My name is Kojo Eshin. In the brief hour we have, really, it's really all too brief, I can feel it counting down, what we want to do is talk with and around some of the new works that are installed here at the CCA. That's to say whether you've seen them or not, it's worth taking these new works as a point of departure for a kind of series of questions that Tony's work has engaged in for several years now and
questions that gain a new salience in this moment. So we're going to talk about the Morrissey problem from 2019 we're going to talk about testament a from 2019 the queen is dead fragment two from 2019 if we have time we're going to talk about micro house or the black atlantic from 06 to 08 so to set things in in a kind of context how many people saw tony's work at the 10th Berlin Biennial last summer. Okay, so it's like a significant fraction. So I'm sure you'll agree with me that it was an intense experience. It was actually phenomenal. Tony's work was the work I heard about, you know,
as the news travelled from Berlin to London, and I asked people, you know, what's really good about the Biennial this year? What is the work? And people kept on talking about Tony Koch as if he was a new artist. So there was a rhetoric of discovery around work that Tony had been engaged in since the beginning of the 90s and earlier. And so that's part of what we want to discuss now, what it means for an artist whose work promotes a real engagement with the intense proximity and proximate intensity of moving images and images that move, whose engagement with listening in the mode of looking, in the key of reading,
reading in the mode of watching, in the key of hearing, work in which colour, brightness, sound, vision, text, font, speed, all converge. We want to know why a work whose intransigence, whose insistence, whose commitments have been ongoing for nearly three decades, why there's been this peculiar decollage, this peculiar gap in reception. Why were people A, stunned by the work, and stunned by the fact that they hadn't seen the work? Why was that? I brought along a bunch of catalogues with me of all the shows that Tony Coates has not been in,
and that he should have been in. Funky Lessons from 2004, See This Sound from 2008, Frequency from the Studio Museum in 2009, Freestyle from 2001, Scissors, Paper, Stone from 2009, and the ones which were too heavy to bring along Simply for the Devil, Art and Rock and Roll since 1967 at the MCA in 2008, blues for smoke of the mca 2012 panic attack art in the punk years barbican 2007 maybe you saw some of those shows tony wasn't in any of them why is that okay what was the problem for institutions such that now those problems
now become virtues those problems now become a demand those problems now become an encounter and a confrontation with work that people want to see, that institutions want to see. What are the conditions under which Tony Coates' work was erased from decades of exhibitions that claimed to speak to the relation between sound, music, vision and politics. What is the structured segregation of the sonic colour line, the structured segregation of the sonic colour line that is and was and still is operative throughout the art worlds
that we inhabit? To speak to this question, it's not enough to say that Tony brings together theory, journalism, dance music, rock music, indie music, video art, karaoke and screensavers into a new circuit that is not partitioned or divided or hierarchical but conducted. The question here is to discuss which theory entering into relationship with which journalism, which kinds of dance music, which kinds of indie music and which kinds of video art. So in order to really discuss these we have to focus in on specific works. So we're going to cut right to the first work which speaks to, it's called the Morrissey Problem and this work speaks
to what we could call a kind of colour blindness, colour blindness in contemporary Euro-American theory, which, as Tavo Nyong'o says, has a kind of conceptual aphasia. That's to say, it neglects to talk about the adventure of blackness in the West, and this neglect is intended to be a sort of favour to artists of colour. That's to say, if we don't talk about racial symbolism, then perhaps we can propose that we are beyond racial symbolism. Perhaps we can think of ourselves as somehow post-racial.
But clearly in our neo-fascist era, in an era of drastically advanced regression, in an era in which the intense proximity to images of death is ongoing, insistent and apparent, clearly this kind of post-racial thinking, which I would argue is a Cold War hangover, is no longer operative, useful or critical. On the contrary, I would say the present demands that we think the question of the relation between the colour in Tony's work and the question of the colour line. It demands that we think the question of the citation, the quotation and the circuit together with questions of blackness.
It demands that we think the question of the monochrome as a political object together with questions of symbolisms of blackness and darkness. It demands that we think the relation between blackness and black people. and the way to do this for us is to think through whiteness, specifically the implications of pleasure, the pleasure of white music for black artists in America and Britain and the category crisis that that engenders. So when people think about Tony's work they note that he quotes a lot, that he cites different kinds of music. They note Public Enemy, N.W.A.,
Berita Franklin, Gang of Four. Of course the name of this exhibition is named after a Drake track. There's a great work called Fade to Black and we can hear a quote from Public Enemy's Showing What You Got from It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. That album was from 88. Tony's work is from 1990. So when When he did that, it was new, it was a new record, and it was new to quote in that way, or rather to quote after sampling in that way. But what people don't talk about so much when you look at his work is that there's also a distinct preference for certain kinds of white music. By white music, of course, I'm quoting the album by XTC called White Music.
So what is at stake in this preoccupation with white musics, a preoccupation with the orality of race? What does it mean to be a black fan of certain kinds of white music, such as the British post-punk of Gang of Four, the British indie of McCarthy or the Smiths, the white Canadian industrial rock of Skinny Poppy, the white post-glitch, post-clicks and cuts music of the Finnish producer Luomo, the white post-clicks and cuts music of the German producer Jan Jelinek, the white post-rave, post-para-club music of Burial or James Blake. You could call these
incorporations or inclusions or integrations of these musics with all the loaded terms that are implied by those, you could call that cross-culturality, but that would make it seem as if Tony Coates was not, had no generational entitlement to those musics, as if they were inaccessible to him, and as if he had to cross cultures in order to access white music. As if white music is over there, and Tony Coates is over here. But I don't think that's the case. I think this effective proximity between certain kinds of white music, certain kinds of essays, certain kinds of articles, certain kinds of colours, I think what this does is bring together a way of thinking about
an ongoing preoccupation in Tony's work. Let's put it this way, and you don't have to answer this in any direct way, what's the use and abuse of whiteness for artists of colour? I think that's a really interesting question, Jojo. I would say that there is a stake, I mean, in terms of what maybe people would deem appropriate or what people would read as kind of part of one's identity. And it's kind of interesting that if the opposite were true, there are certain problems, historical and otherwise.
But I think in some ways it's even more interesting to have, you know, say, if you will, black re-appropriations of white cultures, alternate sort of futures and context for those artifacts. And it's actually, you know, as you kind of said at the very beginning, it's, I enjoy the music. And part of maybe what I enjoy about the music is its potential for, I don't know, alternate readings or alternate framings of material. And in some ways, I've been thinking a lot about it because we've been talking a bit. And it's kind of like my reuse and reappropriation of something like modernist color schemes,
the ways in which text is deployed as in retitles in certain works from the modernist canon in a certain sense. But I wanna use them for different and perhaps more extreme purposes. And I think maybe it's that desire for reuse and recontextualization and reframing that could qualify it as black in a certain way. For me, I think we talked not so much recently, but a while ago about the idea of blackness as a hack. It's not a kind of intentionality, it's not an essence. It's people trying to figure out their relation
to a complex of both signifiers, practices, discourses discourses on a kind of daily basis. It's not something that's settled you know and I think it's often mistaken to assume that there are you know some sort of black identitarian essence in particular cultural practices and response there too. It's sort of like you know a kind of thumbnail definition would be almost and I don't mean this in any sense in an essentialist way if a black person is doing it whatever the raw material might be that work might be
seen as black might be and the idea is that you know just because all the material you know comes from black cultural context or historical context one need not assume that the person who put it together is black but you can say that it you know redeploys black cultures right and I know that there are sort of freighted historical arguments around these things but I've kind of chosen to construct a process a working practice around those differentials and around those problems as opposed to assume that I can avoid them by sticking within you know my subject matters and my you know organizing techniques it It seems like there would be no purpose to doing that.
It's sort of like, hey, if it's going to stay within a kind of already known logic of how things should be combined, what things to combine, it seems like there's no kind of, for me, interest. It's almost as though it is precisely at those points where definitions and expectations break down is kind of where I wanna be. And so in that way, you know, you can recode things. Maybe it's the kind of a willingness to and an openness to putting certain pressures on what we think we know and what we think culture is and how it is produced
and by whom and in what context and under what circumstances and what pressures. Okay, so maybe, could I press you a bit when you say, blackness can be thought of as a hack? That's a really compelling argument. And if we put that next to your other point, that precisely at the point of which definitions break down. So what I take is it's, what I take that to open up is the idea up is the idea that what is at stake is the, in a way, what we could call the integrity
of what it is that passes for black music or what it is that passes for white music. So that what Jennifer Stovall calls the sonic colour line that continually attempts to discipline and partition and hierarchize those distinctions, that it's the line that is being hacked. It's the sonic colour line that is being interrupted and being reverse engineered. But I think part of what happens then is related to why your work doesn't show up and hasn't historically.
Whether we're still in that history is to be seen. To be seen, yeah. Because part of what happens in a hack is part of what you just pointed out, which is that the forms of certainty around what counts as blackness, what counts as music, what counts as whiteness, and what counts as music. That's part of what is put into question. And I think part of what institutions want from black artists are forms of certainty. So that the, I mean, of course, none of them would say that as it were, you know. But it's part of the unspoken contract of making work, you know.
It's part of the a priori, the precondition. And yeah, that feeling that the response shouldn't be, what is this? Or who did this? It should be something that directly relates to something kind of already, always already known. And the question is, why should that be exactly? You know, do you have a responsibility to kind of reproduce, you know, a known line or barrier or context? And maybe you're not obligated, strictly speaking, although there are certain problematics and certain limitations and, you know, you could say gaps that occur if you decide not to supply certainty.
if you sort of take as your primary stake to produce certain uncertainties, that may be a different kind of modality of practice and get different maybe audience responses as a result. You know, questions of category, you know, are often very, very important in terms of deciding, you know, whether something is understandable or if it's legible. And so, yeah, something that questions those boundaries or seems unstable in some way. We were talking about this yesterday, right? That part of what your work provokes is what we could call category crisis. And that category crisis, in turn, can open out onto a kind of epistemic panic.
And I recognize this. when your work was at the Tate Modern and I was watching The Will and the Way, part one, which was playing. At a certain point I was looking at this, I was like, what the hell am I looking at? There was this, there's this kind of, it looked like this all over screensaver mode, which was somewhat organic. Somewhat organic, somewhat digital. Yeah. Dr. David Mitchell- Somewhat queasy, somewhat liquid, but continuous all over movement, but with no beginning or end. So certain interminability. I began to wonder if it would ever end, if I'd ever leave.
So there was a sudden change there. Yeah, right. Dr. David Mitchell- Like the potential infinity. It really could go on forever. forever. Yeah, the bad infinity of that moment really started to make me panic. And then as I looked at the monochrome support for the text, as I looked at it move, I realized I wasn't looking at moving images. I was looking at images that move. It's a different thing. There's no moving image. There is an image, a monochrome, and that's what's moving. and there was a different thing and I realised well what is the difference between a moving image and an image that moves I have to think about that because I'm not really certain but I think I'm looking
at that difference so that was part of it and then after a while so the more I looked at the work which initially initially seems to be entirely seems to hold no secrets whatsoever seems to be entirely evident. It seems to offer itself directly to perception, seems to offer itself directly for an encounter. The more I looked at it, the more uncertain I became of what I was watching. So, you know, in a way, people would claim, I would claim to enjoy that. Of course that's what we go to art for.
We go for that cognitive crisis. That category panic. But actually I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure what I thought of what I was watching. I wasn't sure whether I liked it or not. And it could be that over time the compounded nature of this in your work in a way is part of what people were uncertain of and uncertain about, although they couldn't ever say it as such. And so what this leads me to is my second question, which is, it's really the question of, you know, I'm going to put it in as broad and as blunt a way as I can, just so that you can
You can reject it or take it as you like. The question is, you know, to me the question is what happens to the avant-garde once it's mastered by black artists? Or to put it another way, is the avant-garde, is the coherence of the avant-garde safe in the hands of black artists? Can you trust them? Can you trust them? Yeah, I mean as a question, you know, there is a kind of categorical, well of course not, but in some ways that's also, at least in my limited definition, what an avant-garde might do or it might have done
historically and it also interests me that you know often by borrowing so called black forms at least historically that was one of the ways in which you know avant-gardes produced effects of uncanniness so isn't it interesting that it could go in reverse in certain ways and that a different kind of uncertainty might be unleashed by having, if you will, the vertical and horizontal of modernism, say, be tweaked and reworked by people for whom that is not their historical right. I mean, in some ways it's also like ideas about who is allowed to do X and who must do Y. It's like, what if you choose to do Z
knowing full well that X is where you are supposed or allowed to be and to insist on doing it. You know it's sort of like you you get some interesting I think both results readings often misreadings you know people are looking for something that is their kind of imaginary not necessarily what your desire is right. So what happens, yeah, what happens to the avant-garde when, I don't know, people who are not central in its stated discourses take them up for new purposes or differential purposes. You know, it's like I've always had this kind of double articulation, a desire for a double
articulation of looking at form, and that is that it not only be a kind of discourse about conditions of language and legibility, but that it also talk about how society is structured, not as separate enterprises, but kind of simultaneously. And maybe that's also part of why it's so difficult to say, well, you can't just analyze it formally because, I don't know, maybe it's not that interesting formally, but it wants to articulate a completely different thing while doing the first thing. So maybe there's kind of, I don't know how classical that is. I mean, I think about Duboisian double consciousness
And is this another reworking of that kind of concept? Of wanting simple tools often to have kind of multiple registers within them. It's just not enough to be formal, but to kind of be formal with a kind of, I don't know, destabilizing intent as opposed to making things cohere. Yeah, that's what's fascinating because of the work is, the work, we take the Morrissey work, which is, there's a text, an article from the British journalist Joshua Surtees, and he's talking about his love of the Smiths, and then falling out of love with Morrissey, and his sense of betrayal because of Morrissey's turn to fascism. And so Tony has excerpted this from an article just a
couple of months ago. Yeah. And there you have it on a blue screen and a red screen and it swipes along and it's red lettering. And then what you have is five songs from McCarthy. McCarthy, the group from which Tim Game then went on to form Stereolab. So an obscure British indie band, but not if you're an indie guy like we are. In case you know it, I guessed it. I guessed it. You called it. don't because that's as you i'm an indie guy that's what you do yeah so so that kind of so what you see part of what's at stake in that moment is taking the journalists sense of betrayal
and anguish at being what he called one of the few black smiths fans which is a an identification that i i kind of identify with once upon a time i was a black smith fan i suspect there were quite a few but I suspect that only I suspect you were as well but I suspect you're the only one who's made a work like this about it and so part of what's at stake when you look at that work is the is the is the way in which you take the predicament of this journalist as the starting point for a meditation on your own intense proximity to certain kinds of compulsions, fascinations, loves, desires,
and I would argue certain kinds of masculinities. I think part of why black artists turn to indie is because a certain kind of social maladroitness. certain kind of maladroit awkwardness is is elevated it's a part of what made the smiths meaningful yeah and certainly a part of their discourse yeah yeah so it's kind of like it's interesting to kind of maybe use that symbolically in a kind of differential context in an unexpected way it's like yeah how many yeah examples of i don't know black nerd nerdism or black awkwardness you know are represented in kind of mainstream context and if they are
you know to what ends usually comedic right as figures of fun um or something like that exactly yeah exactly then people quote they will quote um donald glover oh yes they'll quote Lakeith Stanfield, what's his surname? Stanfield? What's his surname? Stanfield? Statefield? You know, from Get Out? From Soitbody? Lakeith, anyone? Anybody remember his surname? You know who I mean. So anyway, those two, they're the archetypes. Donald Glover and Lakeith, let's call him Lakeith Stanfield, they're the archetypes. but how about all the decades before? And so you're right, in American televisual comedy,
the black nerd is a figure of fun, or at best some kind of a... How do you explain it? It's sort of like he's not representing the masculinities that you ordinarily would want to see or expect in that kind of context. Exactly. But I think even more than that, this kind of maladroit, maladapted, insufficiently masculine figure, I think speaks to, they become a placeholder for like a larger question. It's like Janae's question. Janae says, there is the black. First of all, what color is he? Do you remember the beginning of the measure? That's how Janae starts, right?
There is the black. First of all, what color is he? That's a really good question. And that's a question in which the so-called problem of the black becomes the problematization of blackness for thought. That's Jeunet's question. In other words, we can make a link between Jeunet and Naomi Chandler. And I think the black nerd bears that, like the figure of the black Smiths fan has this figure out of place, bears some of that ontological problematization. That's part of what's at stake. And then part of what your work then does is then heighten that by rendering all kinds of formal problems and then making them pleasurable.
You know, I think that's part of that. That's kind of my understanding of why of why what for you is an intensely pleasurable experience and for lots of your fans is a pleasure. but clearly not for institutions. So then the question would be, what in the nature of pleasure has changed now such that the problems that your work posed have now become problematisations that are desired? Which is a question for institutions. Yeah, I can't answer that. I mean, in some ways, it's I mean you could talk about historical context and you can talk about
this particular period and its qualities but it's hard to really you know for me to fandom how that then gets translated into institutional discourses and their desires you know because I'm I'm not in the institution in that way I interact with institutions on a regular basis, but it's not like, yeah, like I know what those desires are. I mean, I can, you know, I can only sort of look at it in a strange way anecdotally. You know, it's sort of like there was someone who wanted me to present a critical mass of work in a specific environment, and that is apparently what allowed a certain legibility for the work.
That's kind of an institutional reading. Another reading would probably say that the persistence of violence against black people is also something that has brought my work, historic work anyway, into focus. But you know, it's like how to account for that transition, that's a longer and more complicated story. So it's like I have some anecdotal evidence and I have some large scale systemic evidence, But if you ask me why, you know, it's sort of like, well, that's that's complicated. I mean, it's somewhere maybe between the two. Absolutely. You know, the moment that we live in and its pressures and violences and maybe a desire on and part of it may well be generational.
You know, now that I think about it, it's almost like maybe there are young people or younger people who have a desire for a certain type of complication with regard to you know those questions and maybe that's a factor also you know say my age peers wanted something else you know maybe something like a you know stability or legibility that you know my work just does not supply you know so yeah i think you're right i think if we think of uh if we If we think of a generation in David Scott's sense as a community of memory or as a temporal institution, then a generation is not only people born in a certain period of time, it's
people united by a relation to a set of events. And work that can speak to that memory will strike a certain chord. I think part of what appeals is precisely the question of reading. Because you use the word reading a lot, and I think you use it in at least four meanings, and you flexibly move between all of them, depending on what you feel like. Right. So on one hand, reading in its common sense, sense, word of reading, which is not so common anymore, the sub-vocalisation. What was common? Yeah, silent reading, sub vocalization, reading in the throat in Burroughs' sense of the word. Then reading
in the screen film theory sense of the word. That's to say reading the image as a text, the film text. Then reading as a practice, Yves Kosovsky-Sedgwick, reading as reparative and reading as paranoid, like a practice of interpretation. And then I think when we get to, if we have time to get to the Queen is Dead work, I think there's a kind of, there's what Hortensefellers calls a protocol of reading, reading as a protocol of intramural reading. I think that's also at stake in the word. And then wrapping around all of that is reading in the age of the swipe, right? Because you were maybe probably one of the first artists
in your move from the archive to newly filmed footage, to the monochrome, in your adaptation and use of the swipe as a transition, you effectively anticipated the world of the smartphone. The so-called haptic. Yes, you did. But not only did you anticipate it, but you persisted in it so that it's not a gimmick or an exception. It's a kind of operative, it's an operating principle in your work, the swipe left or the vertical swipe. And so reading in the age of the swipe is to say it's reading in the age of a gestural economy,
the gestural economy that we are all obliged to navigate, whether we choose to or not. so I think part of what your work did was to situate itself amongst several types of reading and I think all of those I think speak to contemporaneity and I think part of what you did was demonstrate a commitment to it so when you see the work when you see a lot of the work that's what strikes you it's the commitment to those positions it's not like you picked it up and then moved on. No. You stayed with it and you in a way dug deeper into the parameters
of that commitment to reading in all of its multiple readings. Really. So that people would dismiss it as didactic. Yeah, whatever. People will say it's instructional and you're like... Yeah, whatever. But it's complicated. Exactly. So in a way, you faced down all the taken-for-granted critiques of reading. And because to me, that question of reading, in a way, on one hand, goes back to the Godardian notion of the screen as a blackboard, the viewer as a student,
and cinema as a pedagogy. and society as a school. But what he did was effectively update that, like post-68, post-France. He actually continued that project beyond Goddard, beyond Richard Serra's Television Delivers People, beyond Dan Graham's Rock My Religion, beyond the Pictures Generation. And so part of what happens is that art history finds itself unable to understand that you mastered that. You mastered all of those reading protocols, all of them. And so that if you want to write the reading of that Godardian project, then you have to make room for
and think through Tony Coase's practice. And that actually hasn't happened. There's a deficit there, which it could be that we are part of being here in CCA, part of being here at Goldsmiths, is to actually work on that gap, the gap between the work that you've made and the theoretical and historiographical encounter with the implications of that work for art, for thought, and for the present, and for politics. Because to me, there is a profound deficit, which I don't want to give into, like, premature celebration.
It's the reverse. I'd like to think of your work as a certain kind of indictment of certain kinds of habits of structured segregation that have organised what we laughably call the art world. And so maybe a way to bring all of this around to the work is to actually talk about Testament A. Mm. We have 10 minutes left. Well, then we need to get to it. Yeah. Okay, so briefly, very briefly, the thing about Testament A is, okay, so it seems on one hand, it's an elegy by myself. That's right. But then it's in the colors of yellow and purple.
In the UK, those colors refer to inadvertently. Inadvertently, in my case, yeah. I refer to there's a sweet rhubarb and custard. It's a boiled sweet. That's what those colors look like. In other words, they look like tasty, artificial, and sweet. So you think, oh my goodness, that's what Nathaniel Maggi would call a discrepant engagement. Like the text is about elegy, and the colors are like rhubarb and custard flavored colors. So how could they go together? But I think what he did was effectively give a certain kind of the political color of acid communism, which is Marx's final work. That's part of what he did.
I hope that it was acidic in some way, as well as sweet. And that that is possible. And that, yeah, that kind of seriousness But seriousness can also be coded in a way that has potential for pleasure. I'm not going to say it's always pleasurable in a kind of easy received sense, but pleasure is possible in the same way. This is something that probably also comes out of say practices, maybe going back even further than Brecht. knowledge can be pleasurable. It need not be, you know, sort of coded only as serious business,
right? Only as intellectual labor. It could be fun, or at least it has that potential, you know, that there's a certain pleasure and enjoyment in thinking, for instance, as opposed to it being kind of always coded as black and white, you know, or red, yellow, and blue. even though I sort of use those codes, that it might be interesting to move against those. And maybe because, you know, it's sort of like a, yeah, what would a pop elegy be like? And so maybe that too relates to my ongoing sort of relationship with popular musics and their potentials, you know, as opposed to seeing them only as a kind of bad object.
in some ways I think one of the interesting things to me has always been and this is again a notion probably from the 60s that it's our investment and our desire in these forms that give them their resonance it's not like they already have it you know it's like we actually invest our time and our energy in these things and that in a certain sense you know if we didn't they would be kind of just a thing, you know, a simple thing, a technical, you know, flourish or something. It's actually our attention and desire that makes those things resonate. So. So let's take that notion of attention and resonance.