Tony Cokes
2021B4 & After the Studio Pt 1
Tony Cokes
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.
B4 & After the Studio Pt 1
Black Celebration
Tony Cokes
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 from Barbara Kruger and musicians Morrissey and Skinny Puppy, the text posits rioting as a refusal to participate in the logic of capital and an attempt to de-fetishize the commodity through theft and gift. Cokes asks, “How do people make history under conditions pre-established to dissuade them from intervening in it?”
Black Celebration
Fade to Black
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 ideology of repressed racism.
Fade to Black
The Book of Love
Tony Cokes
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 life through interview, stories, and song, effectively re-presenting history through the personal. Through intimate subjectivity, Cokes attempts to understand his own present and history by tracing/retracing the life of his mother. - EAI
The Book of Love
