ART-PRESENTATION: Ed Atkins-Live White Slime
Ed Atkins’ computer-generated films feature shabby, lonely protagonists with disarming and marked fidelity. His animations demonstrate their digital constitution, their near-total artifice, even as they simultaneously strive for a disturbing level of realism. Atkins’ films get right under the viewer’s skin, rendering a queasily uncanny version of the familiar – just as the idea of “old food” raises a suspicion of goodness spoiled.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Kiasma Archive
Take off your shoes, place your belongings in the tray and empty your pockets. What happens when we unquestioningly subject to airport security regulations or other, less overt protocols in society? Ed Atkins’ multichannel video “Safe Conduct” (2016) is the core of his solo exhibition “Live White Slime” in Kiasma. “Safe Conduct” is a burlesque of airport security instruction videos. Atkins mixes appropriated and CGI footage of the artist’s own devising, set to Ravel’s “Bolero”. A carousel of protocol, rendered bodies – both literally and metaphorically – abattoirs and metal detectors. The title conjures a parlance of specious administrative directives; an exceptional state-administered document that affords protection to the carrier, as well as the similarly named autobiography of the Russian poet, Boris Pasternak. The protagonist is a bruised archetype, a digital surrogate animated by Atkins’s own facial expressions, transferred by means of performance capture technology. Atkins takes a broad interest in such gaps between illusion and verity, between what looks and what is real. Atkins points to and takes a critical view of such collapses, which have become a typical trait of our digital reality where everything is rendered and mediated. In “Safe Conduct”, rendering is a key word: a term that means both the final process by which a computer generated image is produced, and the means by which waste animal tissue is salvaged and turned into stable, value-added product. This slippage, through language, from the digital to the visceral and back again, is the symbolic order and critical mode of Atkins’ work. Ravel’s “Bolero” serves as a delirious and insistent familiarity throughout, a cultural theme tune to which the triptych of videos are brutally choreographed, beholden to a force of repetitious, insistent convention, production and texture, whose increasing hysteria belies both the psychic and corporal trauma of the kind of proper compliance that the protagonist – a battered and bruised digital surrogate – is forced into. Airport security animations repeatedly tell you what to do, how to behave: take off your shoes, place your belongings in the tray, empty your pockets, put your arms above your head, spread your legs. These animations not only poorly camouflage anxiety, risk and paranoia behind their cartoonish cheerfulness, they also veil the fact that you are submitting to a code of behaviour that is essentially violent. Atkins lampoons such security video instructions with “Safe Conduct” which at the same time becomes a metaphor for a more general state of affairs; a contemporary human condition where we are imperceptibly subjected to more or less explicit regulation, conventions and procedures, written and unwritten rules, administered by an overwhelming wealth of technologies: linguistic, ideological, digital. “Ninth Freedom” (2020- ) works backwards from “Safe Conduct”, Atkins has taken real-world, in-flight safety animations and added a graphic, foley soundtrack. Sound, uniquely, describes bodies: vibratingianimating—matter into a commotion to mirror that of the source of the sound. Earlier works of Atkins’ understood foley sound to be the thing that lends heft to weightless his computer generated imagery. Here, the new soundtracks summon matter and return a kind of palpable reality to the in-flight videos, albeit exaggeratedly: a necessity to compensate for the imagery’s original design as palliative, lite representation of preparation for a catastrophic event. Where silence afforded a kind of unreality, sound grounds and mocks with bathos in the videos. Adding sound is necromantic. A body feigns inanimacy (plays dead) in order to maybe just about endure forcible animation. The acoustic panels that flank the video works muffle the space, dissembling it phenomenologically. The hangar-like space is attempted shrunk to something more intimate, cinema-like. Or otherwise spaceless: a no-place the obverse of the white cube and its sanctifying of art; the acoustic panels meant to situate the videos inside themselves, apart from reality. This practical purpose is partly unravelled by the texts and diagrams embroidered on them. Rather than receding into invisible grift, the panels become points of attention, information, the reflexive content serving both to reveal the acoustic treatment, and metaphorise their purpose and convolute the subject of the videos: A list of Isaac Newton’s adolescent sins, a scale comparison of dinosaurs and airliners, a list of “squalid” things, an alphabet of demons, among others. The language of administration and information abuts mysticism and poetry.
Info: Kiasma-Museum of Contemporary Art, Mannerheiminaukio 2, Helsinki, Duration: 28/2-23/8/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-20:30, Sat 10:00-18:00, Sun 10:00-17:00, https://kiasma.fi
