Drawing on sources as diverse as Screw magazine, Barbara Kruger, post-structuralist film theory, and the Gang of Four, Tony Cokes besieges lifted media images with his combative critiques. To track the martial mentality of American culture, You're In the Army Now (with Bob Salad, 1983, 13 mins) uses Jerry Falwell's Liberty Hill College and a 60 Minutes report on the Vietnam War Memorial. Hotly topical, the tape discovers militarism embedded in the language and posturing of authority. Black Celebration (1988, 17 mins) welds urban riot footage to the industrial clamor of Skinny Puppy for a head-on collision with capital. Cokes' commentary, gleaned from a Situationist text, concludes that looting is an attempt to redirect an exclusionary economy by defetishizing the commodity. A Truncated Fish Story (with Bob Salad, 1982, 11:45 mins) looks at the male viewer and pornography. Here, the gaze is met by truncation, an incomplete viewer identified as an objectified organ. Cokes' newest work, Fade to Black (with Don Trammel, 1990, 32 mins), addresses the status of African-Americans within mainstream cinema. Formally, the tape proclaims that black viewers rely on white-biased reverie for their site of formation. On a cultural level, Fade to Black notes that, on screen and off, the averted stare, the abated status, are part of the same spectacle of discrimination. --Steve Seid