Ed Atkins’ Performing Avatars–Generative Technology in Contemporary Art–Tate Survey Exhibition

Visual artist Ed Atkins’s work is an existential theatre with avatars, CGI, motion capture technology, traditional figural drawing, Unreal Engine, filmed performance, experimental writing and much more.  Architect and first-time guest on the podcast, Nick Taylor, and I, get lost, fall into the temporary exhibition through a faulty door, rush through the show to watch the timed film, return a second time because one of us went to Tate Modern first, discuss exhibition-visiting methods, critique wall texts, and reflect upon our own relation with time, narrative, devotion and death

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Across all technologies, we've asked the same questions: 

…are we spectators or actors? 

…contemplative or engaged? 

…are images and the people in them dead? 

…and if so, why are they moving (both as a verb and an adjective)?

Hailed as a pioneer of digital technology, Ed Atkins' work found its groove in early experiments with video-editing. These quickly migrated into the world of gaming, with its motion capture and CGI animation, and their striking similarity with live performance through timed duration, but with a complicated relation with the physical world and real, fleshy bodies.

For behind the scenes clips and visuals follow us on Instagram: @exhibitionistas_podcast

We discuss: #parenting, #audience #engagement, #theatre spaces, fear, #vulnerability, #narrative building, #virtual realities, #self-representation, #identity, spatial dynamics, #modernism, #existentialism, #mortality, #parenthood, #theatre, #experimental film, emotional detachment, #intergenerational connections, #illness, #family dynamics.

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Bluesky: @exhibitionistas.bsky.social

Website: https://exhibitionistaspodcast.com

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Setup

02:31 Memories of Tate Modern

07:07 Pivotal Moments in Ed Atkins' Career

14:03 A Few Points Of Reference For Ed Atkins' Work

18:21 When The Artist Writes Their Own Wall Texts

22:35 Narratives On And Off The Screen(s)

27:17 The Exhibition as Experimental Writing

32:07 Narrative Building in Art Experiences

37:33 Theatre Without Actors

41:03 Self-Representation and Identity in Art

46:19 Spatial Dynamics and Human Scale in Art

53:23 Modernism and Its Absence in the UK

55:31 Life As Utter Devotion, Art As Its Awareness

01:02:36 The Disconnect Between Generations in Art

01:07:18 Reading Emotion: Ed Atkin's New Film With Real Actors

01:11:40 The Journey Through Illness and Art

01:16:51 The Mysterious Case of the Disappearing Spectators

01:22:16 OUTRO

About us: If you enjoy the podcast If Books Could Kill and You Are Good, you will enjoy Exhibitionistas, where artists are unveiled through current and pertinent angles, and through thoughts and feelings. These podcasts were a great inspiration for our format because they're nerdy and engaging, researched and approachable. The co-host and the guest co-host engage in a conversation informed by an accessible and lively presentation of the subject, through which you can reflect on a show you've seen or discover it if you can't go, learn or re-evaluate artistic topics crossing over into our everyday lives.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

I'm Joanna Pieronevis, your host, and this is Exhibitionistus. I'm an independent writer and curator with a wide-ranging two-decade career in contemporary art, from commercial galleries to art fairs, from research to curating, from Lisbon to London, through Paris. But when I'm asked what I do outside the art world, the inevitable reaction is, oh, I don't know anything about contemporary art. Ouch. So call it a midlife crisis, call it arrogance. But I gave myself the task of trying to fill that gap with co-host conversation episodes centered around a genuine exchange of thoughts, feelings, and precious context around solo exhibitions, interviews, and special episodes based on a particular topic to keep you alert and on your toes. If you want to read further into some of the topics discussed in the episodes and more, you can also find me on Substack under my name Joanna Pierre Nevis. Alright, so we're talking about the Ed Atkins exhibition at Tate Britain today. The Tate has several buildings, so there's Tate Liverpool, there's Tate St. Ives, which is a marvel of modernist architecture in Cornwall, and then in London you have two Tate. So you have Tate Modern, which is dedicated to contemporary international art, and then you have Tate Britain, which is modern and contemporary art. For artists based in Britain or British, so that's where we're headed today. And today I have a newcomer, a new co-host. He is my favorite type of co-host because he is an exhibition goer, but he does not work in the contemporary art field. So Nick Taylor is here with me. He's an architect. He did study fine arts, he's he's cheating a little bit, but he's now an architect in West London. So if you're nearby and if you need an architect, he's your person. So Nick, how how are you feeling about this?

SPEAKER_00 2:21

I'm excited. I'm great. I'm I'm happy to be here. You make me sound like a Ghostbuster.

SPEAKER_01 2:30

Who are you gonna call? I seem to remember you telling me that it's your favourite Tate. And even your favourite museum in London?

SPEAKER_00 2:38

Um yes, I think it's it's definitely my favourite Tate. Um whether or not it's my favourite museum in London is slightly because you have do you classify the Barbican as as a museum? There's a museum in the Barbican. So it probably falls short on the museum. But in the rankings of Tate buildings, the the Tate Britain is by far my favourite. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:59

But being an architect, that sounds weird to me, because I would think that you would choose Tate Modern as opposed to Tape Britain, which is kind of this imperialistic old building, although it has been renovated in 2013. So why why is it so special to you?

SPEAKER_00 3:16

Yeah, it's a good question. So if you would if you were speaking purely from an architectural point of view, if you were to show me the drawings or the models or the renders and describe the project from a as a as a as a project, then the tape modern is by far the best building of the lot, I think. Okay. It was this amazing thing on the on the South Bank in London. Um but being a Londoner, my experience is personal, and I started going to the Tate Britain before the Tate Modern was even there, and so my connection to that building is deeply personal, and it was the Tate Britain was my was my joy space that I would go to when I needed time alone, time to reflect, time to expand my mind. I have I have many personal memories of going to this building and leaving a better, happier person. So for that reason, purely romantic, it is it's my favourite. But then having said that, it's also a great building.

SPEAKER_01 4:25

It is, it's a great, and the I think the the dialogue between the traditional building and the new architecture is so each time I go there I find it so successful. It's one of those successful exercises, I think, in architecture. I mean, I don't know if you I mean from an architectural point of view, do you agree with that?

SPEAKER_00 4:45

Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. When you have a when you have a building that's so rich in heritage and and and obviously of its era and its time, and it's such a standout building in itself, I can't imagine the pressure as an architect you would have to then create something new onto that and and what they've achieved is just it's amazing.

SPEAKER_01 5:11

By the way, you know, the Tate is 25 years old, so the Tate Modern. Do you remember, because I wasn't here, do you remember as a Londoner the Tate kind of you know, the decision to establish it, the the building or building it, and then the inauguration. Do you have any memories of that? No, you would have been 18 or 19?

SPEAKER_00 5:35

Yeah, I would have been in my late teens and and I would have been a typical teenage chasing silly things and just not concentrating on things coming up. So the tape modern kind of just landed. And for me, it was I wasn't even aware of it being under construction. And I think I think it opened when I was probably my first year at architecture school. So it was this spaceship that just landed in London, and even at that stage, you know, I was incredibly naive and didn't know anything. So who's it designed by Herzog and who? Herzog and do, you know, it was a complete education for me at that point. Um, and of course, because it was such a big deal, we then went, visited, studied it, had a look, and and yeah, and so I kind of I grew into architecture as the tape modern was emerging on the on the consciousness of everyone who visited. So it's kind of I think maybe our paths are quite similar in that sense.

SPEAKER_01 6:42

Shall I go and introduce Ed Atkins to you and to our listeners? Um, so Ed Atkins is a British artist who is a child of the 80s, much like yourself, Nick, and he came of age in the 90s. He now lives in Copenhagen with his partner and his two children. But he grew up in a small village near Oxford called Stonesfield. He's a really great writer. I'm reading his book Flowers, so his last book. He talks a little bit about his childhood, also his compulsions, all that glitches in his body. But one of the things that kind of stuck with me uh while I was researching him was that he would sit at the top of the stairs. When his parents left home, he would itemize the number of ways in which they they could die and that he could lose them. You know, by all accounts, an anxious kid, um, whose parents were quite well not your regular parents. So his mum was an arts teacher, his dad was a graphic designer, and he he has a sense of a certain sadness coming from them because his dad kept insisting that you should follow your vocation, that you should always do what you like for work. You you should earn your money and your life through the things that you like doing, because they were both artistic and they both sacrificed their work in order to have a steady job. He talks about his career as being a way for his parents also to make it to Tate Britain, let's say. And so his education was very steeped in art, in arts of all kinds. So apparently they would watch lots of great films that wouldn't be mainstream films, uh, particularly, for example, Werner Herzog films. Um, his mum played the piano really beautifully, his dad loved jazz. And in 2009, he was working with Christian Markley. And so Christian Markley is uh an artist who was then producing a seminal work called The Clock, which was a 24-hour film that um was in real time, so 24 hours, and the time was counted in the film through found footage of clocks in films. So what uh Ed Atkins was doing was trying to find footage of clooks in everywhere, and so he says that at a certain point he would he he exhausted everything of the culture around us and he went into Eastern European films, Russian films, so he watched everything, and that was really crucial in his work. Another thing that happened was that he was asked to produce a video in while he was still at Slade 2009, and he was a bit tentative about it. He doesn't know why he agreed to it, and when he started looking at images and editing, he found the deepest of pleasures, like he found home, and that was a real pivotal experience for him, and he still sees himself as an editor in some ways across all his work. Then another thing happened which was also um more on the existential side of things, and a really sad event, which is that he lost his dad to cancer. And at the same time, he was um producing work, he was very prolific as soon as he finished his MA. And in 2011, he showed his work at Tate Britain, actually, uh, in the Art Now section. So Tate Britain has a room along the other rooms of the permanent collection where young artists are invited to do a presentation of their work, to do an installation. Then he went on to be, I think, writer in residence at the Chisholm Hale Gallery in London. And it was while he was producing the work for that particular um gallery that he had another experience with technology, which was to associate an Xbox Connect with a software from a startup called Face Shift, which was facial capture, and this motion tracking video device that he used to film himself. And while he was filming himself, he was being rendered in terms of um animation. He was really taken by the ability of that those devices to capture something of the liveness of a performance somehow, and at the same time to create a piece and a detached video piece that he could show later. And in 2014, so really quite young, he had a sort of seminal exhibition because of what he showed there at the Serpentine Gallery, a multi-screen installation which features for the first time an avatar for which he used himself, not as the visual, the final rendering of the character, but he used his own body to kind of create that avatar named Dave. I've seen that exhibition, and for me that was kind of a turning point as well, I have to say, because I remember visiting it and really intensely disliking it. So it's a white dude in a sort of a digital basement. He f looks a bit like a skinhead slash troll uh incel, proto-incel, but at the same time he's so lonely, he's smoking, he's drinking, and he's deflat at a certain point the character deflates like a balloon and falls on the table. So you kind of feel for that character and you're filled with with a sort of um contradictory, paradoxical emotions. And then my mind kept going back to it after having visited it. And I realized that I was really taken by the exhibition. It was a real shift of kind of learning how to look at something new, actually, something that I'd never seen before. I don't know if you felt that in the exhibition. I find it very effective. There's a connectivity in his work that I don't see in other video.

SPEAKER_00 13:17

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's really it's really interesting to hear that backstory having seen the exhibition but not knowing that before going in. Because as you're speaking, I'm thinking of the things that I've seen in the show. When you're talking about Dave and this guy in the basement, immediately I'm thinking of the guy who who is in the apartment in the bed, who who falls through the the floor into this sinkhole. But the idea that this guy is low, he's lonely. So you're you're drawn into an emotional response where you are you're feeling for this person, you don't know why he's sad or why he's feeling like this, but as you're watching it, you can't help but but get emotionally involved.

SPEAKER_01 14:03

And there's also another moment in his work which is really important. It's a film called Refuse or Refuse, both work and it's done on purpose, and it's the first time that he uses Unreal Engine. So Unreal Engine is um a 3D computer graphics game engine. It was developed by Epic Games and it was first used in 1998, which is weird. I was kind of surprised to know this. For the purpose of the exhibition, I would say that what I kind of can present as being the main reference points for him would be the editing aspect, and I would venture this, and I I'm interested in knowing what you think. I think the edition part is really important, and I see the exhibition as as an addition, as an edited form of uh creating uh an experience for a viewer or a spectator. Then there's the liveness aspect, so that experience he had with the Xbox and the facial motion capture rendering and animation of a live moment, and the fact that he chooses gaming as opposed to film. So he really chooses a specific medium that for him is interesting, not only because of the liveness aspect of it, so the interaction with what you're creating as a creative, but also as a gamer, you have a duration to it, which means that you start a game, there's a real-time duration, something happens that is reflected on the image, so you have an impact on the image, but also it ends and you can start over, but when you start over, it's never the same experience. I went to Tate Modern and you know realized when I was there that it was at Tape Britain. So I had to go two times, and it was interesting because it is true that some things change as you cross, as you go through the exhibition. And then to end on something a bit different is the reference and the interest he had in experimental theatre. So he he did drama at school, so there's this whole line of a specific kind of experimental theatre across the end of the 19th century and the 20th century with Alfred Jarry, who created uh Ubu King, Ubu Roi. He was really considered a pioneer even for Dada, surrealism. And then there's Antoine Artaud with the theatre of cruelty, so um notion of theatre as not having to be based on text and being based on the presence and the interaction between what's going on on the stage and the spectators. And then you have the theatre of the absurd with Samuel Beckett, who is very well known with his piece uh Breath, which was based on the breath, on breathing, but also Luigi Pirandello with his famous play called Six Characters in Search of an Author. And also Beckett, so you always have this idea of absence in the theatre of the absurd. So Godot is not coming in waiting for Godot. In Pirandello, characters slash actors are waiting for the act the author who doesn't materialize. And there's always this idea of boredom and waiting, but also this idea of absence. And Ed Atkins talks a lot about loss, which is obviously connected to things and events in his life, but also as a spectator, you agree to look at something, but you're losing an aspect of it. So if you're watching film, you lose the three-dimensionality of it. If you're watching theater, you lose the connection and the reactivity when you're looking at a person who's talking to you. You can't talk. And finally, there's film. I think I will invite you to lead us into the exhibition.

SPEAKER_00 18:14

The first space you move into is immediately it's a dark room with music. So it's a nice sensory experience as you're warming up into this thing. And then the first um installation is the I don't know what it's called, but it was the it was like bedding.

SPEAKER_01 18:32

It was um embroidery, as it's called, I think.

SPEAKER_00 18:37

Yes, with the words very, very uh very, very small.

SPEAKER_01 18:43

So did you read that those were the writings of his dad's um sick diary?

SPEAKER_00 18:50

And I was I admit, I was acutely aware that there is a two-hour film at the end of this where I will have to listen, well have to, I will listen to this diary being read.

SPEAKER_01 19:07

And so how so the thing, how did you know that there was that film at the end?

SPEAKER_00 19:12

Um because when because I'm not a member at Tate Britain, I have to I have to buy the ticket. And when you're when you're on the website buying the ticket, it has show times for that film. I had to plan my visit to the exhibition knowing that okay, there are three show times, I want to get there for one of them, and so working backwards, what time do I need to arrive?

SPEAKER_01 19:34

So it's a completely different way of going to see uh an art show where you can't just I was in innocent bliss because I have the the tape membership card, they scanned the card, didn't say anything.

SPEAKER_00 19:48

But that's a completely different experience then, because I I was regimented.

SPEAKER_01 19:54

Yeah, but we'll we'll talk about it. We'll talk about it. So we're still on Death Mask 2, The Scent, and Kerr of 2010. So this these are his kind of experimentations with digital editing, film montage, um with yeah, so high definition videos, basically.

SPEAKER_00 20:16

And he's uh am I right in saying that he didn't he d he doesn't want to display his work in any kind of chronological order.

SPEAKER_01 20:22

Yeah, he said that he doesn't like the idea of a retrospective, which you know, kudos to him, because I mean he's 42 years old. There's no reason. But it's a survey exhibition, it's a mid-career survey exhibition, and that's how we saw it. And um, not to bury the lead, he did something he you can see that he's uncomfortable with the exercise, but he's very good at deconstructing the rules. And so what he did is, for example, the text at the entrance usually is written by someone who is the person who writes the text for exhibitions. And for those of you who listen regularly to this podcast, you know I have a bone to pick with them. Uh, they're usually like the blandest texts. So the text that you read at the entrance is him and the first person, he's talking to you.

SPEAKER_00 21:12

Is that a bit of a cheat code? Because really, so this is him saying, This is my show, this is my work, this is how I want you to experience it, this is how you should read my stuff before you go in. So whereas if if he's not saying that, then he has to do that work through his he has to do that through his work. Is it not a bit of a cheat to say, go into my show, look at it, and feel like this or experience it this way?

SPEAKER_01 21:43

I read a few interviews before going to the show and I knew that he had kind of fumbled the game. So I can tell you what the text says. So it says, My life and my work are inextricable. How do I convey the lifeness that made these works through the exhibition? Not in some factual, chronological, biographical way, but through sensations. I want it so the more you see, the richer, more complex, less authored, less gettable things become. And it's signed at Atkins, and then you have the Tate text, which I am not going to read. Maybe he used this text to kind of um to to uh disrupt the following texts, I guess, in some ways. Because when you read yeah, it is. Because when you read his text, you don't have a sense of the exhibition at all. So you go through a corridor and then you get two.

SPEAKER_00 22:47

And then you're met with what was the name of this piece?

SPEAKER_01 22:50

Hissa.

SPEAKER_00 22:51

You've got three screens of different sizes. They each screen is one behind the other, maybe about three or four meters away from each other, uh increasing in scale as they go back into the back of the room. Um which was I don't know why, actually. I I didn't I didn't even question why that was. I just chose a screen and watched that one.

SPEAKER_01 23:15

But um you chose a screen.

SPEAKER_00 23:18

Sorry?

SPEAKER_01 23:18

Oh interesting. You chose a screen.

SPEAKER_00 23:21

I did, yeah. I I chose a middle screen because it meant I could sit against the wall.

SPEAKER_01 23:25

Really? Because I, for me, it was really playful. So I moved around and I liked to see the repeated image because it's always the same film. It's not one of those video installations where you have different videos going on, which always confuses me.

SPEAKER_00 23:41

I think yeah, I just I was focused on the content because I knew that there was there was a narrative in this. So I wanted to understand the narrative and see okay, what was happening, and those more kind of morbid thoughts. It's the thought pattern of what would it be like if if a sinkhole just swallowed me up or swallowed someone up and that was the way you went?

SPEAKER_01 24:04

So when you were talking about Okay, so the vi the video, so the text tells you that this is based on a sort of um fed divers that he read about that happened in Florida, where this person was in a room and his whole house was swallowed by a sinkhole, and the person just disappeared.

SPEAKER_00 24:24

So you so you know it's not gonna win well. You know this, okay, this is gonna be a f a thing where eventually someone's gonna get swallowed. Someone's gonna get swallowed.

SPEAKER_01 24:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:33

It's like it's like seeing, it's like going into a horror film.

SPEAKER_01 24:36

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 24:37

Which which is really interesting, right? So I'm sat there and I'm watching it. But in it also in the back of my mind, I'm thinking knowing now what I've read about the technology and about playing with the reality and the I kind of felt like okay, so this doesn't look like realism. This is this is almost almost like naturalism. It's it's a man in a room, but he is alone and he is sad, he is, you get all of this stuff, and there's a soundtrack as well, which also pumps these emotions into you. So you know what's you know what what you're watching, and and there are close-ups on his face, so he's singing a song, this this sorrowful song, and you don't know why he's singing it or who he's singing it to, but you just the emotion gets you. I forget the name of the cards that the psychologists would famously use.

SPEAKER_01 25:36

Oh, the Roschart uh tests you would have interpreted. Yes, he's holding it. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 25:44

That's it, that's it card, and you can see his thumb, so you know he's holding it, but the card is kind of oscillating. Yeah, it's it's vibrating, he's holding it, he's not holding it still. And uh watching it, I think, is he jerking off to one of those cards?

SPEAKER_01 26:01

Me too! I thought the same thing, and I thought, how can you show a person holding a card and immediately you know what that person's doing in an animation that is you hate yourself for thinking it. You think not me.

SPEAKER_00 26:18

I'm thinking, have I got is there a problem with me? Why am I thinking this? And then and then you go, and then it pans out and you think, oh, I was right. That is what's happening.

SPEAKER_01 26:28

For me, it was more confusing because I don't have the um appendage. So I was even more disturbed because I was thinking, how do I know how subjectively that looks?

SPEAKER_00 26:42

So so you see him at his most intimate, and he's naked a lot of the time, he's got his clothes on the floor, and I'm you're not sure, is it daytime, is it the middle of the night? You don't know because the curtains are pulled and it's all artificial light.

SPEAKER_01 26:56

There was there was it's and but then it happens, the sinkhole eats everything up, and it gets pretty violent, yeah. It's really and also you're not in the dark anymore. You it's very white, and you see the third room, and also there's posters, there's stuff on the walls. So there's a drawing, there's um a poster that's really weird of a dog placed upward, and it says fear, and then there's a quote by Helen Keller about fear, which I can't remember, but I took a picture. It says, Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing, which sounds in the face of what happened to that poor bloke. You have a glass wall, so you can see into the other room where there's two beds and the poster of a little kitten holding on to a branch saying, Hang in there, which is so cynical. And then you go into the experimental writing. There's wood panels that will punctuate this first half of the show, and it's called Contemporary Art Writing Daily, and you think, Oh, what is this? And so it just says these texts are by the Anonymous Writing Project, Contemporary Arts Writing Daily, C-A-W-D. So it's an entity that's anonymous and and writes on commission, and so he commissioned texts to them, and then he says that he described the videos and the thinking behind the videos, sent all of these via email, and asked them to write whatever they wanted in response. And he describes the text by writing, They sent me a backwash of institutional ventriloquism, Wikipedia entries, grotesquery and humour. The texts are laser burnt into off-cut bits of museum trash. So this is a real commentary on the institution of the museum, if ever there was one.

SPEAKER_00 29:03

I'm glad you've explained it to me because that went over my head.

SPEAKER_01 29:07

Did it? Yeah, completely. It's another layer of the exhibition, for sure.

SPEAKER_00 29:14

Yeah, because I loved his I loved his description of what he got back, but in terms of what it what it meant in that on that layer, I didn't get it.

SPEAKER_01 29:25

So interesting. Because it really is a discourse. I mean that what the where he writes about what he received could also be a description of museum texts, basically, this sort of ventriloquism, Wikipedia entry, and then the text, like for example, he has um uh a discarded MDF sort of pulpit on the wall, and he and engraved on it is the European output of manuscripts from 500 to 1500, and then there's a graph, and that's it, basically, which I find so funny, and it has a lot to do also with technology because the book was kind of this first mass media technology of communication and information, and so of course it's silly and it's stupid, and no one would ever put that, but that that's what I would dream to have as exhibition texts. And I don't know if I said this on the podcast or not, but I was really thinking about this, and I was thinking, I would just love that one person in the museum really worked with the artists, found out what the project was, and just had a go at it. I think you you need that kind of um comic relief when you at the end of this room, which you clearly did not have.

SPEAKER_00 30:41

And yeah, completely, yeah. Because it's such a breakaway from anything you you've just seen to go into that completely different space. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 30:50

Yeah. Yeah. So you didn't read the text, did you?

SPEAKER_00 30:53

No, I not really. Because it because it was There are so many. Yeah, there's just too much, and also going back to the whole time thing.

SPEAKER_01 31:02

Oh, you were you were in a hurry.

SPEAKER_00 31:04

Yeah, if I was just wandering around, maybe I would have read them, but I'm thinking I have another hour and a half before the film starts, or another night, you know, I need to move on. Maybe I'll come back to this. But I never did.

SPEAKER_01 31:16

So, because for me the experience was very much an editing experience, as in you go in, you learn about the dad's cancer, so each screen, each lone standing wall is covered with those embroideries, and so you regularly come across the the sick diaries, and then you learn about that, and when you're in that that piece, um Hissa, where the person's going to be kind of eaten up by a sinkhole, you have next to it two beds, which were a th a play that he actually created with someone else, and I forget the name of the person, apologies for that, which were just two beds with a device under the covers, under the duvet, that make them make the duvet move. As if breathing, but also as if su a very little body was underneath it. You don't quite know exactly. So for me, that was kind of the the sick bed, the surprise of death. So I was kind of also um doing my own film in my own head.

SPEAKER_00 32:25

And it's the same bed or a similar bed to the one on the screen.

SPEAKER_01 32:28

Yes, but also the white bed.

SPEAKER_00 32:29

The poster that's on the wall that you mentioned, with the fear, that poster is also in the film as well, on the wall of the guy. Does that maybe make you start to feel maybe vulnerable in that, well, this guy had no idea what was gonna happen to him, what was gonna come, and and that physical connection of the poster in his room that's now in the room that you're in, are you potentially in the same scenario where who knows what's gonna happen in 20 minutes from now for you?

SPEAKER_01 32:57

Exactly. Those kinds of fed divers are those kinds of things that you do your best to practice your best cognitive dissonance on, because you don't want to think about those in order to keep on living, right? You have to ignore that shit happens and that you may not be here in 30 seconds. So that kind of brings it home, of course, bringing it to your own space, of course, includes you, because my theory is that we are the actors of this play. So, I mean, one of the possibilities of experiencing the work, because I think it's a very laid exhibition, one of the possibilities is you are the actor in this theatre of the absurd that he's creating. Because Dave, that character it at Serpentine, was for me the white male, threatening dude that you don't want to cross paths with when you're going back home in the dark. You know, it you want to avoid that person. But it's also um a projection of projection of projections because it was also he was also using his face, and so there's a a thing of utterness and of oh, he's dealing with his own white males, his genderness, whatever. And then here it's no longer that. That's we're we're really not in that sort of um more societal exploration of identity, and and we're completely in another space for sure. So we have so you we move on to the other room that we can see a little bit of, and it's really uh full. It's so crowded.

SPEAKER_00 34:43

Yeah, so you're so you're snaking through this zigzag um maze-like um route, uh, and these costumes uh there must there must be, I think, three layers going three yeah, three tiers of of um clothes rails with so many costumes. And right the way up to the ceiling makes you feel tiny. Um but you do, you feel like you're walking through maybe the the back of an opera house. These but so many costumes. And then and but whilst you are whilst you're walking through your so your gaze is forced into the the path that you're travelling, and there are screens at the end of each of these corridors with what looks like a nineties computer game, or maybe an early 2000s computer game.

SPEAKER_01 35:36

Early 2000s.

SPEAKER_00 35:37

Is that the right passage of time? I don't know, times. But yeah, but you're confronted with these computer games, effectively, um, which kind of they look like they are the the computer games that my older brother-in-law would have been playing when I was younger, and they are those kind of fantasy worlds where you have your own avatar and you and you have friends who are online and they are also other people in their bedrooms somewhere playing this game, living another life, an alternative life. So it's a it's a false reality, and it's kind of a bit medley medievally, and the costumes that you're walking around are also medieval. Um you're walking around and you're trying to make sense of of what you're seeing. I didn't watch that many of those screens for that long, and again, maybe this is my own anxiety because I've got to get to the end in the next 45 minutes. So, so yeah, so I kind of I tried to understand as much as I could walking through it and take in what I was confronted with, but at the same time, again, that clock was ticking.

SPEAKER_01 36:44

These films are in a sort of a loop, and they so the idea of these films is that these are characters that are so old men and children who are crying, and they have these viscous tears. They're disgusting, they look like snot coming out of their eyes. There's a parallel being made with theatre. So, again, the reference to the theatre of the absurd, where he's always interested in making the either exploring a technology to its um extreme and pushing its boundaries, or the the rules of the game. And so you're not supposed to be crying viscous tears for ages and arriving at a cottage and the fire, but nothing's happening. But then you have behind those beds, you have the refuse-refuse video, which is cut in half. So he tells you that actually the whole video is really interesting. It's the first time he used Real Unreal Engine, which was for him a theater without actors. So there's this flaw where things fall constantly, and the idea was to study how different objects would behave when hitting the pile of objects or the floor, and making sure that the machine could get them right. And each time the video plays, it's a different version, so it keeps changing the order of the objects, the way they behave.

SPEAKER_00 38:20

It's completely playful.

SPEAKER_01 38:22

It's very playful.

SPEAKER_00 38:23

It's what I would do as a kid, but in real life.

SPEAKER_01 38:27

There's an intersection between infancy where you just drop things, also babies, and he has small children, they drop things to to know what happens when you when something's no longer in your hand. But then there's also the reference to Marcel Duchamp, you know, the piece uh three stoppages where he took a meter long uh thread and then dropped it from a meter high, and then indexed rulers to the shape of the three uh fallen pieces of yarn and then presented them in a little box. So there's this idea of dropping something. Apparently he fudged that. So apparently there has been some crazy, some nuts tried that, and it's impossible for the the the the yarn to or the threads to fall like that and create those shapes.

SPEAKER_00 39:28

That sounds like an outrageous claim that that an artist has has lied.

SPEAKER_01 39:33

It happens all the time. That's that's the basic of creation, is you lie to architecture. That's no, no, I think it's we have we share that with you guys. One day you come back and you explain that theory to me. And also, what is really funny about this thing is that apparently, so there were lots of glitches, there were lots of problems creating this. Uh, off camera, there has to be a fish rotating endlessly for the program to work because whenever they took the fish out, the program would crash. So there's some fish out there holding it all together, and the idea is to replicate gravity, and of course, it does and it doesn't. So there's this kind of indecision between this thing that you gain and this thing that you lose in this theater. So, and then at the end of the corridor, there's another video of a sandwich being endlessly made with layers that kind of float and then fall on the bread, then the bread's compressed, and it's real food, and then it's just toys and stuff that make the sandwich. He has a really weird relation with food because this whole installation is called old food. But so after this room, to your despair, there's another video that you had to watch from beginning to end as well.

SPEAKER_00 41:00

Yeah, yeah, this is the piano.

SPEAKER_01 41:03

Piano work two, yeah, which is um from 2023, so a COVID work. Um, and it's again it has that layer of embroidery, then you go to the other side, and I was a bit like you this time because I wanted to watch it from beginning to end, and I did notice that people would sit, watch for a bit, and then leave. And he did the show really well because of course I know what he looks like because I've seen videos of his and I've done research on him, da-da-da. I work in the art field, so we kind of know what he looks like, but your regular museum goer doesn't, and so the the Polaroids, as you call them, in the entrance show his face. Then there's drawings all across the exhibition, red drawings, self-portraits of him either in really awkward positions, usually his head like he's dead, it's a bit cadaverous kind of drawing, um, or on spiders, his head on spider uh bodies, and then here you finally meet him whole. It's the whole Ed Atkins, but rendered, animated, so he had to sit in the room in Berlin in during so the pandemic with a team on in the other room wearing a sort of onesie, really uncomfortable. He had to have an iPhone um kind of on in front of his face, and it actually is a performance. So he performs the it's a minimalist piece of music that is like 486 times the same note, and you have to count the silence in between each note. So he's very nervous, but it's not him, but it's him.

SPEAKER_00 43:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 43:04

So but did you get to watch the whole video?

SPEAKER_00 43:07

Not the whole thing. I couldn't watch the whole thing. So I was one of those people who walked in, sat down for a bit. I recognized it as him instantly, which is great. And it's really clever the way that you've described how he did that, because I without even realizing Yeah. I you instantly you know, okay, this is him. And I and I did remember in the um in the foyer before you go into the show, you see a photo of him with the iPhone on his head. Yes and you know, you know, oh I know how he how they created this. It's not a secret.

SPEAKER_01 43:39

Yes, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 43:41

Um and again, just the emotion the facial stuff it's a human being. And it is him, but it's it's him, yeah. But it's not and it's I I liked it but I didn't love it as much as the other the other stuff. But it again it was it was just another layer. But it moved me on to the next room, which then I really liked.

SPEAKER_01 44:05

So I have um I have a quote of his about about seeing himself. So that's from Flowers from his book. Um so his last book that he just published. He it just came out. And so he says the final renderings very like me, but unlike with a photo, I don't find it paralyzingly repulsive. I find it I find it fascinatingly so, and the difference between kinds of repulsion is very important to me. It describes me. The doubles and effigy, I want to make suffer in my steed. I find it liberating to be able to do something about the repulsiveness rather than be stalled by my being inside of myself and incapable of apprehending myself. So it's really interesting because he talks about this idea of being in imprisoned in your own body, which I very much relate to. I have a very peculiar relationship to having a body. And my daughter actually has she she kind of records sentences of stupid or funny things we say. And there's one of me saying, like, ah, I hate the material world. Why do we have to be material? Like a rant of some kind that that I very regularly go on. And also this idea that he talks a lot about, which is that he loves not working with actors because these characters, you can he can make them suffer, they can be his victims.

SPEAKER_00 45:37

Is he talking about an urge to want to make someone suffer that he has? Or is he saying that we all have this urge?

SPEAKER_01 45:44

You're in a world where the rules are different. And so, like making a painting, anything can happen. And he says in an interview recently in Freeze technology can enable access to a different version of yourself. So you can play out your fantasies, but those fantasies also exist because there's this virtual virtual world. So but so yeah, so you skip that really quickly. Um, and then you moved on to the following room, and to your uh you know, increasing despair, there were other films in there.

SPEAKER_00 46:19

This room was dominant for me. This room was dominated by the big empty um ply box that was in the centre of the room.

SPEAKER_01 46:28

Oh, yes.

SPEAKER_00 46:29

As you move in there, there's just this big empty void, which was um fascinating for me because it's a room in a room, and I'm a sucker for anything which is spatial architectural, so I'm drawn to this. And I want to know what is this? Why is this here?

SPEAKER_01 46:48

Um and then you can't step into it.

SPEAKER_00 46:51

Yeah, I read that I I I walked right up to it and then read on the floor. Do not touch.

SPEAKER_01 46:57

And you're like, this is not architecture, that's the limit of the exercise. It's contemporary art.

SPEAKER_00 47:03

Exactly. And I'm trying to remember the name of the artist, and it's completely uh completely escaped me.

SPEAKER_01 47:08

Incredibly the name of the artisty Gourmley.

SPEAKER_00 47:12

Oh bit gourmly-esque because you're in the tape, you don't you don't think so? In the tape, all the buildings are the rooms are huge, of course they are. Uh the ceiling is about six metres away from your head. And within this space, you've now created a smaller space that relates directly to your human scale that automatically where you were feeling like this small entity moving through. Now you're a big thing in this I see. In this so, yeah, to me that that brought me right back to okay, now I'm I'm my human scale again. And that was my that was my first experience of that room was seeing this thing.

SPEAKER_01 47:54

That's so interesting because I've seen that piece before. So this is the installation of the video worm. So it's a there's a projection on the other side that we'll talk about that you experience as an empty room before coming in. And I saw the I saw it for the first time three years ago or two years ago in at Cabinet, his gallery in London, and I remember not really getting it, like not you know, not the not-gettedness of it. And it's funny that you, on the other hand, kind of go and go like, Oh, I read this, I know how to read this. This is what it's bringing me back to my own scale, and I honestly did not get that at all.

SPEAKER_00 48:33

That's so it's maybe I just got lost in the in the familiarity of it, and that's my own failing. No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

SPEAKER_01 48:42

Everything's valid as an experience.

SPEAKER_00 48:44

Well, it is. Everything is challenging is is challenging me to to understand or to read into something or or to perceive something, but it's work. You can't you're not just completely relaxed as you're walking through, you're thinking, and you're and you're and you're trying to engage with something. And then I come into this room and it's like maybe this was my my relief in that ah, okay, I can I get this. I can it's that familiarity to it, and that's why as soon as I saw it, I thought, ah.

SPEAKER_01 49:19

If you're here, you're probably enjoying the episode. So if you think someone else might enjoy it too, by all means share it. Don't forget to rate and follow exhibitionistas. It seems trivial, but it can make a difference. All kinds of support count and contribute to more investigation and better episodes. So, of course, donations and memberships through our website or on Substack are very welcome. All the links are on the show's notes, as per usual. And thank you to all of those who've taken the leap of faith and have become our patrons. From a five-star review to a substantial donation, Exhibitionistus considers you one of those rare unicorns who support independent journalism. Now, something a bit different. I'd also love to start a conversation with you. You can now leave comments on Spotify, which is a great way to know what you want more of, or if you'd like to add something to the topic developed, the artist discussed, or simply if you want to leave a note of appreciation. It's a sad world when only the trolls and the bullies interact with journalists and art critics. Let's feed the AI beast with good stuff. Why not bring positivity, ideas, and especially your own perspective to the digital art village. And then there's this film, old film called Voila la Verité, which is which was repainted by him, and he hired actors to make the soundtrack, which is just mastication noises and size and um and and noises like that. So I was really taken by that and sat down and watched it. And I think that's where he mentions Antonin Arthur, the Theatre de la Cruauté, Theatre of Cruelty, very important for theatre, experimental theatre um figure of the beginning of the 20th century. So I was there, I was kind of like going back to his references. Then you're right, the empty stage. So I can't remember. I know that someone said that theatre is amazing, the problem are the actors, and I've been trying to find because when I was in the exhibition, that's what came to mind. I thought it was Alfred Jarie, but I'm not sure who said that, or maybe it was just a friend of mine.

unknown 51:47

I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 51:50

It's a great quote. I love it.

SPEAKER_01 51:52

Guys out there, please in the comments tell me who said this. I can't find it. And I know it's French, so it's back in my front days. So some French friend told me this.

SPEAKER_00 52:03

I've never I've never heard it. And listen, I'm maybe now is the right time to confess. I have a theatre studies A level.

SPEAKER_01 52:10

No.

SPEAKER_00 52:11

So maybe I should hear it.

SPEAKER_01 52:13

You do. No, but here in the UK, modernism didn't arrive. That's my theory. And people like you, Nick, are very isolated. You are a modernist architect or of a modernist's uh inclination, and modernism didn't arrive. Here you study Shakespeare. I mean, you don't study Beckett. I can't believe that.

SPEAKER_00 52:33

Modernism still hasn't arrived in the UK. We're still waiting. I mean we are still we we have a very gothic mindset. That's our we have a romantic Gothic notion that we that we just are we we can't help falling back to that.

SPEAKER_01 52:47

Modernism, I think, is a is the godo, it's the goddo of England.

SPEAKER_00 52:53

We're still waiting. It's untrusted. It's untrusted. Because it's foreign.

SPEAKER_01 52:58

And and oh, it's German.

SPEAKER_00 53:01

Yeah, it's it's foreign. We are, we are, it's not of us, it's not British. But why are we talking about modernism?

SPEAKER_01 53:07

Because I was talking about the theatre of cruci and the entonarto, and I did ask myself to what extent people would connect to the reference to Antonarto, because for me it's a given. I studied in a French school, I'm not sure that it would be familiar, a little bit like his childhood. Who were the kids watching Herzog films? I mean, to be honest, I did do the same with mine. We watched the Grizzly Bear film together. Um but who's watching Herzog films with his parents in the 90s? No one. Like no one would be doing that. So he pro he had a sort of a very peculiar and unique, I think, upbringing and education and references.

SPEAKER_00 53:52

I don't think that they didn't have a Herzog uh section in Blockbuster at any point.

SPEAKER_01 53:57

No. They didn't have experimental film from German weird dudes. The the most you would have would be David Lynch. I think that would be the most extreme. Um yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 54:13

That that would be the video that's always there. You can guarantee you could get that one out.

SPEAKER_01 54:18

Yeah, exactly. So yeah, so I was kind of thinking that and I stopped and I looked at the film and watched the film of a uh film director that I didn't know. Um and so it is a weird moment of like suddenly being extracted from this very ultra-technological setting. And then you go into the next room where there's this huge screen um vertical that kind of disrupts the cinema screen and just creates a line and where he cuts refuse refuse into two. So usually the film is a unique setting where you see the things fall and then they land on the on the ground, and here you just see them fall, and it's as if they pierce the floor, the real floor of the Tate, and suddenly disappear into another dimension. So there's this kind of fantastical, kind of um side to it.

SPEAKER_00 55:22

Yeah, yeah. This was for me, this was the space before the space because I saw it, but then I was so taken with what was behind it. Behind the big screen with the falling objects is a is a gallery space with I'm gonna guess maybe 25 frames of roughly A2 size white frames. Each frame is filled with post-it notes on a grid. Just simple post-it notes with hand-drawn sketches, doodles, etc., on them. Um and it's three walls that you look around, and he says that these were post-it notes that he was that he started during the pandemic in 20 n 2020, I think it was. Yes, he would make these little hand-drawn sketches, almost as little I love you notes to his daughter. He'd put them in his in her lunchbox. Um, and then kind of slowly dawned on him that these post-it notes didn't really mean that much to her. She wasn't aware of the real value of what he's doing for her. Um so he started to keep them knowing, realizing then that actually they probably mean more for him than to her. Um, but I think it's kind of so if I understand it correctly, he's talking about the at that strange time when a lot of people found that they had more time on their hands, and and the world shrank. So his world shrank down to these post-it notes because his work more I don't know if his work stopped, but he found he had more time and he could some of these drawings would have taken a very long time. They're not simple quick doodles of a stick man or a whatever person doing these are mini pieces. I love them. Um and you can only really do that during lockdown unless unless that was your unless that was your job to do that. Um I mean I I loved it because on one level, absolutely loved it on one level, because of the richness of the work, just the the breadth of what he's drawing and the randomness and the trying to understand where is this image come from? Why is it and then realizing maybe you'll never know where that came from, and he maybe he probably doesn't know, it's a it's a mind dump, and that's what's also lovely about it is the care and attention that's taken into these drawings is beautiful, and it's for something as simple as a little note that you're gonna put in your child's lunchbox. And so what I the elements of it that I really really loved and elements that I I question. So the bits that I love is this idea as a parent, because I have three children myself, where you will go out of your way and and you will go beyond what you need to do for your child, and it's like a you're you're doing it for yourself, you know. So even lunches, for example, I make my children's lunches still, and it's like a little moment I have every morning where I get to be a bit creative and do something. I'm not really doing it for them, I mean I want them to enjoy the lunch, but I'm doing it because this is me telling them that I love them. And so I completely relate with what he's doing with the post-it notes in that sense. The bit I slightly question is that at what point did he realise that the post-it notes meant more to him than to his daughter? And at what point did he decide I'm gonna start keeping these in a little folder and and preserving them? And then from that point onwards, when he is drawing his post-it notes, it's are they still the same thing, or does he know that he's collating something for a show? That's the bit that I'm wondering about, the genuine Yeah. There's an awareness. And he I'm sure he must know this will be great in the tape Britain in five years when I have a room and I'm gonna put all these post-it notes in a frame. I I just maybe that's the cynical part of me that me it robs it of its it robs it of its uh innocence. Because he's completely aware that yeah, I mean he's keeping them. If if he had if he had created these drawings, given them to his daughter, and then not known what happened to them, and she collected them and put them in a folder, and then after however many a year or whatever, gave them to him and said, I kept all of these, by the way, they don't mean anything to me, but you may as well have them. And then he put them on display, that would that would for me that would have meant more. Because I think he's aware of the value of these things, and he's aware that so so what I'm trying to get to is I think that in that awareness they completely stopped being notes to his daughter. They are now pieces for a show or pieces for himself.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:29

It's funny you say that because he um I he says that this is uh his best piece. For him, it's the best work. And I wondered if it was because it was a moment where he wasn't making art. In my mind, I thought, oh, he liked these because of course what you're drawing is always informed by you're making jokes to yourself, obviously, and so he's informed by it's still informed by the same things as the other pieces in the show are. I like that moment of awareness, first of all, because it's a father talking about f being a dad and being a good dad, which is so rare in any exhibition, in any film that you might watch, they're like good dads or dads that just do you know something for the enjoyment of it and not because their wives told them to do, is so rare that that in itself is is a beautiful thing, and also it's a parent like his dad and his mum who's communicating with the daughter through his own um passion because he loves drawing, and also through the passion of his parents, so it's almost a generational thing that he's giving to his daughter, and I think the pieces about the disconnect is that it talks about this gesture as utterly devotional, that's the the expression on the wall. And for me, the show then shifted and it became about him as a son, as a child, and as a parent now, and us as the children as well, or the parents, and suddenly you're playing another role because you're everyone has a carer or the absence of a parent. You might be a teacher who has a connection to the other generation. So for me, it became about this utter devotion that you have in certain moments of intense consciousness or of obligation or responsibility towards others, and I also saw the exhibition as his responsibility towards his parents, was which is a displaced and undefensible, indefensible responsibility, but that he has nonetheless because there's a painting of his dad in the exhibition. Um and the next work is also his mum's voice. So at this point, it became too much about him. I wondered. My question was I am so full of Ed Atkins's pathos. Like, do I want to carry this person this person's pathos as much? But then, so how did you move in the because this is the last bit of the show.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:20

Okay, so going from my memory, you then go into the Sky News room. Into the room.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:26

No, there's a f the film. There's a film before. Or is it the Sky News room?

SPEAKER_00 1:03:32

You have to walk in and then out of spaces at this point, right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:36

Yeah, you go in and out of the posted space, and then there's the major space, and then there's a feature film, and I have no idea where where that was and how I got there.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:44

Well, I got lost in trying to get out. Because I me too. Oh, okay, it wasn't just me.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:51

Oh, do you know what happened to me in the Hissa room? Okay, so I leaned onto the wall as you would do when you were watching the screen, and then suddenly I fall into the next room of the temporary exhibition. So I had my sinkhole moment where the door dematerialized, and suddenly I saw Damien Hurst's sharp, which is very appropriate by the way, for this the theme. And then I kind of come in the room again, and and being the good student only child that I am, like closing the door and kind of like not even trying to understand what happened at that point, just kind of like Alice in in Wonderland trying to not be Alice and closing the door. And then I see this security dude coming towards me, and he just goes, Like, did you lean on the wall? And it's like, yeah, I did. Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I thought so. And then I was just like, What? There's a door that if you lean on it, just takes you to the other side of the exhibition.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:58

That's so fitting though. Whilst watching that, whilst watching Hissa, what yeah through a wall.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:03

Yeah, that was uh a kind of butterflies in the stomach moment, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:10

Brilliant.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:11

Tell me about the I'm really curious about the end of your exhibition experience.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:16

In my mind, going to the show, I knew this was the thing that I had in my mind. I am going to sit through two hours of someone reading through uh an account of uh a diary of their cancer experience. So that's not easy. And I didn't I didn't anticipate it was going to be easy. So when you know that's coming up, it kind of starts to dominate your your mind as you're getting closer to it. So I get into the space and I make sure I've got the best seat, which I think is the best seat because there are three rows of sofas. It's like a cinema, it's a nice, lovely big black room with great acoustic. A huge screen at the front, and then there are it's like a posh cinema, three rows of black sofas. So I, of course, am sitting on the back row at the center of the screen, get myself comfortable, and the film starts.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:15

And so the film's called Nurses Come and Go, but None for Me. It was produced by the Hartwig Art Foundation, and it has actors.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:28

Like real great actors as well. I love uh Toby Jones and Saskia Reese.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:33

Toby Jones. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:34

Both amazing actors. So that relaxed me as well, because it's a it's like your aunt and your uncle have just walked in on the screen and you you know that you're gonna be looked after. They're gonna take care of you.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:46

But they're also playing a sick joke on you.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:50

I know, yeah, there is there is that. But it yeah, yeah, there is that.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:54

So I discovered it. I was like, oh, there's a feature film. I see the times, I'm like, fuck, again, like I need to come a third time, you know, because this was my second visit, and I was just like, shit, got you know, got hard again, I need to come back, I don't have two hours ahead of me, because the film lasts for two hours, right? I mean, or an hour and a half, or it's a feature film, and it's the so it's a performative piece, and that's there's a reason why it's so long. It's the actors performing for six or seven or eight people, young people in front of them sitting on chairs. So it's Toby Jones reading the sick diaries and Sasky Reeves in the back. He just said that he creates these animations so that he can do whatever he he he wants to them, and now he has real actors. It was as if we've come to a point in the technology that it's everything is so the deep fakes, you know, everything is so realistic that it it there's no point anymore in using that technology, and so now you go to real bodies. Yeah, but that's yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:05

But then but they're playing it but they're also playing a very different role to the characters in his earlier films with the uh with the technology because they're they're not really showing the emotion, they're reading the emotion. Or Toby Jones is reading the emotion, but it's not his emotion. So he's just relaying to you in and actually quite a um it's very clever because what he's saying is very moving, but he's not moved. Sasuke Reeves is Did you see the beginning of the film?

SPEAKER_01 1:08:43

No, I saw the end where they play So there's two bits, so they read the sick diaries, and then the end is Sasuke Reeves is actually his daughter, and they perform the games that uh Ed Atkins plays with his daughter, which is the ambulance games or something. She's the nurse and he's the patient.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:04

Yeah, yeah. So but at the very beginning of the film, you see them welcoming in the the younger, the audience is very young. I would say they're probably mid to late teens, maybe a few early twenties. I'm not sure, but there's definitely they are the children in the room, if you like, and and the grown-ups in the room are Toby Jones and Saskia Reese, and you see them welcome them in, and it's all very polite and nice, and um so in that sense, you're what you are you are presented the two grown-ups in the room as the host.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:36

With the artifice, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:38

Exactly. So they are the then automatically they are the parents, in my mind. Um, and so I found Saskia Reeve's response to the the retelling of the diary or the reading of the diary really interesting in contrast to the audience, the younger audience that you're watching hearing it, because if she is the mum, or maybe she's not the mum, maybe she's just another grown-up who is closer to the experience just by her age and her stage in life, than these younger people listening to what becomes quite a it starts off being sad, starts off being a bit desperate, and then it becomes a bit more horrific. At the beginning, the bits that the young audience find are funny, they start to love because he's talking about poo or things that are quite childish, and you think like, yes, okay, he's talking about he's talking about um emptying his bowels or whatever, but is it f I I don't know if it's funny, maybe it's because my stage in life, and I'm closer to this, so I see it as as what it is, whereas they see it maybe the whole thing that he is discussing is you can see it's at it's more abstract to them hearing it. Whereas you see Sask Reeves is behind them, she's not facing him, she's facing side on, so he's facing the people listening, and they are it's like story time, they're they're gazing at him. Saskia Reeves is listening, but she's staring a thousand yards away, sometimes smoking a cigarette, which I thought was interesting, and sometimes because Ed Atkins smokes and eats junk food.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:27

But he talks a lot about that in Flowers. He has these really disgusting habits. Yeah. The silk cut cigarettes in the worm video is his.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:51

And it was remarkably. I'm not gonna say easy, it was remarkably possible. You could do it.

unknown 1:12:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:00

And it's okay. And you did, by the end of it, you you've you you went on the journey. It's it's literally it's just a guy sitting on a chair reading diary entries from how he feels every day and the treatments, and sometimes it's going into details about the certain nurses that he likes or the nurses that he doesn't like. So you get the you get the day-to-day sense of what he's going through, and of course it gets worse and worse and worse, and then they play the game. So it was and the game, I think the last set part of it is about maybe 20 minutes, the ambulance game. Okay, so there's there's what I have a huge question that I I've not really I haven't found a suitable answer for myself, which in in that game. So the whole way through the whole retelling of the diary, you're watching Um Toby Jones read the diary, but you're also watching the audience, the camera, because again, it's great editing the way that it's shot, so you're watching the close-ups on the people as they're responding to what they're hearing, and then they play the game, and it's kind of more of the same thing going on, but it's an absurd piece of acting because they are now children. I suppose Toby Jones is playing an older person play pretending to be a child, if that makes sense, if he's the dad. Um there is a moment in the ambulance game where so maybe I should just briefly explain. Toby Jones is lying on the floor saying what's wrong with him. He has got a problem, and and Saskia Reeves, the ambulance driver, stroke medic, stroke nurse, stroke doctor, surgeon, physician, whatever, is looking for all these various cures for all these things that are wrong with him. There is a moment where she covers him because she realizes this is bleak and there's only one treatment left for you, and she covers him with these paper towels, almost like he is deceased, he's dead. Uh, in that moment when she's doing that, as the camera kind of pans out, you realise the room is now empty, and the younger audience are no longer in their chairs. And I'm thinking, has he died? Is this is this uh is this a preparation for someone for burial or whatever? And she does that all of that, and then uh as the camera then pans back out to another view, you see, oh, everyone's back in their room again. So for that brief moment, the room was empty, and I don't know why.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:28

I think it's about those missed encounters in presence. You're with the person, and then that moment when they're not there is a moment where it's the singhole moment, isn't it? It's that singularity where as as as because those diaries, mind you, were read to the family, so the family would read them or he would read them to the family, so it wasn't a like a private diary. They they were uh an incredible family, they could they kind of could connect like that. And then it's also the portrait of this intergenerational impossibility of ever really being on the same level. So I don't know, there was this kind of disconnect and the singularity in the moment of death where it's it happens to you, it's not gonna happen to anyone else. But it's also absurd. The thing in the exhibition, and and we talked a little bit about it before, but to make it quick, is that you didn't know uh you were a bit befuddled by people's behavior in relation to moving image in the exhibition. So it's a it's a pro it's a problem, I would say, or it's an issue in exhibitions because when you go to the tape, you kind of feel like okay, I'll be there one hour tops. You kind of go through the rooms. The poor people you went there and then decided to have lunch together. They will not because they won't they won't have time, you know. And the thing is that in contemporary art, and you asked me the question, and I was really surprised about that because I thought it was a given. You're not supposed to watch from beginning to end, and it was so cute when you said, like, I was so lucky, I got there in the beginning of the video, which for me is not an issue at all, because there's this kind of tacit rule of this is for you to experience, go through, come back if you want, stay if you want, watch the whole thing. But then I got to piano work too, and I thought this is a performance, you have to watch it from beginning to end, makes no sense. So there's the intersection of cinema and performance through theater. And I I was a bit annoyed when I got to the end, and I was like, I don't have time to watch the whole of it, and I really want to watch it whole because being bored is part of it, it's part of a performative piece. That moment where you're kind of like and you're almost falling asleep, and then something wakes you up. You feel real time, that's the purpose of it. Yeah, and in that way, it's a very traditional piece of avant-garde, you know, theatre film, warholyon, if you will, whatever. And it's a second time that I'm kind of led to say in the podcast, like this ticket, the same with Marina Abramovich at the Royal Academy, should be valid for three visits. Because then you have Worm and then you have Sky News live with no um without sound and with no uh subtitles. Was there some sound? Oh, there's sound, but there's no subtitles, I think. That's the thing.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:29

I I thought the Sky News thing was really interesting in the context of you seeing it before you go into the the uh film about the dad, the two-hour film, and then seeing it, you have to see it again when you come out. Yes, because the very thing the very the very thing about this rolling news that never sleeps, it never stops, it just goes round and round and round. It's this monster that will never sleep. And then you go into watch this film where someone dies, and then you come out, and the monster is still there. And this idea for me, I always feel that when you die, the world should stop. At le the world should at least pause, but it never does. You know, the day after you die, everything carries on as if you were never here, and and that that idea for me of you know when someone dies, for the people connected, it can be the most either horrific or seismic thing in someone's life, it could be a marker in in their in their life. But for the world, it's just another day. There's no there's no mention of it, there's no it doesn't change anything. And so that for me, that Sky News being where it was and the way you experienced it before and after was um it just it it highlighted the things you that you already know that this thing is this thing is relentless.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:00

And also the Sky News or any like news channel glitches because there is a moment where it either repeats, but also there's moments where you need image, and that really annoys me, and that's why I don't watch uh news could most of the I read. It's you have to fill in the holes, like you have either to produce a completely absurd image that has nothing to do with what you're talking about, and then you have the sub the scrolling texts underneath that has nothing to do with the news, and there's this glitchy body of news. Um, and that takes me to something that I didn't say about Ed Atkins, which is that a lot of the things that you see, he doesn't do himself, he's not a geek, he has people do the stuff for him, so he's not committed to this technology for him. The technology is like the body, because the body of his dad was glitching, like it was also dysfunctioning. And it and and he talks about uh a problem he has on his right hand where he it it spasms, and so many times he's like in a restaurant carrying something and the hand spasms and he spills his drink all over himself. And again, it's interesting that he's because it really looks like uh something that might happen when you're playing a game, those old games where suddenly a wall is no longer there, or suddenly you can go through the door, but you shouldn't be able to. Or and uh for him, he really talks about these technologies as the interesting sort of uh delirium of what the body can be and do, and also the same and and carrying the same flaws and the same defects that you will find in a body, but in a completely different context that then kind of creates a critical distance or an emotional distance or a sentimental distance, but then that distance is filled with melancholia. Was it a tell me, was the exhibition an enjoyable experience? Was the podcast an extra will you be back?

SPEAKER_00 1:21:08

I loved it. I've loved every element of that. I I think that it was a very enjoyable experience because um when is it not enjoyable to go to an art gallery? Even the ones that you don't connect with, the whole thing is still enjoyable, surely. That's why you go. Because it's not guaranteed every time you go that you're gonna love what you see. So you're not going there, from my experience, you're not going there to love something or to you're going there to ask yourself questions. So even the fact maybe the question, was it enjoyable, is irrelevant because it's always enjoyable, I think. Uh and as for talking with you, it's a delight. Always a delight.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:53

Ah, there I was fishing for that one. You have to say that while you're being recorded, but we have the true talk behind it. But anyway, thank you so much, Nick. Thank you for doing this with me. It was a real pleasure. And uh thank you, listeners, for being out there and um sticking to the very end. This was a very long episode. Um, and yeah, well, thank you, thank you all. This episode was recorded on the 12th of May of 2025. My co-host was the lovely Nick Taylor, and we talked about Ed Atkins' exhibition, which has no title, it's just his name, Ed Atkins. It takes place at Papepriton and it's on until the 25th of August. So you have plenty of time to visit it. The research assistant for this episode was Sehej Malik, and the music is by Sartan as ever. Thank you so much for sticking with us. Don't forget to sign up for the newsletter. Follow us on Instagram if you want to see images, if you want to see the backstage of the podcast, I won't tell you more, go and check it out. Um, there's lots still to discover that you don't get just by listening to the episode, and it can kind of light up your day and it can also provide a lot of images for what we're talking about. If you're a visual person, don't forget there's the Instagram account, there's also a Spotify video, so you can watch it on Spotify. If your telly has the app Spotify, you can watch it on your telly because it's so embarrassing to be out there in your homes, but it's so lovely to be in your eardrums. So, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for supporting us and take care. Bye bye.