How Musician and Artist Coco Klockner Uses Sound to Explore Transfeminine Representation

AGE: 34
BASED IN: New York

Coco Klockner cut her teeth in the DIY music scene of the early 2010s, where she finessed a sense for sound, site sensitivity, and timing that has percolated into sculptural interventions shown at Silke Lindner, lower_cavity, and, most recently, in her first institutional solo, on view at SculptureCenter in Queens through Dec. 22. Her material lists have included everything from sounding rods to a first-aid kit—all fodder for an ongoing investigation into strategies of transfeminine representation and beyond.

Describe one work you’ve made that captures who you are as an artist.

A piece I return to is from 2022. It consisted primarily of sculptural adjustments to a set of hi-fi tower speakers that I grew up with. They played a sound piece that was very slightly modulated by convolution reverb profiles taken at 10-minute intervals of the space that the work was installed in, creating a duplicated reverberation of the space—as if there was a perfect sonic model of the room inside of the room. I think about the disclosures demanded of trans people—always but especially this year—and how a perpetual demand to know what’s inside, what’s underneath, what a voice sounded like, and so on, operates. The sonically doubled room somehow felt like a resonation of that dynamic, but also just a very earnest experiment in how material functions when it’s performing.

Imagine someone gives you $150,000 to make anything you want—no strings. What are you making?

I would buy a boat and install one perfect sculpture inside of it before sending it out to sea somewhere, maybe near Point Nemo. I’d like for it to circulate in the ocean forever.

What’s an artwork you didn’t make, but wish you had?

Jason Rhoades’s The Costner Complex (Perfect Process) from 2001. Gorgeous, mind-altering, strange, depressing, uplifting.

What’s an underrated studio tool you can’t live without?

Cookies and treats within arm’s-length distance.

Is there a studio rule you live by?

Cookies and treats within arm’s-length distance need Tupperware; mouse-chewable plastic from the store is not enough.

Who are the three people, alive or dead, invited to your dream art-world dinner party?

Greer Lankton, Candy Darling, and Harun Farocki would be so funny. I think Harun would clam up, Greer would be starstruck by Candy, and Candy would just be eyes glued on the door for the next most glam person to walk through.