11. Ed Atkins @ Kunsthalle Zürich

Ed Atkins,

Ribbons (2014).

3 channel HD video installation, 4:3 in 16:9 with 4.1 surround sound. 14 min.

Courtesy the artist, Cabinet Gallery, London and Isabella Bortolozzi Galerie, Berlin

Ed Atkins,

Us Dead Talk Love (2012).

2-channel HD video installation 4:3 in 16:9 with 5.1 surround sound, colour.

37 min. 24 sec.

Courtesy the artist, Cabinet Gallery, London and Isabella Bortolozzi Galerie, Berlin

At the first glance, I probably was not struck by the aesthetic in Ed Atkins’s video works. Moreover, I was even disturbed by it. But later on it’s no longer the case.

These sad, alienated and brute protagonists are highly emotional animated characters seem to be us in representation. They are often engaged in sentimental activities- smoking, drinking, crying, being alone out there monologuing, being too depressed to function… but without any explainary context, their emotions come across staged and performative, which immediately reminded me of Taylor-Wood’s ‘Crying Men’, both works are de-contextrualized and offering an opportunity for mimesis experience: ‘…focuses on our capacity for mimesis, giving us not a subject that is either composed or dissolved, but one which is subject to emotion and suffering and which is tied to the emotion and suffering of others.’(E. Walden)

What made this mimesis experience more complex is the fact that these emotional entities are all CGI characters. In this sense, there’re many layers of imitations adding up to each other- it’s animated video, they’re CGI human, they mimic human emotions. Exactly because of it, the raw emotion of melancholia (or it’s even the affect of melancholia, as for these characters there’s no memories or experience of any feelings could be registered) is underscored- it’s something that purely about the emotion and affect of melancholia. This obscurity of the principle of this alternative animated world, the background of the story or the biography of the character also serve how melancholia works in our psychics- something is missed, but we don’t know what it is.

Ed Atkins,

‘Old Food’, 2017（Installation view first floor）

Kunsthaus Bregenz 2019. Photo: Markus Tretter. Courtesy of the artist, Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin, Cabinet Gallery, London, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York / Rom, and dépendance, Brüssel

© Ed Atkins, Kunsthaus Bregenz

Three other crucial components in his work that inspired me. He was greatly interested in language, especially the incapability of language- there’s always a failure in fully representing anything. And he integrate the grammar and syntax of language with video editing. The way grammar and syntax language deploy to constitute meaning is the way video works make sense through montages. Then, in the exhibition ‘Old Food’, he emphasised the absence of the corporal body by showcasing thousands of costume borrowed from the theatre, which made me think how can I foreground the presence of the body and the absence of the body at the same time in my performance. Finally, two-channel work ‘Us Dead Talk Love (2012).’is projected onto two screens, but not fully, as he adjusted the distance and make the margin part of the projection fell out of the screens and casted onto the walls or entrance behind them. Created ‘an ambient sense of space and non-space’. Even though this is referred to the ‘Old Food’ show, in general I think all his exhibitions captured it in the way he chose to present works. Very inspiring!

C-1. Online Dossier

In this first online dossier I mainly focus on loss and the tasks of mourning. We are precarious creatures. The fact there’re ‘ineradicable dimensions of human dependency and sociality’ in us determines that we are always exposed to the vulnerability being susceptible to the loss of others. When we are facing the loss, we are forced to deal with our detachment from others. Here, grief and the task of mourning comes into play. In the very first work systematically introducing mourning, Freud suggested mourning is a psychic process of us withdrawing libido from the loss. Similar idea was demonstrated in Derrida’s writings on mourning: when we mourn, the Other becomes a part of us. we interiorize the alterity the Other possesses.

On the other hand, we conduct mourning as a reaction to cope with not only a lost person that we used to love, but also for the loss of ‘some abstraction…such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on’. This definition opens up a new potential to the spectrum of loss. The loss we are experiencing individually is of intuitions, but here, we are no longer dealing with our psyches, but something of socio-political relations. Indeed, through the tension of our current situation, we are more and more experiencing the loss that ‘apprehended the modern and postmodern epoch of loss- characterized by the fragmentation of grand narratives’. The intuitive logic of ‘an object past away, then it follows by grief and mourning’ doesn’t stand in this occasion, but a static paradox where the past is past but it has not past. We are still in the aftershock of the history, and we are still actively engaging with it.

The predecessors I listed are mostly performance, video and installation works. Artists like Tiyan and Pho’s explore their lost cultural identity by listening, artists like Song Dong and Au Hoi Lam mourn for and commemorate their father’s death through creating a imaginary, unreal re-connection, meanwhile artist like Gina Pane intended to reclaim our lost primitive instinct through her body. Through personal narratives, and through body, these artists investigate what is loss, and what does it mean to lose.

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Reference:

1 Butler, Judith. Precarious Life : The Powers of Mourning and Violence. (London ; New York: Verso, 2003), 14.

2 Butler, Judith. "Violence, Mourning, Politics." Studies in Gender and Sexuality 4, no. 1 (2003): 9-37.

3 Freud, Sigmund, Freud, Anna, Richards, Angela., and Strachey, James. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth Press, 1953.

4 Eng, David L., and Kazanjian, David. Loss : The Politics of Mourning. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003)

10. Touching My father Trilogy, 1997/2002/2011

Song Dong

Touching My Father, 1997,2002,2011

Performance, Photography, Video

This is a performance work expanded for fourteen years. The first time, Song recorded his hand moving around up in the air and then projected the image onto his father’s body; the second time, Song got to touch his body with his own hand, but this time lifeless. The video was recorded on the tape, realising it’s too heartbreaking to view the footages, Song sealed the tape box, determined not to open it again; the third time, eight years after father’s pass away, Song projected the last family video with his father in onto the water surface, touching the reflection of his father on the water.

After his early performance, Song is famous for his family theme works using family members as subjects. The linkage in his work between personal narrative and the grand narrative is very strong. Seemingly, it’s an intimate work about his own family, about redeeming Song’s personal relationship with father, but if tracing back, what cause the distance is the Chinese traditional norms of society, and the great social changes in the 20s. According to art historian Wu Hong, ‘The significance of this work (not waste) is in line with my definition of Chinese contemporary art - an art that often deploys the common tools of international contemporary art: installations, video, etc., but at its core is still about Chinese problems, a reflection on Chinese society by Chinese artists themselves. Through this project, we see the relationship between contemporary Chinese art and the family.’ (https://cul.sohu.com/20140327/n397285084.shtml)

I guess this is also the direction I am taking.

What inspired me is what Song said about ‘new media’. His definition of ‘new media’ is not restricted to new media technologies. For certain medium that you’ve never used it before, as long as you you find an appropriate language to express, this is viable, and this is ‘new media’. ‘For example, the third time I touched my father, I used a traditional medium like water to reflect, when it is still, it forms a mirror, which is also a very traditional medium, but in this way it can express my relationship with my father, and when he becomes a work of art, it conveys the meaning that is complex and emotional.’ (http://www.cafa.com.cn/cn/opinions/interviews/details/548813)