Tony Cokes, B4 & After the Studio Pt. 1,
Tony Cokes, B4 & After the Studio Pt. 1, 2019, installation view, BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, 2020, photo: Tom Janssen
until 20 October 2020
Public Studies: Practice as Theory (online)

As a part of the exhibition Tony Cokes: To Live as Equals, the artist presents a two-day online workshop investigating critical themes that circulate through his work, and various intersections with and applications of forms of the theoretical.


Topics include frameworks of ideology, violence, representation, critique, and image production, as examined through Cokes’s videos, and many of the writers and thinkers he sources from, including the Situationist International, Louis Althusser, Our Literal Speed, and others. The workshop will examine the uses and limits of theory in critical practice, and the ever-shifting idea of what it means to be critical. This course takes place online over Zoom.

Monday 19 October, 18.00–21.00 hrs
On the representation of violence, mass movements, and riots. This day will draw on the works Black Celebration (1988), FADE TO BLACK (1990), and shrinking.criticism (2009), alongside the texts “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses…,” and “The Decline and Fall of Spectacle Commodity Society” by Situationist International, and “The Decline and Fall of Art Criticism” by Julian Stallabrass.

Tuesday 20 October, 18.00–21.00 hrs
Why produce another image? This session explores the proposition of video as a non-representational media, and alternate conditions that could produce different forms of legibility. Works discussed include Evil.27: Selma (2011), Evil.8 (Unseen) (2004), and Before & After The Studio Pt. 2 (2019), along with two related texts from Our Literal Speed and other sources.

Participation:
This is a two-day course, it is not possible to apply for individual days.
Language: English
About BAK Public Studies
BAK Public Studies offer critical insights into theoretical foundations and concrete actualizations of art as public practice. Understanding art in relation to both theory and social action, BAK Public Studies form a space for collective thinking, imagining, and acting in parallel to BAK’s politically-driven and theoretically-informed research, discourse, exhibitions, and publications.
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