Some Munich Moments

2022 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

Channel I: 54:00 minutes, Channel II: 74:00 minutes

Tony Cokes

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Tony Cokes’s long-form, multi-channel work Some Munich Moments 1937–1972 forms a layered montage of historical and contemporary source material exploring different periods of Munich’s history. Incorporating footage and speeches from the infamous 1937 exhibitions, Degenerate Art and First Great German Art Exhibition , views of the city’s destruction from June 1945, and texts on Otl Aicher’s graphic identity for the 20th Olympic Games in Munich in 1972, the film weaves together an open-ended narrative. This visual and textual material is set to music including techno playlists, contemporary EDM tracks, and Donna Summer’s disco classic, I Feel Love (1977), which the American singer recorded in Munich’s legendary Musicland studio. Through the juxtaposition of image, sound, and text fragments, Cokes exposes the roles of fascist cultural policy and postwar design strategies. This interconnection of moments from Munich’s history continues Cokes’s multi-decade investigation of the relationships between power structures, racist ideologies, and image politics. Initially conceived for his solo exhibition encompassing the Kunstverein Munchen and the Haus der Kunst, Cokes developed Some Munich Moments 1937–1972 to approach and respond to the history of the two institutions. At the same time, it speaks to Cokes’s larger approach to creating site-responsive rather than site-specific works, which meld his ongoing research interests with particular troubled histories. In its original iteration, the work was installed within separate spaces on different loops, connecting with his attention to the malleability of display frameworks. A milestone within Cokes’s body of work, Some Munich Moments 1937–1972 speaks beyond its original context to address urgent contemporary questions of art, design, visual representation, and politics unfolding across the world today.

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Since the 1990s, Tony Cokes’s video works generate complex layers of meaning through the juxtaposition of basic elements such as language and sound. Typically, he animates existing texts from disparate sources—including academic writing, popular news media, and even spoken or written “rants” by public figures—and sets these words to pre-existing music. Although this format appears straightforward, his specific choices of text and music are often disjunctive, encouraging a deeper engagement with the materials. Cokes’s signature format belies a larger intention to tackle challenging social issues such as race, urban politics, and murky histories in multivocal, nonreductive ways. Starting from the accessible material of pop music and found text, his artworks open up ways of reading and listening that can speak to many different audiences.

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Colors:

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• power.n.01
• geopolitics.n.01
• medium.n.01
• design.n.01