The first artwork that visitors encounter when visiting Tony Cokes exhibition at Goldsmiths CCA is “The Morrissey Problem. This piece, specially commissioned by Goldsmiths Centre fir Contemporary Art, contains reflections from a black fan perspective on the singer’s support for far right ideas.

Tony Cokes, “If UR Reading This It’s 2 Late: Vol 1,” Goldsmiths CCA and Jeremy Deller, “Putin’s Happy,” Hannah Barry Gallery. Part 1.

“If UR Reading This It’s 2 Late: Vol. 1″, the first UK solo exhibition of US artist Tony Cokes, takes its title from a 2015 music album by the North-American rapper Drake. Popular music is a key element and preoccupation in the work of Cokes, always intertwined with political questions --in many cases directly related to a racialised subject-- and cultural theory that evidence the artist work in and engagement with academia. However, the engagement with these matters in the work is done in a non-straightforward manner, resulting in works with a certain degree of complexity, but also ambiguity, that through the use of music, rhythm and text establish an affective relationship with the viewer. 

From a formal point of view, Cokes artworks are relatively simple: the majority of his output presented at Goldsmiths consists of screens (sometimes projections, sometimes old cathode-ray tube TV monitors) where text on a flat colour or abstract background is animated as a discourse is presented following certain rhythms, whilst at the same time loud popular music (rock, electronica, techno, electro-pop) blasts through speakers or headphones --sometimes directly connected to the text presented, as in Evil 16 (Torture.Musik) (2009-2011) with fragments of tracks of popular music used by US (and UK) troops to torture detainees in Iraq in the work ; and sometimes not.

Two works have been specially commissioned by the Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art with the occasion of this exhibition, The Morrissey Problem (2019) and Testament A (MF FKA K-P x KE RIP) (2019). The Morrissey Problem presents the thoughts of Joshua Surtees, a black British Morrissey fan, adapted from a piece published earlier this year in the newspaper the Guardian, expressing his concern and disappointment about the singer’s open and public embrace of far right ideas.

Stills from The Queen is Dead, Fragment 2 (2019), a work by Cokes on the political reverberations and legacy of Aretha Franklin. It is made of fragments from a selections of articles on the late singer, and it is presented accompanied of some of her music. At the moment of my visit, this was a techno remix of one of her songs, and the text on the screen spoke of Franklyn’s support of the Black Panther activist and philosopher Angela Davis.

The second piece commissioned by Goldsmiths, Testament A (MF FKA K-P x KE RIP) (2019) verses on Mark Fisher, the late philosopher and lecturer at Goldsmiths College’s Visual Cultures department. The text used as the base for this work is not one of the many pieces of writing by Fisher, but part of the contents of the first memorial lecture in his honour, delivered by his friend and colleague Kodwo Eshun in January 2018, one year after Fisher’s death. The lecture is an intellectual eulogy and a testament to the power and potential of Fisher’s ideas. You can watch it here. Cokes deploys the thoughtful and precise words of Eshun in a way that he replicates the extraordinary rhythm and cadence of that specific speech, making the viewer slowly absorb the clarity and carefulness with which the words were articulated and the power of the message delivered. 

Cokes engages with Fisher as well through the choice of music accompanying the text animation in yellow and pink. One track he employs is the song ‘Ghosts’, by the British 1980s new-wave band Japan. A verse of this song gave title to one of Fisher’s books, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (2014). In the chapter with the same title, Fisher reflects on the electronic music of Goldie, Japan’s singer David Sylvian and Tricky using this song as a connector between the three artists. Fisher creates a genealogy of art pop and a picture of the electronic music (and the culture) of the beginning of the 21st century, exposing at its core the very British preoccupation of class. 

Extra materials: 

An interview with Tony Cokes on Artforum, regarding this exhibition.

Kodwo Eshun and Tony Cokes in conversation about this exhibition on 28 September 2019.

Tony Cokes’ Testament A (MF FKA K-P x KE RIP) as a visual essay on Frieze magazine (April 2019), with a text by Pablo Larios, senior editor at Frieze.

Mark Fisher’s series of lectures at DOCH, School of Dance and Circus, Stockholm University of the Arts, in May 2011.