Flash Art uses cookies strictly necessary for the proper functioning of the website, for its legitimate interest to enhance your online experience and to enable or facilitate communication by electronic means. To learn more about cookies please see Terms & conditions

Flash Art
Flash Art
Shop
  • Home
  • CURRENT ISSUE
  • Features
    • Archive
    • Conversations
    • FOCUS ON
    • On View
    • PARADIGME
    • Reviews
    • Report
    • Studio Scene
    • The Curist
    • Unpack / Reveal / Unleash
  • STUDIOS
    • Dune
    • Flash Art Mono
    • Archive
      • DIGITAL EDITION
      • Shop
      • Subscription
      • INSTITUTIONAL SUBSCRIPTION
      • Contact
→
Flash Art

#329 Feb–Mar 2020, Reviews

4 February 2020, 6:13 pm CET

Tony Cokes Luma Westbau / Zurich by Miriam Laura Leonardi

by Miriam Laura Leonardi February 4, 2020
1
2
3
4
5
6
“Before and After the Studio: Volume II.” Installation view at Luma Westbau, Zurich, 2019. Photography by Stefan Altenbuger. Courtesy Luma Westbau, Zurich.
1
2
3
4
5
6
“Before and After the Studio: Volume II.” Installation view at Luma Westbau, Zurich, 2019. Photography by Stefan Altenbuger. Courtesy Luma Westbau, Zurich.
1
2
3
4
5
6
“Before and After the Studio: Volume II.” Installation view at Luma Westbau, Zurich, 2019. Photography by Stefan Altenbuger. Courtesy Luma Westbau, Zurich.
1
2
3
4
5
6
“Before and After the Studio: Volume II.” Installation view at Luma Westbau, Zurich, 2019. Photography by Stefan Altenbuger. Courtesy Luma Westbau, Zurich.
1
2
3
4
5
6
“Before and After the Studio: Volume II.” Installation view at Luma Westbau, Zurich, 2019. Photography by Stefan Altenbuger. Courtesy Luma Westbau, Zurich.
1
2
3
4
5
6
“Before and After the Studio: Volume II.” Installation view at Luma Westbau, Zurich, 2019. Photography by Stefan Altenbuger. Courtesy Luma Westbau, Zurich.

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.

Share this article
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Mail
More stories by

Miriam Laura Leonardi

WELCOME TO SUNNYDALE Mining the American suburban fantasy through a widely varied output, Olivia Erlanger expands the limits of sculptural thinking

10 February 2020, 8:00 am CET

Olivia Erlanger politely asks me to hold the call while she scrolls diligently through her screen cap folder. The lengthy…

Read More

Hans Haacke New Museum / New York

29 January 2020, 1:00 pm CET

Spread across four floors and spanning six decades, Hans Haacke’s retrospective at the New Museum — his first museum show…

Read More

Trisha Donnelly Matthew Marks / New York

4 February 2020, 6:13 pm CET

In 1974, the CIA green-lit a 350-million-dollar cover-up operation to salvage a sunken Soviet sub from the depths of the…

Read More

Jessi Reaves Herald St / London

29 January 2020, 12:19 pm CET

Jessi Reaves’s New outfit standing container (all works 2019) is a darkling. Three antilopine console legs support an upturned, cankered…

Read More

  • Next

    “Museum” MMK / Frankfurt

  • Previous

    Trisha Donnelly Matthew Marks / New York

© 2025 Flash Art

  • Terms & conditions
  • Contact
  • Work with Us