Pop Manifestos

A group of short essays about pop music Tony Cokes wrote in 1997-98 led him to produce a series of videotapes called Pop Manifestos. These videos blur the boundaries between critical analysis, amateur historiography and common advertising tropes. In making the videos he plays the roles of artist, collector, curator, marketer, and critic. The Pop Manifestos video installation features a large projection of the final work in the series, 1! (2004), accompanied by five monitors displaying each of the previous series’ videotapes, and an audio archive excerpting 100 CDs Tony Cokes collected over five years (1997-2002).