Latest news with #EdAtkins
The Guardian
06-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Ed Atkins review – a portrait of the artist in turmoil
A mesmerising film by the British artist Ed Atkins (b.1982) shows a pianist performing – with excruciating difficulty – what seem to be arbitrary chords in some mysterious sequence. Straining and sighing, pausing and deliberating, he appears to be guessing the notes. Yet every strike is right, or so the visible relief running through his face and body appears to confirm. Except that the pianist is not real, and nor are his emotions. The man is a digital avatar of Atkins himself, his performance translated by motion capture into this hyperreal model. The excessively perfect rendering of every imperfection, from stubble to wen, gives it away. But so do the movements of eyes and head, which have a trace of the super-glide smoothness of CGI – expertly programmed and yet still unable to capture the vagaries of human vitality. If the man is made of nothing, what about the music: is it also made up? There is a semblance of improvisation, hands trembling over the keys, eyes opening and shutting in private meditation. In fact he is playing Swiss composer Jürg Frey's minimalist Klavierstück 2, its pauses so agonisingly variable that he might be counting the seconds. But you only know this from a wall text. Your uncertainty matches his (or its) anxiety. It seems as if the avatar is a virtuoso pianist: inwardly tormented, externally vulnerable. But how can one know, from this pixel-thin figment of advanced technology? Strange and increasingly tense, this film, Pianowork 2 (2023), comes about halfway through Tate Britain's major retrospective of Atkins's prolific career. By now, you might guess that the figure is based on the artist. Self-portraits in red pencil appear throughout, mechanically impressive yet from the most unflattering angles – head lolling, mouth hanging, from below the chin. Equally startling is the accompanying caption, in which Atkins excoriates his own appearance. 'I am often entirely destroyed by an image of myself.' This open-hearted candour goes with a fastidiously sealed aesthetic. All representation involves artifice, of course, but still we long to depict life, even now that machines do it for us. Ever since he took up computer editing at the Slade, Atkins has been examining the diminishing gap between the digital and the real with a questioning, fascinating melancholy. To begin with, he used found footage spliced with abrupt audio, multiple jump cuts, focus pulls and lens flares. Verité is a fiction (as cinema has told us). But his ideas were steadily expanding. How It's Made (2015) cuts factory footage with readings from Swann's Way so that the manufacturing of candles, for instance, seems suddenly alien and fearful. Snuff out the candle – Proust's great dread – and in floods the darkness. Soon came the male avatars: the tattooed drunk in Atkins's breakthrough Ribbons (2014), a thuggish descendant of Max Headroom uttering fragments of poetry. The muttering man in Hisser (2015), masturbating in one corner of a lonely bedroom that will soon be swallowed up without trace down a sinkhole – a true story that became an obsession, filmed across three screens that increase in size, as if Atkins was trying harder and harder to make sense of it. 'I'm sorry… I didn't know,' says one character, over and again, in a feedback loop that inflects the phrases with ever-changing meaning. Trying to speak, wanting to communicate, but saying what exactly? These artificial beings are stymied and stuttering. Some can't speak at all, like the boy, the man and the baby in the film sequence Old Food, who weep continuously for something, or nothing (or the impotence of their own fake condition). The baby's tears are slickly viscous but the soundtrack of the man crying, audible through several galleries, is so real it calls on your empathy. There is a strong sense of confusion, deja vu and anxiety through the show. You hear a noise and think someone is actually behind you, retrace your steps and see the same film differently through the back of the screen. For Atkins, according to his outstanding words in the catalogue (he is a celebrated writer too), the exhibition is a reimagining of life's chaos: the more we experience, the more complex and less contained it all becomes. Artworks are split across galleries, not always successfully. The garbage that rains weightlessly down from high heaven in one room ends in a bathetic junk heap in another. The absurdism can be wilfully crude. Unoccupied beds, hitched to hospital wires, shudder and writhe. A medieval peasant wandering through a forest is video-game animation, and racks of German opera costumes alongside carry no charge as empty props. But if the films sometimes appear creepy and cold, like something trapped beneath a stone, it is because the characters are just going through the motions. They have no freedom of expression, only what Atkins permits. And the sense is that what you are encountering throughout is the artist's own knowledge of distance, pain and deferral. The way his father's early death suffuses everything, his thwarted audio attempts to talk long-distance to his mother, or to communicate with his young daughter through daily Post-it note drawings for her lunchbox: Atkins is always trying to catch the irretrievable moments as they pass. His child resists 'all this projected significance', but for him this is the most honest of self-portraits. The final work at Tate Britain is Nurses Come and Go, but None for Me (2024), a two-hour feature film that opens with Saskia Reeves ushering six young people into a room where Toby Jones will read the sicknotes, as he called them, of the artist's late father. Hospitalised, desperately ill with cancer, the patient rises at every moment to the world still around him with intense poignancy, humour and grace. The social life of the wards is recorded as exquisitely, and originally, as the private experience of the patient. Atkins's camera searches the faces of the audience and finds what artificial images can never begin to express: the spontaneous beauty of true human responses. Ed Atkins is at Tate Britain, London, until 25 August
New York Times
02-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
In Ed Atkins's World, the Uncanny Is Realer Than the Real
It's awful having a body. It oozes, leaks, spurts. It is unpredictable, uncontrollable, ails, fails, betrays and embarrasses. It's not nice to admit, but you know it, and I know it. The artist Ed Atkins definitely knows it. A major new retrospective of Atkins's work, running at Tate Britain in London through Aug. 25, features human bodies (or digital versions of them) that are anxious, lost for words, exhausted, emotional, apologetic and falling to pieces, sometimes quite literally. Atkins — who was born in Oxford, England, in 1982 and is based in Copenhagen — is perhaps best known for his videos that show CGI avatars in strange states of limbo. They utter disjointed but poetic narratives, or try and fail to perform various tasks — as though struggling to be 'real.' An early film at Tate Britain, 'Death Mask II: The Scent' (2010), alternates between scenes of digital devices, a human head, shot from behind, with short blonde locks bathed in neon light, and close-ups of a fruit from various angles as sticky liquid pours over its eerie skin, which is pocked and freckled like an aged human's. Here, it is the editing process, with jump cuts visible to the viewer, that creates an uncanny tension. In 'Hisser' (2015), simultaneously projected on three free-standing walls that increase in size, we enter a more recognizable environment: a teenage bedroom (remember that kitten poster that urged us to 'hang in there'?), with moonlight streaming through an open window. A man appears on the bed, tossing and turning, and singing to himself. He flips through a stack of Rorschach blots, masturbates to a postcard of a Walter Sickert painting, browses his computer — and then falls through the floor into a giant sinkhole, only to reappear, walking naked and disoriented, stumbling and mumbling through a bright white nothingness. There's a morbid humor to Atkins's work, which puts its avatars — based on the artist's own facial gestures and speech, recorded and mapped using motion capture technology — through excruciating experiences. A wall text by the artist explains that 'Hisser' was inspired by the news story of a man in Florida who disappeared when his bedroom was swallowed by a sinkhole. 'This idea attracted and consoled me,' writes the artist, who also describes the film as an exorcism of sorts, and its characters as 'surrogates' or 'emotional crash-test dummies' who reckon with things that Atkins himself cannot face. And yet they remain imperfect stand-ins, not quite real, if 'real' means convincing, or lifelike. Well, who can blame them? They can, after all, only learn what their makers teach them. They are, we see in Atkins's work, like us: limited. In his world, technology doesn't create utopias; it mirrors who we are, inside and out. This becomes more obvious as the show progresses. Near the end, a video called 'Pianowork 2' (2023) features a digitally generated character who looks just like Atkins, playing an exacting piece by the composer Jürg Frey on an upright piano in a darkened studio. Atkins's avatar grimaces, gasps, frowns, smiles and sighs — and as he struggles with the precise minimalism of the piece, seems to transcend the moment now and again, as performers sometimes can. The Tate Britain show presents Atkins's video work chronologically, but it is surrounded by newer work in other mediums — drawings, sculptures, installations — and the retrospective has a fluid mood, rather than seeming like a linear tour. 'Beds' (2025), features a pair of beds, whose white covers writhe as if possessed by some invisible animating process. In 'Old Food' (2017-2018), Atkins has installed a series of videos between huge racks of costumes borrowed from the Deutsche Oper opera house in Berlin. Screens show a baby, a boy and a man sobbing; thick tears, more like glue than saline — another technological limitation — run down their faces. All around them, velvet robes, starched crinolines and silver dresses hang heavy, like speechless ghosts of dramas past. The most recent works are Atkins's most personal. 'Children' (2020-ongoing) features touching grids of drawings on Post-it notes that the artist put into his daughter's lunchbox. They are colorful, profane, comical, full of 'I love you's and sometimes written in childish scrawl: a record of the tender, fleeting moment of early-childhood parenting. 'Nurses Come and Go, but None for Me' (2024), a collaboration with the poet Steven Zultanski, is also about love, the passing of time and loss. The two-hour film features the actor Toby Jones reading a diary that Atkins's father kept during the six months before his death from cancer in 2009. A room of young people listens. One sobs. They all fidget. We watch their faces, and they are as unfathomable as those of the digital avatars we've scrutinized in previous rooms. At the end of the film, which is the end of the diary, the actress Saskia Reeves mimes an ambulance driver who tries to heal Jones with a series of magical concoctions, before covering his body with Post-it notes scrawled with enigmatic symbols — a game Atkins plays with his daughter. The film allows us to hope, beyond reason, that the diary perhaps hasn't ended, that the pain will dissipate and that everything will be all right again. There's no sinkhole, no cure — there's just life and, of course, art. In Atkins's work, no matter the medium, those forces are realer than real.
Telegraph
01-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Ed Atkins, Tate Britain: Deeply unsettling
'I'm not a particularly sad person,' the British artist Ed Atkins once said, with a rueful giggle, 'but a lot of the work ends up coming out quite miserable.' You don't say! Saturated with references to loss and grief, his mid-career survey at Tate Britain – which premieres a new, feature-length film in which the actor Toby Jones narrates a diary kept by his father following a terminal-cancer diagnosis – may be the saddest show I've ever encountered. It's also one of the more cussedly obfuscating and pretentious. (Referring to his own artworks, Atkins admits: 'They are profoundly obscure, even to me.') Yet, somehow, by staging a sort of 'Danse Macabre' between cutting-edge technology and timeless emotions, he manages to summon something sorcerous and compelling. Born in 1982, Atkins grew up in a village outside Oxford, and graduated, in 2009, from the Slade, around the time his father discovered he was dying. Since then, he has accrued cachet for unsettling, conspicuously artificial computer-generated videos and animations that often utilise AI and feature glitchy, limp-looking digital surrogates of himself, drawing upon various tropes from advertising, video games, and cinema. Starring a stock figure from a company specialising in 3D graphics, Hisser (2015) imagines a sinkhole opening beneath the bedroom of a man in Florida. (Atkins came across this macabre incident in a news story; the man's body was never found.) In The worm [sic] (2021), a jerky digital double of Atkins, resembling a bespectacled Newsnight presenter sitting alone in a spot-lit studio, interviews his mother. Pianowork 2 (2023) presents a realistic, computer-generated likeness of Atkins, with gold earrings and a monk-like buzz cut, hunched over a piano while performing a melancholic piece by the Swiss composer Jürg Frey. Atkins says that he's interested in the artificiality of digital representation; it's the failure (even 'impotence', as he puts it) of contemporary digital technology to express feelings, rather than its wider impact upon society, which preoccupies him. His work is simultaneously creepy and hesitant. Despite the CGI trickery, he's not averse to an old-school, freehand approach. In a series of technically impressive, monochrome self-portraits, executed in red pencil upon pale-pink paper, Atkins – who says that he loathes the way he looks – depicts his face from unusual, unflattering angles, so that it appears corpse-like. In a neurotic subset of these drawings (which, frankly, seem like a cry for help), he fuses his blankly staring, open-mouthed head with the body of a gigantic spider. To offset the psychic turmoil, he includes a room of tiny, surreal and cartoonish drawings on Post-it notes, brimming with love as well as strangeness, which he started making for his children during the pandemic (slipping them, daily, into his daughter's lunchbox). In one of the show's disarming, first-person wall-texts, he says that he considers these 'the best things I've ever made'. I get it: here, Atkins relaxes and expresses himself directly, liberated from the burden of self-consciousness. Many people, I suspect, may feel nonplussed, even irritated, by this difficult exhibition, which can seem dense to the point of impenetrability, as well as lachrymose. Yet, like it or not, mournfulness is a part of human experience. Atkins's work may, on occasion, be clever-clever, even aggressively antithetical to mainstream culture. But it's also original – and, despite (or paradoxically because of) the distancing effect of all that tech, sometimes moving.
The Independent
01-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Post-its and gigantic babies, Ed Atkins's daring Tate exhibit proves he's the most interesting artist in Britain today
It's been a good decade since Ed Atkins was first mooted as a potentially major figure in British art, for computer-generated videos and animations that appeared dizzyingly ahead of the technical and conceptual curve. If he seemed to disappear from view over lockdown (as did many artists) he returns now to the limelight as the recipient of a major survey exhibition at Tate Britain – one of very few living, let alone younger, artists to be accorded that honour. The show is taking place in a digital terrain that's vastly more complex and embattled than it was even five years ago, where there is not just a 'dwindling gap between the digital world and human experience', as the blurb puts it, but a universal understanding that it's ever more difficult to get a reaction from the over-saturated consumer, and people, faced with an increasing number of communication platforms, crave above all the authenticity of the face-to-face. Far from trying to side-step these issues, the exhibition plays with them sometimes brilliantly, and occasionally hilariously, in a range of mediums from ultra-high tech digital reconstruction to handmade drawings, embroidery and that great under-explored artistic resource known as the Post-it note. The now 42-year-old, Oxford-born, Copenhagen-based Atkins appears in various digitized incarnations, as the show muses on the theme of loss, building towards the culminating work, a feature length film on the death of his father. There's clearly no shortage of ambition here then, though some of the most engaging video works are the earliest and most technically primitive, cobbled together with laptops and cell phones. Described in the wall text as 'a very intimate video that quickly sheds its specificity in order to foreground its construction', Cur (2010) put me in mind of someone trying to re-stage 2001 A Space Odyssey on their kitchen table, with pieces of fruit and the tops of people's heads looming planet-like out of the darkness. These works, completed immediately after Atkins finished studies at London's Slade School of Fine Art, are offset by hand-embroidered 'samplers', as Atkins calls them, pieces of cloth covering the soundproofing screens embroidered with barely perceptible lines from his father's cancer diaries, which form the central text of the show's final film. In place of the usual dry-as-dust wall texts, Atkins has provided his own chattily informal written commentaries (his parents are 'my mum and dad'). He's nothing if not lucid as a guide to his own show, but there were times when I wanted to shake him off and come to my own conclusions. In Hisser (2015), a 'customised stock figure from the online marketplace Turbosquid' stands in for Atkins, in a restaging of the true story of a man from Florida who was swallowed into a sinkhole while asleep in bed. Atkins's naked digitized surrogate is seen masturbating (though facing away from the 'camera') and lying in bed fretfully mouthing the words to a pop song (I believe it's Elton John and Kiki Dee's 'Don't Go Breaking My Heart'). The fact that his disappearance into the sinkhole feels like a cursory afterthought, leaves the point of the whole absurdly complex procedure a touch mystifying, which I dare say is the point. (2019), in which theatrical curtains draw back to reveal masses of mind-boggling junk – chains, skeletons, fish – crashing onto a stage in hyper-detailed images seems to test the very limits of the term 'animation', while arousing the sense that when everything is digitally possible, nothing feels truly same might be said of a gigantic baby playing a piano in a fairy-tale cottage or the generically medieval surrogate for Atkins who – looking a bit like Richard E Grant – shed s floods of gluey-looking grey tears. Is he supposed to be another manifestation of the show's central theme of loss? While the setting for this group of exhibits, huge double-tier racks of stage costumes, on loan from Berlin's Deutsche Oper, might be assumed to signify the etherealness of the absent human presence, it's their blunt actuality that impresses. Our developing sense of the exhibition as a competition between the surrogate and the actual is compounded in Pianowork 2 (2023), in which another Atkins surrogate – in this case looking so like him you'd swear it was straight film – 'mimes' to a recording of the real Atkins playing Jurg Frey's one-note composition 'Klavierstuck 2'. In this case, it feels like the analogue element has 'won'. While Frey's work represents a formalist avant-garde, which many would consider as obsolete as the hockiest digital technology, the piece's uncompromising discipline, in which the player physically counts out the spaces between the notes, feels as timelessly actual as, say, Michelangelo's David. The Worm (2021), in which a smartly dressed 'interviewer' figure plays Atkins's role in a real-life phone conversation with his mother, is described by the artist as an 'artificial documentary of something very much alive and utterly real'. It's that realness that compels our attention, though we are, of course, wondering how real the disembodied mother's voice actually is, even as she talks of her own struggles to make herself feel real to herself in the face of a difficult relationship with her mother. In the show's climactic work, the two-hour film Nurses Come and Go, But None for Me (2024), the digital is apparently abandoned altogether, though the film's gruelling content is still very much mediated by artifice. Toby Jones, everyone's favourite 'everyman' actor, reads out the diary kept by Atkins' father Philip, during the six months prior to his death from cancer in 2009 to a small audience of young people. The diaries' admirably matter-of-fact and unsentimental tone is maintained in the film, resisting the temptation to make the material more 'moving' than it already is. Most visitors will probably drop in and out of it, rather than try to do it in one sitting, but – without wishing to give too much away – they shouldn't miss the end when Jones and his on-screen partner Claire (Saskia Reeves) suddenly start enacting a childlike game of nurses and patients, that was played in real life by Atkins and his daughter. If this sounds a shade silly and self-indulgent, there's a palpable sense of the changing of generations: the performed creativity of the parent who is departing is replaced by that of the child who has just arrived. The artist's daughter reappears as the recipient of a series of Post-it note drawings, which Atkins has placed in her lunchbox each day during lockdown, when his ongoing projects were suspended, as 'little hellos, little irruptions of love into her day'.While the drawings themselves are fun, and occasionally border on brilliant, it's Atkins' realisation that the gesture was far more important for him than it was for her (something every parent will instantly recognise) that makes them poignant, and his belief that they are 'the best things' he's done that makes them Atkins's garrulous commentaries do occasionally exasperate earlier on in the exhibition, they make more sense as the themes develop. While the show feels as though it will be all about clever concepts and impenetrably stylish surfaces, it is one of the most heartfelt and overtly autobiographical exhibitions I've ever experienced – as well as being undeniably very clever. The cycle of life from parents to children to grandchildren is paralleled by the cycle of technology, from low-tech, to high-tech, to no-tech. I came to this exhibition skeptical of some of the claims made for Atkins' significance as an artist, but I came away a lot more convinced than I expected. If there's a more interesting artist working in Britain today I haven't yet encountered them.
The Guardian
22-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Note perfect: Ed Atkins's daily Post-it drawings
In 2020, the English artist Ed Atkins started drawing on Post-it notes and sticking them to his daughter's school lunchbox. As well as 'little hellos', they were also, amid the power-down of the pandemic, 'a way for me to achieve something every day', says Atkins. Some of the drawings are cute if a bit creepy – a smiley-faced ghost, a bell lifted to reveal a foetal human underneath – while others involving axes and claws might induce nightmares in adults, let alone children. What began as a private father-daughter ritual has since become integral to Atkins's practice, which uses video and animation to explore how the digital world affects our sense of self. For his forthcoming show at Tate Britain, he wanted the Post-its to take centre stage – and 'to be the legend at the bottom of the map, to teach a way of looking and accepting and feeling that might be useful for everything else'. Ed Atkins runs at Tate Britain from 2 April to 25 August 2025
