Tony Cokes: Untitled (m.j. the symptom)

Borrowing its text from assorted excerpts from the Mark Fisher-edited essay collection The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson (2009) , Untitled (m.j. the symptom) examines the King of Pop as a complex set of contradictory signifiers, a funhouse reflection that is as distinct, spectacular, and compromised as the culture that produced him. So say Kraftwerk in their haunting 1977 song “Hall of Mirrors”: “Even the greatest stars / find themselves in the looking glass.” About the Artist Tony Cokes makes politically resonant works in a visual language all his own. Since the 1980s, his work has surfaced the latent ideologies of popular culture, confronting issues of structural racism, power, visibility, and the defiant pleasures still found under capitalism. Cokes samples and remixes fragments of our media landscape to subvert its governing codes. His tightly choreographed video essays layer found text over vibrant colors and dissonant soundtracks, exploiting the gaps between sensory regimes to heighten and complicate the reading experience. Quoted passages from current events or critical theory take on a new tenor when set to music, resulting in propulsive animations that appeal to the mind and body alike. Cokes’s immersive works make text feel visceral and let rhythm spur new insight: as his art attests, “it is possible to dance and think at the same time.”