Evil.5: Grin and Bear (No Responsibility Mix) (2006)
Tony Cokes
Evil.5: Grin and Bear (No Responsibility Mix), Tony Cokes, USA, digital, 8 min, 2006
Evil.5: Grin and Bear (No Responsibility Mix) continues Cokes’s investigation of the uses of appropriated text and pop music as a form of political critique. Employing a deliberately didactic approach, Cokes challenges the Bush administration’s policies and the war in Iraq. Statements on the Iraq war and Bush’s “war on terror” by Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, and Richard Clarke, among others, are displayed as on-screen text against flat bands of colour. The graphic presentation and accompanying pop soundtrack suggest the strategies of commercial advertising.
Streaming Details
This film is available to stream globally.
Program Partners
This film is co-presented with Artcite Inc.
Image credits: all artworks and stills courtesy Greene Naftali, New York, and Electronic Arts Intermix, New York © Tony Cokes. Portrait courtesy © John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
About the artist
Tony Cokes (USA) is a media artist born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1956. His prolific and influential body of work connects contemporary politics with popular culture, mass media, and entertainment, while foregrounding theoretical questions of racial and sexual difference, enunciation, and history. He received an MFA in sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University (1985). His work has 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, 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, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Guggenheim Museum, and the 2002 Whitney Biennial. He has received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (1994), Rockefeller Foundation (1996), New York Foundation for the Arts (1986, 1991), National Endowment for the Arts (1991, 1992), Creative Capital Foundation (1999), Getty Research Institute (2008–2009) and MacArthur Foundation (2024). His work is in the permanent collections of Studio Museum in Harlem, Centre Pompidou, Hammer Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, and Carnegie Museum of Art, among others. He lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island, where is a professor in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University.