It is hard to know what to make of the series of ink-and-gouache drawings that accompany the British artist Ed Atkins\u2019s video installation The Worm<\/em> (2020), presented in the exhibition Get Life\/Love\u2019s Work<\/em> (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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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$\"Ed$
Ed Atkins<\/strong>
Good smoke<\/em>, from the video Old Food<\/em>, video still, 2017.
Photo: courtesy of & Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin; Cabinet, London; d\u00e9pendance, Brussels; Gladstone Gallery, New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Ed$
Ed Atkins<\/strong>
Good bread<\/em>, from the video Old Food<\/em>, video still, 2017.
Photo: courtesy of & Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin; Cabinet, London; d\u00e9pendance, Brussels; Gladstone Gallery, New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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One sequence in Atkins\u2019s video installation Old Food<\/em> (2018), sometimes titled Ye Olde Food <\/em>or Olde Food<\/em>, follows a boy in Victorian dress drifting through an eerie countryside, which leads him to a sterile room in which sits a piano, and then finally into an ominous cottage torn from a fairy tale. He wanders in a confusion that we share, his face splotched, a rash forming on his skin as he weeps thick glycerin tears. He is lost, and when we find him, we can do nothing for him. Of course he is not a real boy, and of course those are not real tears\u200a\u2014he oozes or leaks more than weeps, and all the artifice of the computer rendering is obvious. But Atkins is not trying to undercut fantasy or to mount a full-frontal assault on nostalgia, the kind of psychic dismantling (of childhood, of sexual drives) found in the work of Paul McCarthy. His is a flicker of sincerity that joins the wrongness of the scene\u200a\u2014and sadness<\/em>, always sadness, brought on by subjects who are wasting and in decline<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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His is a project of mourning in a world in which all matter is out of place.^{3<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 3 <\/a> - \u201cWe are left with the old definition of dirt as matter out of place\u2026. Where there is dirt there is a system\u2026 the by-product of the systematic ordering and classification of matter.\u201d Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo<\/em> (New York: Routledge, 2006 [1966]), 44.<\/span> Even the origin of the word \u201crendering\u201d so commonly used to describe the creation of figures in computer animation, as Atkins discussed in a conversation with the writer and critic Brian Dillon, evokes an image of the abattoir more than the act of making, suggesting animals and bodies boiled, reduced, and disassembled.^{4<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 4 <\/a> - London Review Bookshop Podcast, \u201cEd Atkins and Brian Dillon: A Primer for Cadavers<\/em>,\u201d October 27, 2016, accessible online.<\/span> Something is coming apart even in the falseness of Atkins\u2019s scenes, and we feel it, for real.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Ed$
Ed Atkins<\/strong>
Refuse.exe<\/em>, video still, 2019-2020.
Photo: courtesy of the artist &
Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin;
Cabinet, London; d\u00e9pendance, Brussels;
Gladstone Gallery, New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Whether sadness, disgust, or confusion, the grammar of feeling in Atkins\u2019s work is decay. But there are times when he seems to release us from feeling altogether. In a different sequence of Old Food<\/em>, a slice of bread falls; then a layer of tiny chairs, deli meat, and mustard join something brown and fecund; then more bread, squished together but not really together as the elements remain separate, suspended mid-air and released; and then more bread, but this time with sprinkles of leather-bound books and a slather of mayonnaise, folded skin, tomato, cucumber, and diapered babies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What would otherwise be rank or hard to stomach instead glistens, not grotesque but plastic. This sequence is playful, but unlike the scraped plates of Daniel Spoerri\u2019s Tableau pi\u00e8ge\u200a\u2014\u200aSevilla Serie Nr. 16<\/em> (1991), Atkins\u2019s ingredients lack the uncleanliness of a meal\u2019s aftermath (and Spoerri\u2019s suggestion that digestion is happening elsewhere). What is important about Atkins\u2019s videos is our place in their excess and peculiarity, especially when they fail to deliver what is expected. Sometimes we are simply content to indulge in all of the lush, weird abjection of his uncanny valley. But this succeeds only in radical (subversive?) contrast to the minor, quietly unsettling parts of his work. Maybe these parts are more vexing because they feel deeply personal and personified, like the series of drawings of bedsheets and pillows, or the labyrinth of old costumes (from the Deutsche Oper Berlin) that surround the video screens of Old Food<\/em>, hanging like used skins. In these softer spaces\u200a\u2014haunted by bodies and their traces\u200a\u2014he instils a different form of the uncanny, in which bodies and the material traces of their decay touch us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Ed$
Ed Atkins<\/strong>
Old Food<\/em>, 2017-2019, installation view,
Tate Britain, London, 2025.
Photo: Mark Blower, courtesy of Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin; Cabinet, London; d\u00e9pendance, Brussels;
Gladstone Gallery, New York
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\u201cI wanted to ask whether you thought that finding an eyelash under your foreskin was significant?\u201d^{5<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 5 <\/a> - Texts from 2010 to 2016 in Ed Atkins, A Primer for Cadavers<\/em> (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2016), 193.<\/span> This line, spoken by a disembodied head, begins Atkins\u2019s thirty-seven-minute two-channel video Us Dead Talk Love<\/em> (2012). These words\u200a\u2014these moments\u200a\u2014are not as strange as they are familiar. A body, mine or yours, its composite parts, dropping, peeling, maybe sticking to themselves\u200a\u2014is it my eyelash after all? or my foreskin? a lover\u2019s body, or a stranger\u2019s<\/em>? The eyelash arrives by coincidence, neither insignificant nor devastating. These small occurrences of bodies dissolving and shedding help us to see a different set of stakes in Atkins\u2019s art practice, stakes that are both less self-conscious and closer to us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Ed$
Ed Atkins<\/strong>
Us Dead Talk Love<\/em>, video still, 2012.
Photo: courtesy of Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin\u2009 &
Cabinet, London<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
I am convinced that these moments of visceral minutiae are the trick of Atkins\u2019s work, how through all the artifice his work forges a connection to a viewer. He traffics in giddy, forbidden excess only to draw us into these dense, anguishing, lesser moments. Everything breaks down; it rots and shatters and decomposes before our eyes, producing a melancholy that is inescapable. Grief is a body, and what feeds that body and falls from it is grieved as well: the taste of a tumour, the weight of a cadaver\u200a\u2014 every trace hints at a body in Atkins\u2019s work; every object\u2019s unmaking has already been set in motion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What are we to make of this place where sadness, decay, and beauty intermingle? It might be worth taking an adjacent approach to answer the question through Felix Gonzalez-Torres\u2019s “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)<\/em> (1991), his well-known installation consisting of a pile of colourful candies neatly arranged in the gallery. At the start, the pile weighs approximately 175 pounds, roughly the weight of Ross Laycock, Felix\u2019s lover, before he began wasting due to AIDS. As viewers\u200a\u200a\u2014or not viewers but assistants, maybe accomplices\u200a\u2014we can take a piece of candy, of him, until the point that he disappears, after which he is renewed as the gallerist restores the pile to its original size. It\u2019s a complicated work, one almost too easily read through a Christian lens\u200a\u2014the sacrament, dissolving the body of Ross into us, joining through transubstantiation, and Ross, the figure of sacrifice, death, and return as the candies are replenished after the last one is consumed. But taking a piece of the candy is not a neutral act: we join in the disappearance of Ross. As the author T Fleischmann, in a book-length autobiographical essay on touch, the queer body, and time, writes of their encounter with “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)<\/em>, to unwrap and dissolve him, to move him around the mouth, \u201cI sucked at the candy as I continued to look at the pile, slightly diminished. I felt for a moment an acute sense of loss and beauty, each indistinguishable from the other.\u201d^{6<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 6 <\/a> - T Fleischmann, Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through: An Essay<\/em> (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2019), 4.<\/span> Loss and beauty are consumed, dissolved, incorporated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Felix$
Felix Gonzalez-Torres<\/strong>
\u201cUntitled\u201d (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), 1991, installation view,
The Art Institute of Chicago, 2022.
\u00a9 Estate Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Photo: Tom Vaneynde, courtesy of
Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote in his late, uncompleted work, The Visible and the Invisible <\/em>(1968), about the concept of dehiscence<\/em> as a way to think about a body reopened in order for something new to form. Dehiscence, a concept borrowed both from surgery and from botany, requires a split or a wound to enable a body to come into consciousness. Merleau-Ponty writes, \u201cDehiscence opens my body in two, and because between my body looked at and my body looking, my body touched and my body touching, there is overlapping or encroachment, so that we must say that the things pass into us, as well as we into the things.\u201d^{7<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 7 <\/a> - Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible<\/em>, trans. Alphonso Lingus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 123.<\/span> A body changes, it leaves traces, it is torn (or opened) in two, becoming something else even as it comes apart. The realness of these breakdowns in Atkins\u2019s work (a father\u2019s death, a lost boy, a stained sheet, a fetid piece of meat) is only tongue-in-cheek insofar as they make us aware of the shared stakes of collapse below the surface of his screens. Each moment\u200a\u2014each small, aggrieved scene\u200a\u200a\u2014speaks of the endless transactions between the body and its movement toward decay, and with it, the inescapable parts of living we share.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Decay is fundamentally loss\u2014a breakdown, the material evidence of disintegration\u2014but not necessarily disappearance. Like other forms of loss (chief among them grief), something grows in the space in which a thing separates from [NOTE count=1]itself.[\/NOTE][REF count=1]For a study of disintegration in medical thought, see Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers, The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe<\/em> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).[\/REF] 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.<\/br>","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":269592,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[99],"tags":[],"numeros":[7549],"disciplines":[],"statuts":[],"checklist":[],"auteurs":[2506],"artistes":[6200,4466],"thematiques":[],"type_post":[],"class_list":["post-269604","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-post","numeros-115-decay","auteurs-todd-meyers-en","artistes-ed-atkins-en","artistes-felix-gonzalez-torres-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269604","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=269604"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269604\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":270286,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269604\/revisions\/270286"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/269592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=269604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=269604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=269604"},{"taxonomy":"numeros","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/numeros?post=269604"},{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=269604"},{"taxonomy":"statuts","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statuts?post=269604"},{"taxonomy":"checklist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/checklist?post=269604"},{"taxonomy":"auteurs","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/auteurs?post=269604"},{"taxonomy":"artistes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artistes?post=269604"},{"taxonomy":"thematiques","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematiques?post=269604"},{"taxonomy":"type_post","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_post?post=269604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}