In looking at the archival material, it suggests multiple approaches and registers. I’m always glad for that. And it’s interesting to have that kind of information in dialogue with, in this case, Jordan Carter, who was curating the show. Suggestions from other colleagues—many of which I ultimately incorporated into the piece—also emerged when I told him that I was thinking about these things. So yes, I often collect things that are “my own” but often it’s good to have an interchange with colleagues and friends around the things that I’m thinking about and working on. In this case, those registers were definitely important. It’s not just archival material as background or as inspiration, but also as springboards for dialogue while I’m doing the work.

Rail: I really appreciate that there was a collective kind of knowledge production and intellectual labor involved in this work. There’s a dialogue between video channels, and then also behind the scenes, there’s a dialogue happening between you and people and archives at Dia. The interchanges are multiple and that, I think, contributes so much generative tension to the work. Can I ask where you typically start with archives and other sources? How do you deal with their vastness?

Cokes: Yeah, that’s hard to say. It varies a little bit by project. Sometimes I collect text. You probably could argue that I’m a music collector. Although, I’m not as voracious as I was when I was younger, and I sort of miss that. But it’s kind of like a sifting process. I think it’s almost like, I collect things. I say, maybe this will go into work at some point, I don’t really necessarily know exactly how. And then, if I’m working on a specific project, I will maybe set up a playlist and think about how the track could implicate a different register, say on an affective of level that the text does not address directly, but kind of works in a tension, sometimes even antagonism, with the other material. In some cases, I absolutely know the exact text that I plan to use, and then begin to think about the musical choices—the genres and the histories, in relationship to various moments or attributes of a given project. But often, I think, the first thing that I want to commit to is the sonic aspect of it.

So it goes back and forth. The first thing I usually commit to is an edit of the soundtrack. It narrows things down and gives me a baseline or temporality to work with. Then I began to think about, okay, how am I going to go through the textual references and how they might inform one another. Sometimes there are changes, sometimes tracks come in, sometimes they go out: the Burial track, for example, came in toward the end of the project. A friend saw a work-in-progress and said, "Have you seen or heard this track?" It’s great when those things happen. I embrace them when they resonate and seem appropriate. And in that respect, I think I’m often lucky. It’s almost the Warholian way: I’m talking to people, and they’re helping me with my work, as opposed to just, I don’t know, responding to it, and leaving me alone with it.

Rail: You mentioned that you’re keen to kind of stir up an affective register through these dialogues between music and text. Can you talk a little bit more about that, particularly for folks who haven’t had the chance to see the exhibition in person? What are the affective claims that the work is evoking or attempting to evoke? Of course, it’s going to differ from person to person, but how would you describe the embodied experience of being in this space?

Cokes: One thing that’s reported to me fairly often is the idea that there might be some kind of bodily response to historical or theoretical or journalistic information. The body is one register of potential knowledge, and hopefully, future action. It’s not just fun, it’s not just being entertained, it’s not just diversion. It is also a way of thinking and acting. The body, and its rhythms, are sites of acknowledgement and community. I see a resonance between gospel music, the Black Baptist church, and community, and maybe even art practice and institution-building. I want to model those possibilities, those possible connections.

Rail: Yes, your work is always making totalizing demands on our bodies and our senses. This kind of command feels particularly potent in the Dia Bridgehampton installation, where you’re provoking us to think about the history of the space and how it’s linked to what’s happening on the screen. The embodied experience of being at the site is inextricable from these historical contexts.

Cokes: I feel like an immersive experience can be knowledge producing. Some people question whether it’s possible to dance and think at the same time. I really don’t have a problem reconciling those actions conceptually. If you’re called to move, who’s going to stop you? I’m certainly not going to stop you. If the space and the relations between the materials call for a response in the body, if they might help clarify, for example, the social aspect of religious practice, art practice, political practice, that seems like a good thing to me. I don’t know that you can only have these things in strict separation. It seems like there’s a long history of both spiritual and political practice that involves engagement with the body, and that the body does produce certain feelings, emotions, and thoughts. And this is not a purely individual knowledge. The body can kind of facilitate a way of calling people into consciousness of their relationships with others. And so, why shouldn’t my art be a place where those knowledges are circulated, recorded, and reproduced? And acted upon?

Rail: Completely. There’s also this weird way in which minimalism often gets historicized as being purely conceptual, purely philosophical, and thus divorced from the body. But it was deeply in dialogue with all these movements in performance art—for example Fluxus—that were thinking and acting through dance, through music. These practices of conceptual art making have always been very much interlinked with the body and the movements it produces.

I want to ask about a line in your videos that recurs several times, a subtitle of sorts: “doing politics with colour.” What does this phrase mean to you, and also what are the political conceits this installation is involved in?

Cokes: Yeah, that’s interesting. It was something that came from the previous large project, and I wanted to reconsider it as a concept. The line comes from Otl Aicher, a German designer, who did the color scheme and design profile for the 1972 Munich Olympics. There’s something in his life and in his project, a kind of desire to lay out the corrective to the 1936 games, under the thrall of Adolf Hitler and Nazism. He wanted to create a kind of post-nationalist, international idea about design. The possibility of that kind of got undone by terrorist acts at the 1972 Olympics. But I was particularly interested, for example, in the choice not to include colors that represent national flags, or a particular historical period or political moment. So when I was thinking about the use of color, and specifically, about Flavin’s work, I grew interested in resuscitating Aicher’s argument: that a relationship that seems only formal could also be imbricated in the social—not something imagined out of historical or social context, but something maybe specifically linked to it. And that it might be a possibility worth pursuing, even if there were historical problems and failures in the past. The Heiner Friedrich book had on the back cover, I think, the quotation from Winston Churchill about repeated failure being a kind of motor, as opposed to being an impediment to what people need to do and how they need to think and act in the world. Success and failure are not strictly speaking binaries, but are linked to what one has to do, or what people have to do in order to move forward in a certain sense.

Rail: There’s a lot that your installation is engaging with politically. The texts are raising questions around the commodification of the artwork, spectatorship in the museum, accessibility, etc. What are the modalities of critique that you’re aiming to foreground here? And can this project be conceptualized as a work of institutional critique? Is that playing a role at all?

Cokes: I mean, it’s something that, historically and daily, I think about: what are the conditions of possibility for making work today? And, what are ways that we might construct relations that aren’t necessarily totally “accessible” to everyone, but might extend those conditions of possibility, that might help us roll back and reconsider historical moments or practices that have not been read as critically enough. This also brings us back to the whole business of minimalism, for instance, as apolitical, or theatrical. It raises, again, a critique of minimalism’s relationships to the human body: embodiment as a problem as opposed to a feature, or as something that at least has possibilities and is not to be dismissed, or could have a kind of use value not just in the past, but potentially in the future. I think you’re right about the complex history and context out of which minimalism came: that there are performative registers there that are worth considering because they are connected to the body and not strictly speaking abstract. And I’m always a little bit polemical in the things that I put together and would want people to consider, to look at again. I also think the idea that these aesthetic traditions are purely visual and that they are separate from sound has always been of interest to me. There are also practitioners who incorporated sound, but not as the primary aspect of their practice. And that kind of interests me. Take Michael Snow, for instance. He was a musician, and also a filmmaker, but has a lot of films that have no sound. He isn’t using sound in the way it is used in traditional and entertainment film content. I like to explore roads not taken, the possibilities in historical forms and genres. I’m interested in things that they wouldn’t normally do, as opposed to reproducing all the aspects and all the sensoria that they historically have done. That’s part of why I want my work to involve a complex relationship to sound; to pull from more than a single genre and from historical periods that are not necessarily the same as the text, right? I want there to be variations to indicate that music has use-value both in the past and the future.

Rail: That’s right. I’m interested in your remarks about your practice as being not primarily visual. There are moments in this installation where the text pauses, and as viewers are left for a moment with a purely sonic experience of the thing. The colors on the screen continue to change, but the text is arrested. It’s a fascinating point of tension in the work. Can you talk about what those moments of breath, of pause, from the visual doing?

Cokes: Well, it has to do with rhythm and phrasing in the text. I often make editorial decisions of course, when I’m deciding what the duration or what the capacity of a given page is and where to make the breaks. And sometimes there are actual paragraph breaks in the text, for instance, and I will approximate those to kind of give a pause in the video, because there’s a pause in the text. You know, I sometimes do it in different ways for different reasons. But when I insert blanks, they usually mark paragraph changes. Sometimes I might have breaks between sentences, but more often, it’s per paragraph breaks. But also, it’s good to have some spaces for reflection and consideration of what might come next, or a change in register, or a change in the source of the text or who is speaking. These are spaces where you can attend to the music, or think about its relation to what came before and what may come after.

There’s got to be a break, it’s a structural feature of the text. And I like marking it, as opposed to running everything together. People have also remarked on some occasions that looking at my work is a very different experience than reading a text by yourself. There are questions of who controls the reading, of whether there is space or time for recursiveness, for going back—which is endemic to readerly control. Breaks are productive, not just as punctuation, but also as spaces to mentally rewind or to project what’s going on.

Rail: I had no idea that the pauses had that kind of practical function of being a marker of a paragraph break. For me, those moments have always been so psychological. They allow me to reorient my relation to the work. So I had never imagined their role within the actual written text, and it’s very really interesting to hear you frame their practical in relation to the psychological.

I really want to ask about the public-facing dimension of the project. You’ve installed a video channel alongside a highway near the museum. How did you arrive at this specific idea of situating the work on a highway? And how in general would you describe your relationship to public art?

Cokes: Yeah, it’s pretty complicated in some ways.

Rail: For sure.

Cokes: I see the public, again, as a zone of potential, a zone that I recruit to reread in a way. Public reading is interesting to me. So much of what reading has become entails certain privatized aspects, whether it’s advertising, for example, or technology, which has continued to filter what people read and how they read. I like the idea of inserting these little aphorisms into the public sphere that are not “selling anything.” They’re just enunciations that appear. And they appear from a context that may or may not be fully present to the reader. So for this project, rather than try to provide a summary for all the fragments of all the things, I chose a particular set of registers, not all from the same text, but things that refer in some way, maybe to something that’s not a product, not material. So that guided my approach in this case. One project that had a heavy public component before this was for the 58th Carnegie International. There, I wanted to redirect some famous or infamous utterances. I had gotten bored with the “I, I, I” of the personal pronoun, and decided to just take these statements, which are well known, and just change the personal pronouns to see what impact that might have in a public context. I’ve also done some public projects that are stills.

If I’ve selected a variety of different texts to be part of the same project, you know, they are read as a kind of a selective index of some moments from the video. But in an interesting way, at least to me, this raises more questions about the context. It underlines a general question that I think emerges in the work, and that is: Who is speaking? And in what context? To whom, or for whom, or for what reasons? So those are maybe different addresses in terms of public material. I’m interested in the simple and/or complex fact that we’re called to all the time in public, but usually from very specific kinds of contexts and conditions. Why isn’t there a wider variety of public calls?

Rail: That’s a really interesting question. I like the idea of this work being kind of an interpolation or an invitation into a discursive space. It’s asking some questions that one might imagine as belonging to art and its institutions, but I think something really interesting happens when you: A.) invite this work into the public; and B.) facilitate this kind of depersonalization, absenting the "I" from the text. As you said, this gesture of changing personal pronouns, reducing names to initials, has appeared in a couple of your works. I want to ask whether these different forms of drawing away from the ego are related to your exclusion of context and citations. As you said, we don’t know as viewers where these texts are coming from. What does that lack of context ask us to do?

Cokes: I’m interested in the quality of reading of a particular text or set of texts. It’s maybe an intuition of mine that it’s useful to look at the structure of certain accounts and narratives—they are tropes in a certain way. And it’s easier to do that looking if you’re not necessarily distracted by what you think you know already. A little bit of distance can help clarify that maybe this is something that you’ve seen in a different form before. If you stick with all the information, you think it’s an “isolated” or specific incident, and then you pull back, from what you know, and you might be able to see that it relates to other descriptions or other statements in public. One example is a work of mine which sourced texts from outrageous public statements. Even if you don’t immediately identify who’s saying it, you come to a recognition of what’s being said, and how it’s being said. Sometimes it’s almost impossible to do that if you’re only attending to who said it. You suppress the specifics or the generalities of what’s being said, because you think you know something based on the attribution. So, I’m kind of interested in what happens if you suspend the attribution. It’s not like I want to keep it a secret, or that I want people to go on some guessing game or treasure hunt. I’m asking: could we just for a few minutes suspend what we think we know about public statements? I think it may at least allow the possibility of seeing some aspect of their construction and contextualization, how they operate. I’m interested in how these things become meaningful, or how we think we understand them, or what we think we know about these public statements. Who gets to make them and under what circumstances?