Tony Cokes’s The Will & The Way... Fragments 1 and 2

Stuart Comer: The subjects of your videos have ranged from Donald Trump to Michael Jackson, and in this case, you took as your subject the architect Paul Revere Williams. I’m curious how you gravitated to him and to his work in the first place.

Tony Cokes: Initially, I didn’t know a lot about Williams’s trajectory. I knew that he had done some homes for Hollywood people and also iconic municipal buildings, like the airport and one of the courts in Los Angeles. But I didn’t know very much about him at all, so this work became a kind of revelation.

I was particularly interested in a book that had been edited by his granddaughter; it’s an overarching account, both anecdotally and philosophically, of his approach to his practice. In the book there are two primary voices, one more anecdotal and vernacular, and then there are insertions of a very different viewpoint, talking about his own views on what design is, or can be. In my own work, too, there’s always that kind of relationship between the story aspect and a more analytic and theoretical angle. And so it was useful and interesting to pursue that. I looked at some other material as well, but it was something about the voice that drew me to the book.

We are presenting the two parts of the video, each for one week. I’m curious about how you arrived at this two-chaptered structure.

These videos were part of a commission, and had to be sited in Williams’s residence, and I try to think spatially about work when I’m doing an installation project. In the house there were two rooms that were perpendicular to each other, both facing a courtyard, and I was struck by that mirroring, and also by the differences between the two spaces. One was a formal living room, with wooden walls, usually carpeted, and it had a view of the garden. And on the other side there was a lanai, which was an indoor/outdoor space, with tile floors and brick walls.

So I thought that it might make sense to have some kind of doubling, formally. And also that it would be interesting to contrast Williams’s stories with something else, and I happened to be doing a site visit out in Los Angeles at the time that Aretha Franklin passed away. She was a central figure, especially to my mother, and it was interesting to think about what it would do to place them in a cross pattern, a kind of placement and displacement. So that’s how the formal aspect of the installation got decided. It was like, “Oh, I can have one channel about each of them in each room, at different scales, but rhyming.”

Sound is so critical to your work, especially pop music or club music. And I’m wondering how you arrived at using Radiohead in this video.

I often work with things that I’m listening to. This music came from a set of remixes from Radiohead’s The King of Limbs. When it was released I was aware of it, but hadn’t listened with the kind of attention that I was able to give it later. As is often the case, I was looking for music that would complicate the other materials that I was recruiting for a project. In this case, it had to be something immersive that might refer to traditional song forms or melodic forms, but not fully embody them. This music seemed to resonate with my decisions visually, and had hallucinogenic, naturalistic sort of references, which is something that I hadn’t worked with in some time. It was interesting to think about things that might refer, in an oblique way, to water, or to leaves, or to molten materials—to these kinds of moving patterns as opposed to a static juxtaposition between two colors or something like that.

There are three strands of filmmaking that tend to be seen as separate, or even opposed to each other. One is narrative filmmaking, another is documentary filmmaking, and the third is structuralist filmmaking. To some extent, this video is all three, so there are a lot of cinematic codes being played with and fused in a really clever way.

In some ways, you could say that that’s my MO. I was trained by modernists who felt that there should be rigorous separations between formal play and descriptions of society or of individual lives. And I was sort of like, “Why is that, exactly?” It seemed to me that a more useful and complex model would combine all of these codes and expectations. I often say that I love the “document” in documentary. I often work with transcriptions of interviews, or things that might appear in a documentary, except that I don’t treat them in that way. I run them through conceptual and structural modalities, because I think that there are multiple potentials for legibility in these kinds of combined codes, as opposed to trying to keep the codes discrete from one another. That’s something I never really understood.

In the 1990s, there was a resurgence of interest in what was called sentimental conceptualism, or romantic conceptualism, which was trying to suggest that Conceptual art doesn’t always have to be dry and clinical, which is the way it had often been perceived. In your work, the music in particular delivers a level of affect that has not been traditionally associated with Conceptual art.

I’d say that in my work I strive for thinking and feeling at once. You know, is it possible to think, dance, and act in the world simultaneously? Affect can be as useful in its way as analysis.

Increasingly, your work is shown in very large public spaces, like Piccadilly Circus. At the same time, it became very present in the virtual world during the pandemic. It had a certain urgency in that moment, and it was great to see it being shared online, by a variety of institutions, internationally. So I’d like to ask how you’re thinking about navigating civic space, both on a large-scale, physical level, and through the Internet.

I love the idea that something that I developed on my laptop, this device that we’re communicating through right now, could also exist in multiple places, and at multiple scales, and that it may be able to have different resonances depending on where you are in relation to it spatially, contextually, and socially. I’m interested in the idea that the work can function at the scale of ubiquitous advertising, and yet also be experienced with full sound in an immersive environment. And streaming is yet another version. My tendency, at least right now, is not to privilege one over the other, but to think about them as layers that are not mutually exclusive. That’s what’s exciting for me about it.