Tony Cook wins genius grant
Brown University —
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| Tony Cokes, a professor of modern culture and media at Brown, has been named a 2024 MacArthur Fellow. Photo provided by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. |
The MacArthur Foundation has named Tony Cokes, a professor of modern culture and media at Brown University, one of 22 MacArthur Fellows from across the U.S. for 2024.
The honor is accompanied by an $800,000 stipend, awarded
over five years with no conditions, to enable Cokes to advance his artistic
practice. Cokes’ video works and installations examine historical and cultural
moments through a signature style that places frames of appropriated text
against backgrounds of solid colors or images, paired with musical soundtracks.
He said he was surprised to receive the award, often dubbed
the “genius grant,” for which recipients are nominated anonymously by leaders
in their respective fields and considered by an anonymous selection committee.
“Receiving a MacArthur award is something I didn’t know would happen for me at my advanced level and age,” said Cokes, who is 68 and has been teaching at Brown since 1993.
Cokes plans to use some of the funding to concentrate on a
long-term project focused on the legacy of Factory Records, an independent
record label founded in 1978 in Manchester, England, that produced albums by
the bands Joy Division and New Order.
“I’ve been working on this project for about a decade, so it
will be nice to be able to seriously pursue it and build a team to work on it,”
Cokes said.
The no-strings-attached aspect of the grant offers a unique
opportunity for creative and flexibility, he noted.
“It’s great to have that openness,” Cokes said. “I’ve always
kind of worked to my own tune and desires, but it’s nice to have such freedom
over the next five years to find the things that are most interesting to me and
pursue them.”
Cokes’ artistic practice involves sampling and recombining
visual, textural and musical fragments, including pop music, film footage,
journalism, philosophy texts and social media. For example, in a 1988 video
piece, “Black Celebration (A Rebellion Against the Commodity),” he combined
documentary footage of the uprisings that took place in Black neighborhoods in
Boston, Los Angeles, Detroit and Newark in the 1960s with samples of texts by
musicians Morrissey of the Smiths and Martin Gore of Depeche Mode, the
philosopher and theorist Guy Debord, and others.
In his work “Evil.16: Torture Musik,” created between 2009
and 2011 as part of an ongoing series, Cokes responded to the U.S.-led “war on
terror” by pairing portions of text from an article about advanced torture
techniques with pop songs that were allegedly used as a form of music torture
in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and other sites.
More recently, in 2020, Cokes examined the discourse around
police brutality and anti-Blackness in his work “HS LST WRDS,” which
incorporated the final words, with the vowels removed, of Elijah McClain, a
23-year-old who was killed in 2019 in the custody of Colorado police.
“As in many of Cokes’ works, the text is more than language
conveying information and becomes a visualization of terrifying
breathlessness,” the MacArthur Foundation wrote in a statement announcing his award. “Through
his unique melding of artistic practice and media analysis, Cokes shows the
discordant ways media color our understanding and demonstrates the artist’s
power to bring clarity and nuance to how we see events, people and
histories.”
Tony Cokes' work highlights how media shapes our
understanding of the world and reinforces existing power structures, prompting
critical reflection on how people, events, and histories are represented. Video by the MacArthur
Foundation.
Through the contrasts in his work, Cokes said he aims to
provoke thought, emotions and perhaps even physical movement, including
dancing, among viewers.
“I sometimes say that the juxtaposition between the text and
the music is projecting a kind of time travel, and everything isn’t locked into
a single place,” he said. “The juxtapositions do not read as totally random,
but sometimes the intention requires some thinking, and they may illustrate
relationships across time.”
Sixteen of Cokes’ works, including pieces from his
“Black Celebration” and “Evil” series, are in the collection of
the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His art has also been exhibited at
several other national and international venues, including the Whitney Museum
of American Art in New York, Haus Der Kunst in Munich and Dia Bridgehampton in
New York, which presented an exhibition of his new work from June 2023 through
May 2024.
The MacArthur fellows program recognizes “extraordinarily
creative individuals with a track record of excellence in a field of
scholarship or area of practice, who demonstrate the ability to impact society
in significant and beneficial ways through their pioneering work or the rigor
of their contributions,” according to the foundation.
Among this year’s recipients are writers, scientists and
historians, including fiction writer Ling Ma, dancer and choreographer Shamel
Pitts and oceanographer Benjamin Van Mooy.
Cokes, who lives in Providence, Rhode Island, teaches
courses in Brown’s Department of Modern Culture and Media on topics including
video and documentary production; the role of sound in film, video and
installations; and the relationship between theory and practice in art and
media forms.