Tony Cokes: Music, Text, Politics

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Image courtesy of MACBA.

Since the 1980s, Tony Cokes (b. 1956, Richmond, Virginia) has developed a precise visual style marked by his attempt to challenge the established use and hierarchies of animated text and found images, adding a visual element in the form of solid-color slides or, more recently, morphing organic backgrounds.

Self-described as a "post-Conceptualist," Cokes acknowledges the influence of conceptual artists such as Art & Language, Adrian Piper, Lawrence Weiner and Jenny Holzer. In his college years, he also encountered the art of Dara Birnbaum, Yvonne Rainer, Barbara Kruger and Dan Graham. From that moment onwards he became interested in editing, focusing especially on the idea of making versions and mixes, and how these strategies could provoke or induce the way we read images and stimulate our desires.

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