Ed Atkins

Among the texts laid out at the entrance to the mid-career survey of Ed Atkins (b.1982) at Tate Britain, London, Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit’s Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (1993) stands out as the most illuminating in relation to the artist’s intentions. In it, the authors theorise an aesthetic of ‘failure’, which they associate principally with the writing of Samuel Beckett. In their characterisation, failure is a deliberate strategy by which a breakdown in representation prevents the work of art from being meaningfully related to the external world. As a result, the work also obstructs the reflective processes – such as distinguishing between subject and object – through which identity is constituted, thereby sabotaging individuation.¹ It may therefore seem contradictory that the wall texts throughout the exhibition are written by the artist in the first person, enriching the works with autobiographical explanations that seem to compensate for this failure. And yet, as Bersani and Dutoit would be quick to point out, this incongruity could also epitomise the conundrum that a work of art’s failure can also be its success.²

For much of the past fifteen years, Atkins has been exploring what the curators of this retrospective, Polly Staple and Nathan Ladd, refer to as ‘the dwindling gap between the digital world and human feeling’ through the ‘misuse’ of video software and computer-generated imagery (CGI). Most of the show charts this misuse of technology, beginning with Atkins’s earliest videos, created after his graduation from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, in 2010, in which he established a mode of Beckettian failure pertinent to the digital era. In Death Mask 2: The Scent FIG.1 repeated chords of sentimental music promise a commensurate narrative or meaning, while a repetitive montage of an ovoid fruit, a candle flame kaleidoscopically multiplying and an unfolding clock-calculator purposefully defers such satisfaction. Classical Western symbols of mortality – perishable fruit, flickering flames – suggest that this failure to represent could also be a failure to countenance death or, indeed, be a kind of death in itself. Such a reading might be considered a little far-fetched were it not for Atkins’s accompanying text: ‘I was thinking a lot about the material and emotional extremes of death when I made these videos, as well as the texture of grief’.³

The exhibition then fast-forwards five years to the CGI animations for which Atkins is best known. In Hisser FIG.2 – a twenty-one-minute film screened on three separate walls of increasing size – a man, described by the artist as his ‘surrogate’, wallows in deranged solipsism. Alone in his bedroom, he flicks through blank photographs, masturbates to Rorschach tests and postcards of works of art without, it seems, reaching climax, before eventually falling through a sinkhole that opens up under his bed. At one point, the screen ‘scrolls’ vertically through the bedroom, which is repeated over and over again in a seemingly infinite loop. If the film portrays anything, it is the breakdown of any relation between self and other: its only character is so self-absorbed that a world beyond himself exists only as a replication of his own, or not at all. In turn, this dynamic – in which the ‘work becomes a model of self-contained (nonreferential) identity’, as Bersani and Dutoit put it – prohibits the audience from substantially relating to the figure or any aspect of the film.⁴

Throughout the exhibition, videos are interspersed with drawings, tapestries and conspicuous objects, such as the large, hollow plywood box onto which The Worm (2021) is projected and the racks of theatre costumes that frame the weeping characters in Old Food FIG.3. These elements introduce an analogue counterpoint, juxtaposing digital, filmed and tangible worlds. The installation of Hisser is especially pertinent in this regard. The bedroom appears to extend outwards from the gallery – using CGI to mimic the effect of one-point perspective – while the three screens act as physical obstacles breaking the illusion. Some of the bedroom’s posters are physically recreated on the gallery walls, while Beds (2025), their white duvets rising and falling as though encasing a breathing body, are installed behind a window that reflects, or duplicates, the screens. Attached to the glass is a postcard of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656; Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid), a painting which, like the installation, envelops the viewer in a labyrinth of reflective and representational thresholds, withholding any vantage point from which to take its measure.⁵

Atkins collapses the ‘relations between representer and representee’, to borrow from Beckett, with a still more seamless and succinct emphasis on the self in Pianowork 2 FIG.4, in which a CGI double of the artist plays Jürg Frey’s intensely minimal piano composition ‘Klavierstück 2’ (2001).⁶ The arresting chords converge with close-ups of Atkins’s face, contorted with effort and the threat of tears, unifying the actions of playing, listening, feeling and depicting. Screened in a separate room, the film’s self-containment is frustrated, not by a juxtaposition with physical props, but through the proliferation of Atkins’s ‘avatars’ in Hisser and The Worm FIG.5, as well as the photorealistic self-portraits FIG.6 that punctuate the exhibition. The varying media and levels of realism – with every ‘version’ of Atkins, whether a verisimilar depiction or a ‘surrogate’, being different to the last – engender a curtailed individuation, something that Bersani and Dutoit posit as fundamental to the aesthetic they theorise: ‘Narcissistic concentration is thus manifested as self-dispersal, as the simultaneous confirmation and loss of identity is a potentially endless process of inaccurate self-replication’.⁷

A comparable splintering of the self occurs in a departure from CGI in Atkins’s live-action film Nurses Come and Go, But None For Me FIG.7, except here, arguably, the artist has inverted the ‘failed’ dynamic of his previous videos. The actor Toby Jones reads from Atkins’s father’s cancer diary, which he made over the last six months of his life. After one hour and forty minutes, Jones reads his final page, and is joined by the actor Saskia Reeves. Together they perform a fantastical roleplaying game invented by Atkins and his daughter, with Reeves delivering a series of magical medical diagnoses and cures. Unlike the other videos in the exhibition that centre on the artist’s body or an avatar, this work renders him more as an outline – one defined by the (performed) presence of two of his family members. When the artist is conjured by Jones, it is at a significant remove. The Atkins that Jones performs is illusory; moreover, he is largely supine, his personhood determined by what Reeves does to him. With the self decentred and channelled primarily through others, the dispersal of identity in this work is anti-narcissistic, ‘successfully’ translating realities between multiple media and multiple people.

At a time when the ‘reality’ of digital media resists easy determination, Atkins’s critical misuse of technology invites contemplation of its innate propensity to fail. Although his textual guidance smooths out the glitches, with the unusually candid ‘I’ reassuring the viewer that the individuated self prevails, perhaps these materials should be considered within the context of the retrospective as a whole – as opposed to explanations of separate projects to be seen exactly as they were at the time they were made. The texts share the same life-affirming tone as Nurses, as well as his ongoing Children FIG.8, a series of naive drawings of body parts, foods, words and bizarre formations on Post-it notes that Atkins has been slipping into his daughter’s lunchbox since 2020. In the wall text, Atkins admits that ‘her sense of the drawings’ preciousness, or lack thereof, quickly made it apparent that they were mainly for me’. His uncool candour rhymes with the gridded Post-its themselves, which have a calendar-like sense of the everyday, as he presents what might otherwise be construed as self-absorption as a fact of parental love. It might be said that, with regards to his more self-consciously Beckettian failures, the wall texts are one ‘version’ of Atkins looking at another.