Tony Cokes: The Book of Love
535 West 22nd Street 5th Floor
$7 / $5 / free for members
Get tickets here.
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is pleased to present an evening with Tony Cokes, organized in conjunction with On Non-Visibility, his first gallery exhibition, on view through June 9th at Greene Naftali. At EAI, Cokes will be in conversation following a screening of The Book of Love (1992), a video portrait of his mother that deliberately takes apart the conventions of personal documentary to frame its own devices. Describing the tape in FELIX journal, Cokes writes, “…The piece is about my mother, so it has a lot of narrative and Oedipal tropes. She tells stories while I busily frame her cropped image with quotes and voice-over essays. I let her speak, but never outside the context I construct. (A lot of commentary is irrelevant to her story) Think about all the hands and reasons and agendas between you and anything you see no matter how ‘raw,’ ‘faux-naïve,’ ‘rough’ the style. A lot of confusion exists between romantic notions of ‘otherness’ (authenticity, identity) and highly fragmented, constructed, class- and gender-split subjects. Social agendas are always disguised as art. What statement is more politically charged than the claim that art (or science) must be politically neutral? Art can’t help reflecting on history/politics/economics.”
