Tony Cokes. Retro (Pop, Terror, Critique)

For nearly three decades, video artist Tony Cokes has been engaged in a thorough examination of the uses of sound and image by forms of popular culture and mass entertainment. Working independently since the mid-1980s, and as part of the "art band" X-PRZ from 1991 to 1999, Cokes' videotapes, sound and multi-media installations cull together a broad range of theoretical texts, popular music and archival images that are endlessly borrowed, recycled and sampled to look at the ways in which ideology and power are distributed and subsequently perceived and received. Cokes levels out the field of "appropriation" to include the products of intellectual culture and theoretical discourse, giving visual shape to a history of critical response and further implicating the "culture of critique" in the endgame of capitalism.

Retro (Pop, Terror, Critique), Cokes' first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, brings together over 30 videos and text animations from the past 15 years. Taking the form of a new multichannel installation conceived for REDCAT by the artist, the exhibition offers a survey of Cokes' recent output, while subjecting his own artistic practice to the looping processes of use and reuse. The repurposing of existing works to this end furthers the repetition of images, sounds and texts that has been characteristic of the artist's work since his acclaimed Black Celebration (1988), which pairs newsreel footage of uprisings in urban black neighborhoods in the 1960s with textual commentary and popular music references from the 1980s

Tony Cokes
Retro (Pop, Terror, Critique)