Ed Atkins

This is British artist Ed Atkins’s first show in Canada, and the nonprofit foundation DHC/ART is an ideal location for “Modern Piano Music.” Since opening in 2007, the gallery has a history of beautifully installed solo exhibitions of important international artists, and its series of small galleries and original Old Montreal architectural details lend an uncomfortable intimacy to this work that is entirely appropriate.

Atkins creates CGI videos, usually consisting of a lone white male protagonist voiced by, and facially mapped after, the artist. This surrogate (Atkins prefers that term to “avatar”) engages in disjointed soliloquies and performances that suggest desperate attempts to communicate. The result is poetic, jarring, sometimes strangely charming and always unnerving. There is the sense that words have failed these men, unable to express the emotions they are compelled to externalize. The language of film editing is also pushed to the breaking point here—rapid cuts, sound effects and bursts of familiar songs suggest a narrative progression, which is constantly withheld.

All the pieces make use of text, and words are sometimes written on the bodies of the characters. In Ribbons, 2014, a skinhead character at a bar has “bankrupt” scrawled across his forehead, and words like “troll” and “FML” (“fuck my life”) inked on his arms and torso, often backwards. It’s unclear if they are the result of a prank while he was passed out, or manifestations of self-disgust. Subtitles like “Don’t die” and “I’m just like that” are unrelated to the sound or image. Animated film trailer-style titles, e.g., “A Demand for Love” in a golden biblical font soaring through clouds with dramatic music, also fail to connect with the shots that follow.

Over three video channels the uncanny figure (realistic and yet grotesquely ‘unreal’) drinks and smokes at a bar table, sometimes slumped face-down on it or coiled underneath it—a visual joke, drinking someone “under the table.” All the while he maintains eye contact with us as though imploring or challenging us to understand, and he sings, and delivers streams of consciousness like “Hey X, a chimera, X, crossed with X, the hind legs of a mother, the face of legitimacy, et cetera.” There is something of the truncated language of texting in all the works, here suggestive of the omnipresent (particularly in the UK) x’s for kisses.

As with all of Atkins’s works, the title Ribbons evokes many meanings and yet “fails” to fix or encapsulate the piece. It could refer to the repeated shot of ribbons of different liquids (urine, blood, olive oil, crude oil) pouring into a whisky glass at the sound of a boxing-match bell—another “round” of drinks. The underlying feeling of violence in the piece also calls to mind the phrase “cut to ribbons.” And the feminine decorative connotations of “ribbons” contrast with what feels like an unflinching look at the experience of masculinity under a techno-centric patriarchy.

The same themes and techniques echo throughout the works on view here, as if trying to articulate something deep and wordless with different kinds of language. Even Pricks, 2013, takes the opposable thumb as its subject, that which sets us apart from animals and wields an undeniably phallic power. A chimpanzee voiced by Atkins provides the rambling dialogue as a thumb turns up and then down, suggesting the gladiatorial “live or die,” as well as the more innocuous “hitching a ride,” or the banality of the Facebook “like.” Shifts in scale allow the thumb to enter eyes and ears, a much smaller hand to caress it, and later the appendage completely deflates and then reinflates to ludicrous proportions.

The videos all emphasize the body, its instability, messiness and wetness, despite the dry incorporeality of its CGI presentation. The way the show has been installed serves to make us aware of our own bodies in space, with works projected on chunky drywall screens more like walls or huge tombstones. Rectangles of grey carpet extend out from each, on which viewers can sit or lie. But unlike, say, a Pipilotti Rist installation where viewers are invited to recline on cushions or beds, it is not entirely clear that you are allowed to (many visitors avoided even walking on them), and in fact they are not that comfortable—you feel very aware of your limbs, having to change position regularly. The windows in the galleries have been subtly tinted rather than blacked out, prompting a double take as we see the outside world slightly altered, making us aware of our eyes and the act of looking.

Safe Conduct, 2016, the most recent work in the exhibition, is the only exception to the floor-level drywall screens. Here, a triad of huge monitors is suspended high above us, like the information screens at airport security. Indeed, the piece is a visceral burlesque of the animated instruction videos increasingly used in spaces of transit. In an otherwise deserted airport security zone, to the incessant machinelike march of Ravel’s “Bolero,” a bruised, trembling and mumbling man strikes poses suggestive of being searched or captured that become almost like a deranged dance.

Humming along with the tune, this lone character drops items into the security trays on a conveyer belt—guns, knives, his internal organs, limbs, blood and other bodily excretions. At one point he tears off the skin of his battered face over and over, and later removes his individual features. This occurs with sickening squelches and plops; Atkins often uses over-the-top foley effects for gestures and actions, lending the immaterial CGI physicality and weight, and here the effect is particularly gut-wrenching.

All of Atkins’s output is fascinating, but Safe Conduct heralds a new engagement with wider political issues, looking increasingly prescient since the US election. It draws attention to the experience of air travel security as the closest “we the privileged” come to experiencing the dehumanization and bodily invasion that various groups of people undergo on a daily basis. From racial profiling to immigration, so much violence today is structural. It can be subtle and hard to pin down, but, like Ed Atkins’s work, it is profoundly affecting, it gets under your skin and burrows deep into a place beyond language. ❚

“Modern Piano Music” was exhibited at DHC/ART, Montreal, from April 20 to September 3, 2017.

Clare Samuel is a Northern Irish and Canadian artist, writer and educator who teaches at Ryerson University in Toronto. Her work has been exhibited and published internationally, and she is a co-founder of the Feminist Photography Network, a research creation initiative between Scotland and Canada.