Ed Atkins Untitled, installation view,
dépendance, Brussels, 2023.
Photo: courtesy of the artist &
dépendance, Brussels

What Comes After Disintegration?

Todd Meyers

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Decay is fundamentally loss—a breakdown, the material evidence of disintegration—but not necessarily disappearance. Like other forms of loss (chief among them grief), something grows in the space in which a thing separates from itself.¹ 1 - For a study of disintegration in medical thought, see Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers, The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). But these transformations invite an exaggerated expectation of scale. No matter how small or slow, there is something potent about the change brought about by decay.

It is hard to know what to make of the series of ink-and-gouache drawings that accompany the British artist Ed Atkins’s video installation The Worm (2020), presented in the exhibition Get Life/Love’s Work (2021) at the New Museum in New York, but in them is something intimate and fleshy even in the absence of a body. On white sheets and pillowcases, the afterlife of our odours, hair, saliva, and skin are pressed into the cotton fibres on which we once slept, now yellowed and crumpled. We sleep, we shed. What remains are the traces of ourselves released in our slumber, the detritus of an organism prone to decay, stains of what once was.

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