Collision/​Coalition

Tony Cokes (b. 1956, Richmond, VA; lives and works in Providence, RI) creates video works in a distinct style, piecing together found footage or solid-color slides, animated quoted text, and pop music. Displayed on LED panels, Cokes’s new commissions form a diptych titled Before and After the Studio (2019), which investigates the role of the artist’s studio—its architecture, its shaping of artwork, and its forming of mythologies.

The new work appropriates fragmentary, anonymized descriptions of an artist’s sculptural works on themes of American violence, media, and celebrity culture, made in the 1980s and 1990s; found texts commenting on the “rise of the studio,” specifically in relation to the reuse of industrial spaces; and texts that explore the development of the “creative class” and its members’ desire for specific architectural spaces derived from the model of the artist’s studio or loft. For Cokes, this creative-class architectural impulse is a characteristic of the capitalist system we live in today. Music ranging from Drake’s hip hop to a survey of UK dubstep accompanies the video.

The installation includes a series of related works. killer.mike.karaoke (2017) combines two songs by the hip hop artist and activist Killer Mike while their lyrics are displayed on the screen. An outspoken social justice advocate, Killer Mike is known for connecting community to activism through his music. Projected are studio, time, isolation: reconstructions of soul and the sublime (2011) and shrinking.criticism (2009). The former combines recordings of reggae singer Cornell Campbell with sections of text from art historian Tom Holert’s essay “Studio Time,” while the latter sets a text derived from British writer Julian Stallabrass’s essay “The Decline and Fall of Art Criticism,” which discusses the conflation of business, art, and advertising within global art of the last four decades, to the dubstep sounds of Kromestar.

Oscar Murillo (b. 1986, La Paila, Colombia; lives and works in London, UK) is a multidisciplinary artist working in painting, drawing, sculpture, video, installation, and performance. In exploring the conditions of contemporary globalization— constant cultural exchange, increasing cultural displacement—Murillo considers the movement and use of people, things, and ideas. For example, he utilizes words, activities, food, airplane flight patterns, and social structures to visualize this complex cross-fertilization of cultural material.

In this work for The Shed, Murillo began with Diego Rivera’s unrealized mural at Rockefeller Center. Contrasting socialism and capitalism, the mural was originally commissioned by the Rockefeller family, but removed after being labeled “anti-capitalist propaganda” by the media. In homage to the mural—a history of unlikely coalition between a captain of industry and an ardent socialist—Murillo organized a procession of effigies that started at The Shed and ended at Rockefeller Center. The figures speak to a tradition in Murillo’s hometown, where effigies of the inhabitants are burned as a cleansing ritual for the new year, and relate to his ongoing reflection on the position of workers in society as both producers and consumers.

Murillo’s process reflects his attempt to understand artistic practice through the lenses of action and labor. His paintings are marked, dyed, cut, and sewn—a patchwork of images and physical interventions. His drawings are created on airplanes; for Murillo, the flight is a meditative space in which to constantly, repetitively draw and write. The black canvases that hang from the ceiling on hooks like draped flags divide the space between Murillo and Tony Cokes. Acting as a permeable barrier, the flags record the action of visiting the exhibition as visitors interact with the canvases.

This new short film directed by Yanina Valdivieso and Vanessa Bergonzoli (Display None) centers on Beatriz González’s monumental public artwork Auras Anónimas, an installation of 8,957 tombstones in Bogotá’s Central Cemetery featuring silhouettes of those that died due to armed conflict in Colombia’s civil war. This important memorial to the victims of violence is now under threat of demolition by Bogotá’s city administration. The documentary presents that story, in part, to bring awareness to the importance of saving this national monument.

AURAS ANÓNIMAS AND BOGOTÁ’S CENTRAL CEMETERY

Installed by the artist Beatriz González in 2009, Auras Anónimas is, foremost, a memorial—one of Bogotá’s only public monuments to the Colombian civil war. The work is embedded within Bogotá’s former Central Cemetery, known as the Columbario. The site has historic significance as the place where the dead were brought to be identified and then buried by their families during the period known as La Violencia, or The Violence (the 10-year civil war in Colombia from 1948 to 1958). In 2003, when Bogotá’s mayor Enrique Peñalosa planned to demolish the cemetery and rezone the land for a soccer field and playground, González took part in the protest movement to save the cemetery, declared a national monument in 1984, and its six neoclassical columbarium structures from the 1940s and ’50s. González petitioned the mayor’s office to halt the demolition, held seminars and public discussions on the cemetery’s future, and planned to turn the site into the kind of site-specific artwork that scholar James E. Young has called a “counter-monument.” By the time González installed Auras Anónimas, two of the six columbariums had been torn down. Her work replaces the fronts of the empty grave compartments in each remaining columbarium with tombstones depicting silhouettes of the soldiers who carried corpses in plastic sheets, nets, and hammocks during Colombia’s most recent five-decade civil war, which ended in 2016 with an historic ceasefire deal. Like all of González’s works, the images were taken from newspapers and re-appropriated by the artist to become symbols of Colombia’s recent past.

Memorials have always acted as public sites of collective remembrance—as structures against forgetting. However, monuments often lose their meaning or significance as names, wars, and individual faces are lost from the collective civic consciousness. There are no names, faces, or other signifiers attached to the silhouettes in Auras Anónimas. González, instead, offers a universal monument. While Auras Anónimas is a monument for the anonymous victims of the armed conflict in Colombia, it can also be interpreted as a universal symbol of loss and death, understood by and applied to all histories and cultures.

In 2019, the Center for Memory, Peace, and Reconciliation opened next to the Central Cemetery. The Center not only acts as a site for remembrance of the casualties of the armed conflict but also as a place for the survivors to gather and meet. Even within this new context, Bogotá’s old Cemetery is still scheduled to be demolished by the new city administration—and Auras Anónimas along with it.