Imaginative Resources

Descriptions of Tony Cokes’s videos often start with what isn’t in them. Over the past two decades, he has eschewed representational imagery in favor of white text, excerpted from journalistic sources, presented on monochromatic screens, typically red or blue. The videos could be mistaken for examples of some strain of minimalist cinema or artifacts from the heyday of stripped-down Conceptual art. Yet in Cokes’s hands, text-driven videos are remarkably expansive in the topics t