Heimo Zobernig’s schwarzescafé in the Löwenbräu art complex is currently hosting the first Swiss solo exhibition of US-based artist Tony Cokes, who uses conceptual and media forms to rearticulate and confuse how daily life and historical events are commonly experienced, constructed, or represented. In five video works that borrow their contents almost entirely from existing sources, he addresses the endless war on terror, sound and its culture, the decline of art criticism, and the role of the artist’s studio. He does so without recourse to originality or secrets about his person or methodology, but by solely affirming what Art & Language asserted as a work of conceptual art: by being reasonably legible. Texts on solid-color slides pass by at different speeds, and the music, on loudspeakers as well as headphones, ranges from Drake’s hip-hop to a survey of UK dubstep. Zobernig’s multifunctional architecture deliberately invokes Viennese coffee house culture, which UNESCO lists as an “Intangible Cultural Heritage,” and has been described by the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig as “a sort of democratic club, open to everyone for the price of a cheap cup of coffee, where every guest can sit for hours with this little offering, to talk, write, play cards, receive posts, and above all consume an unlimited number of newspapers and journals.” Cokes’s intervention makes a historical site like a coffee house, with its free and inclusive accessibility, new again; when images, texts, and sounds meet on the same plane but remain distinct, we seem to be in step with the times — our attention is enhanced and our presence is complicated as we re-hear, re-see, and re-think the flows of information that stream across the screens, pages, and spaces of our lives. In contrast, the café remains static — almost uncannily, tangibly real.
