Tony Cokes at Hannah Hoffman Gallery

Tony Cokes, All About Evil (Selected Works: 2006–2022) (installation views) (2025). Images courtesy of the artist and Hannah Hoffman Gallery. Photos: Paul Salveson.

In All About Evil (Selected Works 2006–2022), Tony Cokes’s recent solo show at Hannah Hoffman, three videos played all at once. A large LED screen, like a Jumbotron placed on the ground, was flanked by a smaller monitor mounted to the wall with two headphones. The third played on a large monitor that occupied the gallery’s front window and could be watched from the gallery’s outdoor courtyard. Both the wall-mounted flat screen and the one in the window looped the same five videos in differing sequences, producing a repetitive but asynchronous mélange. The large LED screen played a series of eight (of the show’s 12 total) videos, their sound booming loudly. Across these three screens, Cokes presented an archive spanning 16 years of his attempts to illustrate political evil. In a sans serif font overlaid onto mono- chromatic backgrounds, Cokes strips down speeches, essays, books, and tweets—he pulls in quotes from President Donald Trump; Kanye West; comedian George Carlin; YouTuber DJ Joe Nice on Joe Biden’s failed policies regarding racial violence; David Frum’s article “This is Trump’s Fault,” originally published in The Atlantic and an article originally published in The Nation on how American pop music is used as an interrogation and torture tactic by the CIA. To drive this point home, the text-based videos are accompanied by music from the likes of the Pet Shop Boys, Postal Service, The Specials, David Bowie, Britney Spears, and Steel Pulse.

I sat on a black foam block singing along to Britney Spears’ 2003 hit “Toxic,” which plays over Cokes’s 2022 video Evil.13.3.UKR (4OE) while reading about how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could lead to “the worst war of the century,” a tragedy “for the entire world,” quotations by United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres rendered in alternating blue and yellow text on contrasting backgrounds. It felt jarring to be reading what’s on screen whilst dancing along to a song engrained in my memory from childhood. But it’s not just a nostalgic Britney song: Cokes intentionally uses her lyrics as a textual interplay with the words on screen. The accounts of various people being appalled by war become entangled with thoughts of being addicted to toxicity, a poison paradise. I continue singing and become hyper-aware of how the language on screen is continuously failing to relay the actual magnitude of transgressions being described.

In Evil.13.3.UKR (4 OE), a section recounts the shared disgust of President Joe Biden, French President Emmanuel Macron, and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine as well as the International Criminal Court charging Putin with war crimes. The video continues to disclaim, in Cokes’s voice, that “the term [war criminal] has been inconsistently interpreted and unevenly applied to leaders or countries—including the U.S. and its officials—who have initiated aggression for reasons considered unjustified.” Cokes highlights the irony of countries like the USA, UK, and France imploring the ICC to charge Putin with war crimes when their own countries have been accused of the very same imperialist agendas.

Cokes’s sequencing of text demonstrates how language is unstable, often relying on the authority of the author or speaker. This notion is articulated in Roland Barthes’ essay The Death of the Author, where the literary critic stresses the importance of the reader’s interpretation of a work.¹ Cokes doesn’t maintain the author’s authority over their work; he instead centers the viewer’s interpretations of text and sound to reveal the ways in which meaning is produced.

Cokes’s textual interplay is one of compilation. Everything he proposes in his works’ form—from their collaged components to their installation on multiple screens and at alternating sequences—is organized as a parataxis, or a structure without hierarchies, where all the components are simply adjacent to one another. The layered sequencing across the three videos in the gallery meant that three videos playing in unison at any given time almost never came into exact combination again, creating a unique real-time reading across the videos every time they played. I found myself listening to the headphones on the wall-mounted video while reading text or listening to audio from other videos, further remixing their elements to produce new meanings in real time.

In titling the show All About Evil, Cokes seems to imply a certain amount of unattainability by using the phrase “all about.” It would be impossible to encompass and translate all evil, everywhere, present or past. This unattainability is also present in our flawed media, which can be burdened by sensational yet noncritical perspectives. Leaving gaps and slippery edges, Cokes is less interested in providing an authoritative definition of evil and more interested in allowing the viewer to interpret the media landscape through their own nuanced associations.

Tony Cokes, All About Evil (Selected Works: 2006–2022) (installation views) (2025). Images courtesy of the artist and Hannah Hoffman Gallery. Photos: Paul Salveson.

Shani Strand is a Los Angeles-based artist. They hold an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. They have been published in The Avery Review and Pin-Up Magazine.

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