User:Aitantv/Old Food, Ed Atkins

Old Food (2017) exhibition, at Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin

Moses Hubbard (2017) I Spent Four Hours Inside Ed Atkins' "Old Food" Show Hunting the Mysterious Shit Sandwich. Published in SLEEK Magazine. Availabe: https://www.sleek-mag.com/article/ed-atkins-old-food/

Old Food teaser - https://www.youtube.com/watchv=FXPbIJlF0W8&ab_channel=BerlinerFestspiele
"The next two rooms both have single vertical screens, one with a baby standing in the rain, and one with the monk figure." (Hubbard 2017)
"I go to the last room, where there’s another vertical screen. This one features the maudlin boy again, sitting on a stool, facing away. There’s hay scattered on the ground and the same weird lurching sound from in the first big room, so maybe this is supposed to be the space outside the hole in the wall. Once a minute, the boy turns around and gasps."(Hubbard 2017)
"Atkins doesn’t seem to be all that interested in making one coherent point with Old Food. Rather, he establishes certain thematic nodes (embalmment, memory, disembodiment), and lets the juxta-/ contraposition do the rest of the work."(Hubbard 2017)
"Fortunately, that doesn’t interrupt the show’s emotional core: a deeply felt exploration of remembrance, memory, traces of things past. I find myself repeating that line — “Sir, who are all the dead?” It brings to mind all of the things that have happened that we’ll never have any idea about. This is balanced against Atkins’ avatars, which seem to be pretty much the exact opposite of “all the dead” – though they’ve never had bodies, or lives, they exist, and we have to deal with them." (Hubbard 2017)

Atkins, E (2015) Artist Talk, Contemporary Art Society https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5b8C59qcng&ab_channel=thisistomorrow

"I didn't know what to point my camera at so I pointed it at the structure" (Atkins 2015)
the sensation of manipulation
Death Mask 3 - manifesting mourning - losing his father - countering melancholia with a nameable mourning, you know what you lost -
"There's nothing more opaque than the back of a head." (Atkins 2015)
A Primer for Cadavers (2011) - video back of the head
"Discovered that I had this misanthropic tone when I wrote in the first-person singular" (Atkins 2015)

digital-analogue

"excessive performance of analogue (in effect) - lens flares, dust marks, "(Atkins 2015)

death mask 3 (2011)

Atkins, E (2011) Deathe Mask 3. 34 minutes 44 seconds, HD video with sound https://www.ubu.com/film/atkins_death3.html

"Most of Death Mask 3 was shot as if stock, with all the incumbent thoughts of what ‘stock’ is. At the time, I think I thought that stock was fascinating because of its sufficiency as both empty and replete. So that a stock image could be almost completely owned by whatever context it finds itself in, that to caption a stock photo is to collapse its potential and take it off the stock shelf, as it were. Death Mask 3 is made up of imagery that has no specificity. Mountains are mountains, with all the attendant ‘mountainnesses’; the sea is THE SEA; nature is nature, etc. I wanted the images to be images more than images of something. The ‘of’ in the work is everything that’s done to these images, is the owning of them. Most of the time, that owning of these kinds of images is an interruptive process – cutting off the image’s potential, its openness. I suppose I thought that by focussing on these things as images of images rather than images of things that I could speak better of images – that the work could situate somewhere where a variety of contemplations and reflections might be possible. To keep an image as just that, too, is to deny it part of its desire to disappear and become illusion. So much of the structure of the work is in abeyance to this idea: the making opaque of things that desire transparency; the interrupting of things that desire to transcend. Most of the time I would like a return, which of course requires moving away in order to be felt, with a bump or a crash…" (Atkins 2011)