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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
The Guardian
02-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Ed Atkins review – a harrowing medley of spiders, sinkholes and death
Filled with laughter and pain, and bodies that cry and moan, suffer and sing, Ed Atkins' exhibition at Tate Britain is populated by the unreal and the simulated, the present and the absent, the living and the dead. We go from light to dark and back again, from room to room, and constant shifts in tempo and register, swerving from one medium to another. Along the way, we keep meeting the artist. Atkins drawn in coloured pencil, pensive in profile. Atkins as half-man, half-spider, splayed across the paper. Here's his naked foot, drawn monstrously huge, and a hand clenching. He's the author of his own descriptive wall texts, a collector of lists and, most pungently of all, the digitally tweaked persona who appears and reappears in the various guises of his CGI-avatar. One of which, early on in the exhibition, is swallowed by a sinkhole, along with his Ikea-filled apartment, but not before we have discovered rather too much about the state of his mind and the grim things people get up to in the privacy of their homes. There's so much stuff in Atkins's art, so much weirdness and generosity, so much bleakness and humour. A curtain opens on an empty stage and things begin to fall from above. A bed, stepladders, books, cardboard boxes, an anchor on its chain, bricks, several large tuna, bones, scatter cushions, skulls. Things pile up, they bounce, they get crushed; other things twirl in freefall, freeze mid-air or swipe into digital oblivion. Even gravity has glitches. But the cartoon rain, the flashes of lightning and the fall of pixelated snow keep the action moving. As I watch, I hear a spooky voice say: 'My proper name is death.' Where did that come from? I never did find out, in the hours and hours I spent here, among all the sound leakage, drifting from room to room. A lot gets subsumed along the way through Atkins' exhibition. The pleading, reproachful eyes of a borzoi sighthound; the plaintive unaccompanied renditions of Randy Newman songs, and all that kerfuffling and crashing, the film about the sandwiches, and the quiet, nearly blank fields of the embroideries, with their tiny sewn words. And what of the young lad who runs endless circuits through a bucolic landscape, as though he's trapped in an animated medieval manuscript? And now the 468 repetitions of the same note that Atkins plays on an upright piano, in his performance of Swiss composer Jürg Frey's 2001 composition Klavierstück 2. It all adds up, but to what? Encumbered by a Lycra motion-capture suit and gloves, and with an iPhone braced to his head to record and track his face and hands, Atkins sat at the piano to perform Frey's spare, exacting composition. The version of Atkins on the screen, performing, is a largely faithful, nearly seemless digital representation of the artist. Homing in on his face, on fingers playing and lingering above the keyboard, on feet at the pedal, on his expression and his concentration, we see none of the gubbins that were used to record him. We hear his breaths and snufflings and quiet groans along with the music, and think we perceive the turbulence of the player's emotions, and catch him counting time, although the being at the piano is a digital model, a not-quite-real apparition, in whose expression I imagine I see feeling. As the end credits scroll, we read that Atkins finished making this video 'in great sadness'. His expression, in the small photograph that slides down the screen beneath the text seems to confirm this. But where and to whom or to what does that sadness belong, and is my own sadness, as a response to the music, or at least to the video, appropriate? Here he is again, talking to his mother on the phone. Their conversation is real enough, intimate and warm, though at odds with the slightly soiled, avuncular gameshow host appearance of the Ed Atkins projected before us (note the grubby spectacles, and the meaty hand that raises a glass that isn't there to his lips). The scene is projected on to the exterior back wall of a cavernous and empty plywood box that fills most of the gallery. This guy's an off-the-shelf digital stand-in for Atkins. Only his voice seems real. Another of the models for this scene, and for the entirely digital set (including the cigarette smouldering in an ashtray), is the famous last television interview with screenwriter and playwright Dennis Potter, recorded in 1994, two months before Potter's death. If we get snagged up on all the references and the details – the wall texts, the embroideries, the posters and the postcards, the live TV giving us the news on Sky (luckily it is streaming on mute), we'll never get to the end of it. You could spend days in here, lingering, moving on, backtracking, getting cloistered among the racks of opera-house costumes. I keep trying to find the thread, then losing it again. Which is all part of the pleasure of Atkins' work. He also has a great capacity to surprise, to enmesh us and keep us rooted, even on a tiny scrap of silent film, a sequence from Dimitri Kirsanoff's 1926 Ménilmontant, that Atkins has had colourised and added Foley sound to, so that we can finally hear the old man in the film chewing on his bit of bread, and the sausage he is paring with his knife, wordlessly passing scraps to the young, starving mother who has found herself beside him on the park bench. What a tender, almost real moment this is. For all its artifice, it is like touching a wound. Coming towards the end of the exhibition, Atkins' most recent work, made with writer Steven Zultanski, jettisons the use of digital beings entirely. The video Nurses Come and Go, But None for Me is over two hours long. Actors Toby Jones and Saskia Reeves play couple Peter and Claire. Claire ushers an audience of young people (these too may be actors) into a large, comfortable room where Peter reads Sick Notes, a diary kept by Atkins's father, Philip, during the six months between his diagnosis with kidney cancer and his death in 2009. Enormously affecting, spirited, candid, a sometimes funny and frequently harrowing account of physical deterioration, Philip Atkins' diary is leavened by his mental fortitude and stoicism. As we listen and watch, the camera drifts and alights too. Claire – whom I take as a surrogate for Atkins' mother – sits apart, smoking in the corner. There's Peter's clumpy shoes, and his troubled expression as he turns the loose-leaf pages. The diary is upsetting for some members of the on-screen audience, and all the more affecting for being read aloud by Jones. Towards the end, following the text, his measured tones break into expletives and yelps and broken words. It is as if we have come to the limit of language. Jones the actor, playing Peter, also fully inhabits the role of Philip. After the reading is finished Peter and Claire play a game devised by Ed Atkins' young daughter Hollis Pinky. Peter has now adopted a further persona, and lies on the floor, and Claire, taking the role Ed Atkins used to play in this once-private game, first pretends to be an ambulance, then some sort of doctor, who attempts miracle, fantasy cures for imaginary ills, games of coping and resuscitation, of childhood fears being allayed through play. 'When an actor breaks character during a scene, it's known as corpsing. 'I want everything I make to corpse,' writes the artist. Where is the real Ed Atkins? Where is the real anybody? We're all corpsing all the time, for all the time we have. At Tate Britain, London, until 25 August
The Guardian
31-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘My brain reaches for morbidity': inside the unsettling world (and 700 Post-it notes) of artist Ed Atkins
When he was younger and his parents were out of the house, Ed Atkins used to sit on the landing and force himself to imagine all the ways they might die. 'My thinking was that if I imagined it first, then it would be very unlikely to actually happen,' says the 42-year-old artist. Atkins' parents didn't succumb to any of the ways he had invented. But during the final year of his master's course, his father, Philip, was diagnosed with cancer and died six months later, during Atkins' degree show, in 2009. 'It's a huge thing, obviously, losing your father,' says the artist. 'And it started to feed into what I was reading and was interested in. His death, and death generally, is in all of my work.' That fact may not be immediately apparent to those encountering Atkins' work. He has spent the last two decades at the forefront of digital art, creating strange videos that are humorous, creepy – and likely to leave you feeling a little untethered. Atkins likes to inhabit CGI avatars and perform as them. In 2014's Ribbons, he became a bare-chested, tattooed smoker known as Dave with a penchant for singing maudlin Randy Newman songs. In Pianowork 2, from 2023, he took on the role of himself – albeit an uncanny valley version of himself. We watch the virtual Ed trying to pick out the notes of Klavierstück 2, an experimental composition by the Swiss musician Jürg Frey. His sighs, his facial hairs and his pained expressions all appear to be amplified. Atkins' films are often interspersed with poetic soliloquies, cryptic subtitles and intrusive sounds – a burst of tinnitus here, someone farting there. They're both moving and confusing. You're not really supposed to 'get' them, says Atkins. Even he can be unsure of what they mean. What he wants, instead, is to create certain emotional sensations within the viewer – 'a slightly unmoored feeling'. And what could be more unmooring than grief? Atkins' career highlights are about to appear in a survey show at Tate Britain in London. Alongside the digital works will be self-portraits, text pieces, embroideries and a series of Post-it notes he drew on for his daughter's packed lunch boxes during the pandemic. There is also a new work that addresses his dad's death more directly: a two-hour film in which the actor Toby Jones reads aloud the cancer diary Philip wrote during his final months. In the 'beautifully written' journal, Philip discusses fellow patients on his ward, adjusts to life under the care of others and comes to the startling realisation that he had been loved, and that nothing could be more important. 'A lot of weeping and truth,' is how Atkins describes it. 'It's a lot. But it's also universal. Many people are going through that same thing. One of the last lines in the diary is, 'When and how does one begin to think about dying?' That's literally days before he dies. You can never come to terms with it.' People at the very end of life can experience extraordinary clarity. In his final TV interview before he died of pancreatic cancer, the writer Dennis Potter talked about witnessing the 'blossomest blossom'. Atkins hopes he can attain such wisdom before he's dying himself. Perhaps having someone read the diary out loud is an attempt to get there. We meet in Tate Britain's auditorium, a week before the show opens. Atkins – who's wearing a trenchcoat, pinstripe shirt, Adidas three-stripe joggers and a gold hoop in each ear – is extremely affable. But he tends to respond to questions with ideas rather than answers. Talking to him can be like experiencing his art: easy resolutions remain forever out of your grasp. Another way to get to know Atkins is to read his new memoir, Flower. Be warned, however: it is unlike any memoir you've read before – 89 pages long and written as one long paragraph of observations, it reveals its author through a series of likes, anxieties, routines and what he calls 'sexless kinks'. Among other peculiar facts, we learn that Atkins has an inordinately strong bladder, enjoys eating wraps from pharmacies and has a failsafe method for stealing expensive wine from big shops. It can feel thrillingly intimate and honest, even though it is patently absurd. 'Nobody talks about having a strong bladder in their autobiography,' laughs Atkins. 'Not unless their bladder exploded or something. What an insane place to try to find truth! So I was interested in what people qualify as worth telling.' For someone who has long operated behind avatars and technology, Atkins admits that putting this book out there is unnerving, especially as, buried within the stream of mundane information, are morsels of shocking revelation – not least his disordered relationship with food and his hatred of his physical appearance. 'It's hard to say out loud,' he says, tentatively, 'but I don't like my body or the way I look at all. I think about it too much. Some of that is an inheritance, I think, from family stuff.' Was it a struggle to make the self-portraits (his head rendered in red pencil on yellow legal paper, say) that appear in the show? No, he replies. 'What's hard is leaving the hotel this morning. It's got an annoying array of mirrors, so I'm seeing angles of myself where I'm bulging in ways that are just awful. Whereas fastidious attention, trying to capture a bit of razor burn on the cheek, that's really exciting.' He pauses. 'They're going to do photos for this piece in a minute and I will not look at them. I will never look at them.' One thing that does come through in Flower is Atkins' utter adoration for his children (he has a daughter and a son). It's a love so strong not even the memoir's deliberately monotonous and flat tone can mask it. 'A received wisdom is that having children is maybe the end of something,' Atkins says, 'but my best work has all been made since I had children.' Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion Atkins lives with them and his partner in Copenhagen, but he grew up in the village of Stonesfield near Oxford. His mum taught art and his dad was a graphic artist, so it's unsurprising that he displayed a gift for drawing and painting. 'All artists start out because they're good at drawing,' he says, 'and then art school unmoors everything. It takes a long time to get back, if you ever do, to that point of pleasure.' He says having kids helped him get there: 'I love how every gesture that my daughter or son makes on a piece of paper is better than most art, just by dint of its complete freedom.' That's why the 700-odd Post-it notes he drew on for his daughter during lockdown have ended up forming the centrepiece of the show. He never intended these cartoonish missives to go on display, but then he realised: 'It's the thing I can really hang my hat on and say, 'This is me.'' Shortly before this interview, Atkins found himself crying after showing a curator a shot of his son on his phone. Photographs do that to him. 'Maybe this is at the core of some [of the work], the sense of representations being grotesque in relation to the real thing – in relation to a living, beautiful two-year-old.' In Flower, he describes the images he keeps on his phone as pictures of his 'dead children' – a bracing description, given they are very much alive. He says he used that term because looking at flat images of them, when they're not around, makes him spin out. 'My brain immediately reaches for this horrible morbidity: what if they're dead? Even the presence of a phone in my pocket makes me worry it's about to ring with some news. It's sort of ridiculous. And it's not a way to live!' He laughs, then adds: 'Having a kid is like suddenly your heart is living outside your body and it's the most vulnerable thing, you know?' I do. I tell him I'm also prone to morbid thoughts – that sometimes I will look at a photomontage that my phone has generated featuring my kids and feel as if I'm watching it after they've died. Atkins nods. 'The mechanisms used, such as the slow cross-fading and the nostalgic music, is the language of remembrance. It's an 'Oscars in memoriam' situation. It's charged with loss even if no loss exists.' There's something very Ed Atkins about this whole conversation: two men who've just met, sitting in an auditorium talking about their deepest anxieties. I can't tell if it's his manner or something about his work, but Atkins is an easy person to open up to. In fact, it reminds me of one of his most affecting works: The Worm, from 2021, in which we hear a real-life conversation between the artist and his mother. I say real-life although, in the video, Atkins is inhabiting the avatar of a sharply dressed chatshow host from a bygone era, smoking Silk Cut. During their conversation, Atkins' mother talks about her struggles with depression and how it also affected her own mother. She reveals that she's never really felt like a 'bona fide woman' and adds that Atkins' father was never comfortable with the way he looked either. It's delicate stuff: raw and tender. 'That was difficult for me,' laughs the artist, referring to the process of making the video, 'because I was wearing a Lycra onesie and there were two German men in the room next door listening in.' The piece raises all sorts of questions about emotional inheritance, human connection and what constitutes a life. This, really, is the heart of what Atkins does. When he started out, Atkins was often called upon as a spokesperson for digital art – and he was happy to oblige, aware that it provided opportunities to show his work. But the emotional side of what he did was often not at the forefront of these discussions. 'The truth is, technology in and of itself is not interesting to me,' he says. 'I don't actually care at all about computers. Which is tricky because people are always asking, 'What do you think about AI?' And, honestly, I don't think about it.' Atkins actually believes that, for all the giant leaps being made right now, technology will never come close to replicating what it means to be human. 'It sounds almost religious,' he says, 'but I don't think any machine, even in a million years, will be like the real thing. It will never be a person. That's really my faith.' Ed Atkins is at Tate Britain, London, 2 April to 25 August. Flower is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.
