Torture, Terror, Digitality: A Conversation with Tony Cokes

Abstract

Post-conceptual artist Tony Cokes's Evil series (2001-present) interrogates the ideological underpinnings of the on Terror. Through the critical reframing of appropriated texts and images, Cokes infuses a new legibility into material that has remained largely hidden in plain sight. Refunctioning streams of poorly read/ forgotten information, Cokes creates an architecture of wreading (1) for the digital age. Cokes is Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University and lives in Providence, Rhode Island. His works have been exhibited at such venues as the Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Guggenheim Museum in New York; Centre Georges Pompidou and La Cinematheque Francaise in Paris; Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona; the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT) in Los Angeles; Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe; and Documenta X in Kassel, Germany. He has received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council for the Arts, Creative Capital, and the Getty Research Institute. What follows is taken from a series of exchanges, via email and in person, begun in February 2015--when Cokes presented his work in the context of Distracted Wreading [From Structural Film to Digital Poetics], an exhibition at Union College in Schenectady, New York. JENELLE TROXELL: I'd like to discuss your Evil series and how it relates more generally to your extended body of work. Could you say a few words about the series in terms of how you conceived of it and some of its overarching themes? TONY COKES: The Evil series came about in the period after the events of September 11, 2001. Besides feeling inundated by seeing more American flags than I recalled from any earlier period in my life, I was struck by the return of the concept of evil to contemporary political discourse. The repeated use of the term (often in juxtaposition with its alleged opposite) seemed to be puzzling, yet highly rhetorically effective during the years of the George W. Bush presidency. Phenomena like the ongoing War on Terror, the USA PATRIOT Act, and the Department of Homeland Security's color alert system really frightened and angered me and required a response. I began collecting articles, mostly journalistic, some theoretical, to map these things as they happened. I was particularly interested in these texts as or hidden in plain sight. I was also aware that other artists were working with similar materials (multiple projects based on keyword searches of Bush's speeches, for example), and I wanted to align with those practices as a small act of solidarity and resistance. My premise is that a different reading protocol and context might produce new conditions of possibility and legibility for these already widely, yet poorly, read events/histories/articles. JT: From where does the title derive? TC: The title came to me through an encounter with the interview On Evil: An Interview With Alain Badiou conducted by Christopher Cox and Molly Whalen, which appeared in Cabinet magazine in Winter 2001-02. Excerpts from the interview became text elements in Evil/Shrink (2003), the first completed work in the series. That first video, which featured footage taken of Manhattan before and after 9/11, was composed of two excerpts from a large, still incomplete multichannel installation project called Shrink. That project was to feature three simultaneous yet different views of the same area of the New York City skyline accompanied by a variety of theoretical, artistic, and journalistic texts. All the video was set to the same soundtrack: a set of songs from the 1998 album Shrink, produced by the Bavarian experimental rock band the Notwist. JT: Do you see this project as an elaboration of some of your earlier concerns? TC: I think my work has always had an interest in reframing/ disrupting already existing cultural artifacts (visual, textual, or sonic) to produce different possibilities for reading and meaning. …