Tony Cokes: So to speak

Frieze Projects: Against the Edge
Curated by Jay Ezra Nayssan & Del Vaz Projects

Walk-in hours:
February 14 & 15, 2–6pm
February 16th–19th 12–6pm

“The street is more important than the museum…” — Otto Aicher, Graphic Designer for the 1972 Munich Olympics

Frieze Projects: Against the Edge presents three works by Tony Cokes throughout the historic literary and performance center Beyond Baroque. The musicality and rhythm of Cokes’s work, its connection to vernacular forms of music and spoken word mirror Beyond Baroque’s historical context and thematic values. 

Following the opening of Stuart Perkoff’s Venice West Café in 1958 and the Gas House in 1959, Venice became a nexus for Beat artists and writers such as Wallace Berman, Jack Kerouac and Philomene Long. A number of visual artists began to settle in the neighborhood: Billy Al Bangston, Larry Bell, Cameron, Vija Celmins, John McCracken, Ed Moses, Lee Mullican, Ken Price, and John Altoon. In 1968, George Dury Smith began publishing the experimental literary magazine Beyond Baroque from a storefront in Venice, eventually taking over the old Venice City Hall building at 681 Venice Boulevard. Beyond Baroque would soon begin hosting workshops, readings and performances by a number of artists including Amiri Baraka, Wanda Coleman, Dennis Cooper, Simone Forti, Allen Ginsberg, Mike Kelley and Patti Smith over the next few decades.