Artist Playlists: “Trouble…” by Tony Cokes

For this series, Dia invites artists to curate a playlist that brings together music they’re listening to now, in the studio, or that has been meaningful to them during their life.

Photo: Don Stahl

Trouble… started as a meditation on some of my interwoven listening and media production, mostly from 2018 to the future. Some of the collected tracks go back to my media installation Could You Visit Me in Dreams? (2018) in Vienna, through subsequent works like SM BNGRZ.03.01–03 (2021), also in Vienna; Some Munich Moments 1937–1972 (2022) in Munich; the more recent DFAI.01-05 (2023) at Dia Bridgehampton; as well as individual works such as Evil.13.5 (4 OE) (2022) in between these. A few tracks suggest future projects or sounds for which I’d like to develop new contexts.

The overall playlist is framed by material explicitly related to the two-channel installation DFAI.01-05, where the selected sounds largely investigate what I consider to be the conceptual parameters, or implied futures of “gospel” music, but then this playlist takes several detours into other genres that inhabit my recent listening practice: grime, dubstep, disco, techno, pop remixes, footwork… I often develop playlists for my media projects and usually commit to the music first, as a way to structure, expand, or even contradict the textual and visual aspects of a work. I took a similar approach in developing this playlist. Usually, I have tended to take a more generically centered approach, whereas in this particular case I open and close with tracks dealing with possible legacies of gospel (and directly reference the DFAI installation), but then veer into tracks from other popular music genres that I have deployed in the past or want to deploy in the future. Unfortunately, I didn’t get the chance to jump-cut my way through this rather large corpus of material, but that’s what I often do in the videos.

— Tony Cokes

Listen to “Trouble…” by Tony Cokes: Spotify, Apple Music

Since the late 1980s, Tony Cokes has appropriated and remixed text, music, and documentary images into videos and installations that investigate the interrelations of politics, popular culture, race, and identity. On view now at Dia Bridgehampton, Cokes presents a new work in dialogue with the material histories of the site, a former firehouse–turned–First Baptist Church. The artist also responds to the permanent Dan Flavin installation on the second floor, which resonates with Cokes’s own conceptual and formal interests in radiant, monochromatic color and light, as well as his increasingly sculptural and context-specific approach to moving-image installations.

For more information about Tony Cokes’s exhibition currently on view at Dia Bridgehampton, visit diaart.org.