It’s mind melting how quickly Temple Bar Gallery can be transformed. The first time I enter Or Tears, Of Course, Ed Atkins’s solo show in the gallery, it’s launch night and I’m awaiting Atkins’s booked out performance in the atrium to the rear of the gallery space. The entrance has been switched, and the effect upon entering the space is disorientating: gone are the blank white walls and windows, a partition wall has sprouted from nowhere, the floor is somehow carpeted. It feels like we’re collectively suspended in some unexplored, Lynchian corner of the multiverse. This is Temple Bar Gallery, but not as we know it.
It’s the first time Ed Aktins, based in London, has brought his auteur-inspired art to Ireland, at least for a solo show. The performance is really the birth of the exhibition, and the empty room is tense with anticipation for it. As we stand, forming a quiet ‘o’ around a poised and spotlighted mic, Atkins slips in through the crowd in a white, chef-like shirt, and elusive screen-blue face mask. (Given that this is the artist who made a film trilogy titled Death Mask, it’s a reference that hasn’t gone unnoticed.) He clears his throat and begins to spout poetry – one long, epic poem in a soft southern English accent, the arcs of his narrative veering between the profane and the sentimental. It’s quite transfixing, and we’re left silenced as he fades from view again.
But this is Ed Atkins – an artist whose obsession with HD cinema and the fleshy truths it betrays fuels his career. You didn’t think this moment was going to slip away undocumented, did you? The unblinking stare of the camera lens had remained on Atkins throughout, and the results, edited in an impressively speedy turnaround time, are now being screened in the space in a warped reincarnation of the original performance incorporating disembodied heads and Fleetwood Mac. Its “a text becoming a play, becoming a video, becoming an exhibition”, in the artist’s own words. Painfully aware of the layered existence we inhabit, Or Tears, Of Course dissects as much as it documents, the video becomes the artwork, and the performance fades into its history of creation; a shared memory that is represented here, but not quite recreated.
It is partly the medium of film itself that seems to concern Atkins. At the opening of the press release, he quotes Dennis Cooper, who offers the following assessment of Robert Bresson: “His work communicates an unyielding, peculiarly personal vision of the world in a voice so sterilized as to achieve an almost inhuman efficiency and logic.” In past interviews, he had cited structuralist film-maker and digital art pioneer Hollis Frampton as a formative influence, and he once screened Stan Brakhage’s The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes at the ICA. Perhaps more commonly referred to as ‘the autopsy film’, Brakhage’s 1971 cinematic classic brutally documents the standard procedures of an autopsy, from the removal of organs to embalming. At one point in the film, the skin of the face is literally peeled off, revealing the raw, red flesh underneath. Back to those death masks again, then.
This gives us a lead in to Atkins’s other main interest: the body. The deceased body, the ill body, the decaying body. It is perhaps his interest in showing the body in all its unholy forms and functions that instilled in him the desire to pick up a HD camera, despite the twenty-first century’s fetishisation of film. He recreates a flesh so palpable its real; yet so hyperreal we’re detached from it. Last year’s Us Dead Talk Love, exhibited at the Chisenhale Gallery in London, was a two-channel video installation depicting a conversation between two cadavers discussing the desires, intimate encounters and passions of their lifetimes, distantly half-remembered. Like the talking head of Or Tears, Of Course, they float on-screen, disembodied, against an acidic yellow backdrop. It is a paradoxical clashing of the physical and the digital, just as the cadaver presents a paradox to Atkins: physically present, spiritually absent, the body is there, but not there at the same time.
Unlike a cadaver (perhaps more akin to a tumour, another corporeal fascination of Atkins), Or Tears, Of Course is not static, but a growing, mutating organism. In what he terms a series of “generative acts”, there will be “a progression of becoming-representation, which is usually asserted as only possible in death.” And so as text becomes play, becomes video, becomes exhibition, we watch the tumour spread with a morbid fascination.
Or Tears, Of Course runs at Temple Bar Gallery & Studios until March 30th.
A screening of Ed Atkins’s previous work will take place at 6:30pm on March 26th, at the IFI’s Experimental Film Club. More information.
Atkins will also appear in conversation with curator Isobel Harbison at Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, date and time TBC. Check www.templebargallery.com for updates.
