No Sell Out (1995)
Tony Cokes
No Sell Out Tony Cokes USAdigital 6 min 1995
No Sell Out employs desktop video to position images of Malcolm X in tension with commercial culture. It is a result of a series of loaded questions we ask ourselves, and now wish to impose on viewers. Mr. X is the serialized signifier that sparks problematic readings and profits in rap music, “political art,” and fashionable sportswear. Is X the sign of a meaningful difference, or just another hip style thang? Appropriating an MTV-like format to critique and question the capitalist commodification of Malcolm X’s subversive politics, X-PRZ sets computer-manipulated imagery of Malcolm X against advertising logos, archival footage, TV imagery, and a propulsive soundtrack of rock music by R.E.M. and Nine Inch Nails. – Tony Cokes
* This video is credited to X-PRZ under the title: No Sell Out… or i wnt 2 b th ultimate commodity / machine (Malcolm X Pt. 2) by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York.
Streaming Details
This film is available to stream globally.
Program Partners
This screening is co-presented with Video Data Bank, School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Three Fold Press.
Image credits: all artworks, stills, and portraits courtesy of the artist © Tony Cokes and Video Data Bank, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Special thanks to Emily Martin, Zach Vanes, and Eduardo Sotomayor.
about the artist
Tony Cokes (USA) is a pioneering media artist born in Richmond, Virginia in 1956. His innovative, prolific, and influential body of moving image artwork tackles diverse themes and subjects, often connecting contemporary politics with popular culture, mass media, and entertainment, while foregrounding theoretical questions of racial and sexual difference, enunciation, and history. He received a BA in photography and creative writing from Goddard College (1979), and an MFA in sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University (1985). He participated in the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1983–84). Cokes has created an extensive body of video artworks since 1988, which have been widely exhibited at festivals, museums and galleries internationally, including The Museum of Modern Art, Stedelijk Museum, Louvre Museum, Walker Art Center, National Black Arts Festival, Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, Museo Reina Sofia, Media City Film Festival, Centre for Contemporary Art Futura, Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, Whitechapel Gallery, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Museum of Contemporary Art Rome, The Kitchen, Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, Austrian Cultural Forum, MoMA PS1, Haus der Kunst, Rockefeller Center, Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, The Shed, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, including the 2002 Whitney Biennial, among others. He has received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (1994), Rockefeller Foundation (1996), the New York Foundation for the Arts (1986, 1991), National Endowment for the Arts (1991, 1992), Creative Capital Foundation (1999), and the Getty Research Institute (2008–2009). He was Ellen Maria Gorrissen Fellow at The American Academy in Berlin (2020–2021). Cokes is represented by Greene Naftali in New York. His work is in public and private collections internationally, including The Studio Museum in Harlem, Centre Pompidou, Hammer Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, Queensland Art Gallery, and Carnegie Museum of Art, among many others. He is Professor in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. He lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island.