This summer, British artist and poet Ed Atkins opens his first solo exhibition in China, "Refuse", at the Oil Can Art Center in Shanghai, which will run until January 2023. Ed Atkins is an artist representative of the structuralist movement and has been described as "one of the greatest artists of our time" at the age of 40. Working in a variety of media including computer-generated, video, writing, performance, music, and animation, Atkins places many of the themes of structuralism in a contemporary context, using high-definition video to explore the medium of film and literature, and the relationship between human emotion, the physical, material, and the real world. Atkins' seeming pursuit of technical perfection in his works actually "unintentionally" exposes the limitations of machinery and technology, reflecting his critical thinking about technological civilization. The exhibition features a set of 3D simulations and a series of large-scale embroideries based on Chinese works.
Ed Atkins was born in 1982 in North Oxfordshire, England, and grew up in a family that loved art, literature and classical theater. Influenced by his designer father, he became interested as a teenager in the work of German film director Werner Herzog, Czech animator Jan Švankmajer, and American experimental film director Hollis Frampton, to the point that during his art school years He took a long time to sort out his youthful obsessions, and the theme of "death" has been a constant in his work ever since.
Atkins grew up writing, and the written word became his primary method of creation, and many of his works are written and then visualized. After being exposed to moving images, he has done a lot of writing about the structure of moving images, transferring grammar and syntax, as well as the meaning of linguistic composition, into his video works. In this exhibition, the digital video work "How to Make", created in 2018, is his typical text-based work. In the image captured by an old DV, at the end of a small independent space, a small TV set is constantly playing the operation process of a factory assembly line, and outside the image, a male voice is calmly reading the first volume of Reminiscences of a Time Like Water, "Over at Swan's House". The work creates a wonderful contrast between the industrial process and Proust's text, and the total length of the video is 19 hours. The likelihood of seeing the work in its entirety is almost nil for museum-goers, but Atkins does give a "relieved" ending in the interview: even after seeing the end of the film, it does not reveal what it is producing. As the title of the exhibition, "Refuse," symbolizes at least one verb, "to refuse," and one noun, "waste," torn between the meaning of words and the meaninglessness of words. This is the common denominator of all the works in the exhibition.
Two larger embroideries, based on Atkins' father's diary and texts by the ancient Japanese author Seisho Nayan, are on display in the Art Center's office area. Atkins' father kept a diary from the age of 16 until he died of cancer. His diary was kept intact by his family, and Atkins always wanted to publish it in some form to honor his father. Atkins treated the words in his diary as data, entered them into a computer and arranged them alphabetically to the point of complete disorganization, ending up in the form of repetitive, meaningless words. In the process of datafication, some words about cancer, depression and pain seem to be erased and disappeared, and the rigorous and precise words seem to become loosened verses, while the mechanized embroidery further dissolves this failure about transmission.
Four years ago, Atkins visited the Oil Can Art Center in Shanghai and, inspired by the high dome and curved circular space inside the building, created a body of work that creates a dialogue with the space. The work at the center of the exhibition is an iteration of Atkins' Refuse.exe, created in 2019, which Atkins describes as "a drama about the return of useless things. In the work, he simulates a variety of universal readymades in reality, and their physical reality under "gravity". The work spans two floors, with a large number of virtual objects projected from the second floor gallery in the image of a giant wooden box falling incessantly, while only on the first floor can one see the unrelated objects such as beds, ladders, bricks, kittens, anchors, fishing boats, chains, pianos, etc. falling heavily and being smashed to pieces in the space, and hear the accompanying boom as the detached objects pile up into unrelated "junk" with each other. The work was written using a video game engine. The work uses a video game engine as a program to write software that runs in real time in the background, with algorithms that automatically control the attitude and state of each object as it falls, and the way it collides with something on the ground. As a result, the objects and scenes in the video are new and unrepeatable every time, even every second. A melancholic and gloomy mood repeats and loops eternally, and the uncontrollable gravity is the only motive in this suffocating and even numbing mechanical scenario.
In the work "Old food", a young boy plays the piano while shedding tears, inspired by the first science fiction novel in the history of Western literature, Frankenstein. The protagonist Frankenstein monster is his first reference to artificial intelligence, the flow of capital and power in which all decisions are gradually handed over to computers and humans no longer even need to remember or perceive time. In Atkins' view, this is the greatest threat to humanity from mechanical civilization. The avatars in Atkins' works are constructed by using facial capture technology to embed their own faces in them, and they realistically capture the richness of human demeanor, often crying, drinking, talking to themselves, and doing "unexplained" things in the film. In his view, the avatars convey the real human emotions, just as people empathize with the avatars when watching animation. Those "emotions" that only living creatures possess are transformed through digital media to reach people's hearts again, and those subtle expressions and romantic backgrounds together form a "surreal" virtual image that points to the void inside people's hearts in the context of unnatural civilization. In the background of unnatural civilization, people's innermost blankness and desolation are directly addressed.
The digital video work "Untitled" in the exhibition is part of Atkins' series "Old Food", in which the process of making sandwiches on the assembly line gradually gets out of control on the television screen, and the computer generates horrifying images and strange sounds, in which the contrast between the lovely food and the horrible scenes, the industrialized "useful things" are the most important questions raised by Atkins. Atkins raises the biggest question. It is such a "philosophy of waste" that Atkins proposes the impotence of social reflection in the details, personal punctures and fascination with traumatic reality, suggesting a post-truth era without truth and an era that no longer constitutes a whole. However, just like the deafening sound echoing in the first floor exhibition hall, it is the details and "prickly points" that are often avoided or ignored that detonate a more personal reality.
Article Source:艺术与设计
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