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6^

Tony Cokes

2001 00:04:33 United StatesEnglishColorStereo4:3Video

Description

6^ is part of the Pop Manifestos series, a five video project realized in collaboration with Cokes' former students Seth Price and Damian Kulash, and originally conceived as part of a series for the conceptual band SWIPE.

"6^, based on a music track by Damian Kulash, blends essayistic text and quoted song lyrics to self-reflexively question the desires of both performer and audience in pop music forms. Kulash’s song init: A Song for Cynical Art #4 invokes the desire to write songs, rehearses the possible subject matters, then questions the subjective authenticity of such a gesture. The video literalizes the song’s implicit criticism in theoretical (essay) and practical (quoted song lyrics) registers, underlining "individual" desire as a mere shell for mass marketing. The consumer’s desire for a representation of her own personal "emotion" is sold repeatedly in atomized niches, globally."

--Tony Cokes

About Tony Cokes

Tony Cokes works in video and multi-media installation. Juxtaposing re-edited broadcast and archival footage with quotations in the form of texts and voiceovers, Cokes’s experimental documentaries explore the ideological implications of media representation and rhetoric. His work foregrounds theoretical questions of racial and sexual difference, enunciation, and history. 

Also see:

Viewpoints on Video: Envisioning the Black Aesthetic