Ed Atkins - A mixture of prose-poetry, theatrical script and sort-of-stories, Atkins’s Primer is an extraordinary exploration of corporeality, technology and the future of the human race. ‘An elegiac, erotic Frankenstein for the twenty-first century’

Ed Atkins, A Primer for Cadavers, Afterword by Joe Luna, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2016


ED ATKINS  interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist


One of the most widely celebrated artists of his generation, Ed Atkins makes videos, draws, and writes, developing a complex and deeply figured discourse around definition, wherein the impossibilities for sufficient representations of the physical, specifically corporeal, world — from computer generated imagery to bathetic poetry — are hysterically rehearsed.
     A Primer for Cadavers, a startlingly original first collection, brings together a selection of his texts from 2010 to 2016. ‘Part prose-poetry, part theatrical direction, part script-work, part dream-work,’ writes Joe Luna in his afterword, ‘Atkins’ texts present something as fantastic and commonplace as the record of a creation, the diary of a writer glued to the screen of their own production, an elegiac, erotic Frankenstein for the twenty-first century.’


‘Discomfited by being a seer as much as an elective mute, Ed Atkins, with his mind on our crotch, careens between plainsong and unrequited romantic muttering. Alert to galactic signals from some unfathomable pre-human history, vexed by a potentially inhuman future, all the while tracking our desperate right now, he do masculinity in different voices – and everything in the vicinity shimmers, ominously.’— Bruce Hainley


‘How can cadavers seem so alive, speak so eloquently? Atkins’ prose is urgent, sometimes even breathless, seeming to stumble over its own material conditions. His is a unique voice that captures a truly embodied intelligence.’ — David Joselit


‘Atkins’ writing spores from the body, scraping through life matter’s nervous stuff, leaving us agitated and eager. What’s appealed to us is an odd mix of mimetic futures. Cancer exists, tattoos, squids, and kissing exist – all felt in the mouth as pulsing questions.’— Holly Pester


‘If you had to pick one artist currently having a profound impact on his contemporaries, you would have to choose Ed Atkins… He programmes almost all his computer animation himself and writes exceptional stream-of consciousness poetry that feeds into his works.’— Francesca Gavin


‘Few young artists so instinctively grasp the zeitgeist as does Ed Atkins. In his films, computer-rendered avatars overflow with emotional monologues, and a virtuoso digital aesthetic is undercut by a fixation on flesh – death and decay are recurrent subjects.’— Martin Herbert


‘For writing which is so dense, so thickened, it moves quickly. It has the vertigo effect of the comments thread which has spiralled out of control, drawing our eye down the page quicker than we can take it in. Sometimes it says “etc.” simply, perhaps, because it does not have time to draw breath. That is also part of why it never finds the bottom, never settles for the worst, any more than it allows itself to be entirely intoxicated with its own motile, palpable, extraordinary pleasures.’— Mike Sperlinger


‘I overheard someone say that Atkins’s installations are hard to like but impossible to forget. It’s not often that contemporary art scares me – but this sure did.’— Daniel Birnbaum


‘Everything here lives in the uncanny valley, that strange space of revulsion that holds the almost human – what’s us, but not quite.’— Leslie Jamison


‘A Primer for Cadavers is a book I have been waiting for – Ed Atkins is one of the great artists and writers of our time. He draws attention to the ways in which we perceive, communicate and filter information by combining layered images with incomplete fragments of speech, subtitles, drawing and handwriting. He describes this approach as “an attempt to address the body hole, rather than privilege sight [or] hearing… the work finding its home within the body of the reader”. It underscores the ambivalent relationship that exists between real and virtual objects, between real and virtual conditions and between us and our virtual selves. A Primer for Cadavers is a brilliant book!’
— Hans Ulrich Obrist


‘Ed Atkins knows that “your body is deaf, mute, dumb, and, more, importantly, dangerous. No use talking to it, is there? Anyways, it’s busy.” Isn’t it weird to have a busy body, especially one distributed on many “platforms”, across media? In his writing, Atkins slows down that preoccupied body, puts it back together, thrusts it into the “imaginative context” of “particularly effusive relations”, murders it, zombifies it, tears it apart again in that old medium of the written word. He puts it on trial, he writes, but finds that it in turn tries him. File your amicus curaie. We all stand with him.’— Andrew Durbin


‘When it is, in years to be, that Ed Atkins incarnates his own adjective, aspects of the definition (high, low and all points in between) so laid down will dwell in part on this – (t)his fascination with how we tell the world through a medium that is not the world.’ — Gareth Evans


‘Ed Atkins comes across as a writer who makes art. His body of work includes screenplays, audio, and videos that are the visual equivalent of a poem: sentences of image and sound are layered rhythmically, punctuated by repeated motifs.’ — Kathy Noble


‘Atkins’s arcane “Squinting through a prism of tears” audiovisual poetry, with its Ballardian bouquets of language, is impossible to imagine coming from any other time than Right Now. After watching one of his shorts you may have a sense of being touched in an obscure spot that you did not know existed.’ — Nick Pinkerton

Ed Atkins is known as an artist, not at all as a poet, so he’s not an obvious candidate for the review pages of a poetry magazine – but then I started thinking about what the ‘domain’ of poetry might be, anyway. Most definitions point to the ‘intensity’ of linguistic usage, and if this is the sole qualifier, why shouldn’t poetry claim whole swathes of literary production that no longer observe the increasingly delusional borders drawn by publishing’s two primary estates, fiction / non-fiction? It’s just a thought.

A Primer for Cadavers is effectively unlabelled: a collection of texts produced over the past seven years, ‘part prose-poetry, part theatrical direction, part script-work, part dream-work’; if it is a debut poetry collection it must be the longest ever, not far short of five hundred pages. It’s definitely intense.

Atkins’s work is predominantly with video, often using CGI – ‘off the shelf’ motion-capture technology – to skin his avatars in eerily frictionless textures familiar from video games and commercial animations. The films, narrated woozily by the artist, are discomforting, non-linear, slick, soupily ambient, and usually trade somehow on the disjunction between the immateriality of their visual effects and the appalling vigour of their viscerality. For Atkins, the body is a site of terrible activity – his fascination is with its effluvia, excreta, spasms, shudders, infestations, infections, amputations, tumescences, etc. Read within a poetry tradition, this is almost like encountering that archaic objective, to ‘hymn’ the beloved’s body, in the full harshness of its negative. (If the mortifying nature of the processes of representation has often been observed, here they are made graphic.)

Writing is the genesis of Atkins’s practice, and the book gathers twenty-one pieces, many of which have been previously assigned to his uncanny valley onscreen narrators. They run from a single page in length to a hundred-odd. Even on this level, there’s something of the air of the autopsy room in the way they’ve been whipped out of their homes and flopped into the clean, orderly trays of a print document.

The earliest piece but one (2010’s one-page ‘RAZOR’, which finds the writer imagining ‘a razor gliding along the central seam of my scrotum. The weight of the testicles makes the wound yawn’) is ‘A TUMOUR (IN ENGLISH)’ (2011):

Then he says, ‘Reading this text will conjure a tumour

up inside you. It will materialise in your colon (or per-

haps your wet brain, or your left kidney, or tucked and

beneath your right testicle, clustering inside your ova-

ries, your pituitary, your breast, etc. (his parenthetical

tone as if suppressing a burp)), and it

will, um, do so as a direct result

of your having read this.’

That lacuna is the top of an irregular white hole that flowers on each page of the (why not?) poem – the effect is like looking through a booklet of slides, each holding a paper-thick slice of cancerous organ, legible at every stage – as in that old favourite, a stick of rock. To start with I found something about this piece a bit… nineties? Something like the body shock of Existenz-era Cronenberg, or Chuck Palahniuk. There’s a tendency for bursts of geekily ‘dark’ over-writing – you almost expect ‘eldritch’ – and, sure enough, ‘Cthulu’ makes an appearance before long. How about: ‘1,216 billion kilometres away, Saturn screams a ridiculous question to the black’. The lads at Games Workshop would appreciate that (I was one), but isn’t it a little much?

Anyway I took these and other notes, before halfway through ‘A TUMOUR…’ I became suspicious of my suspicions, and Atkins emerged over a few pages as perhaps the most imaginative, sincere, and horribly, gloriously intent contemporary writer – certainly from Britain – I’ve read. Excess is part of it: after a while it’s pointless to complain about the ‘lack of economy’ or scary-funny fluency with which he switches up registers – it’s better just to stay alert and let the astonishments happen. The choicest of these occur between hiccupping interjections of the body – um’s, er’s, erratic BLOCK CAPS – and a woundingly offhand blokiness – ‘Chin up matey’, ‘Classic stuff, that’ (‘he do masculinity in different voices’, as one blurb promises). But the real penetrating brilliance is the single-minded scrutiny of the corporeal realm – practically a new dimension, encountered partly in the virtual, but felt as sub-bass in your bowels. The writing continually, gleefully reminds you of your body’s strangeness and fallibility, that your organs are ‘RIGHT NOW’ pulsing like dormant devices in the gelid half-light of your torso’s stockroom. Atkins has said he wishes to address ‘guts as much as brain’, and he often succeeds – we expect texts to coax us out of our bodies, whereas this one wants to confine us to its sweating walls. Perhaps disbelieving some of the book’s more bombastic aspects is part of its project of re-prisoning – repeatedly being made aware of the text short-circuits the out-of-body reading experience.

While I prefer other pieces here (‘MATERIAL WITNESS OR A LIQUID COP’), ‘A TUMOUR…’ provides an inviting schema to discuss the writing’s mania of aggregation. There’s an image in one of David Foster Wallace’s short stories that’s stayed with me, something like ‘the repulsive nest of moles discovered in an armpit’, which I can imagine as the tumorous kernel from which Atkins’s language began breeding. This is a fantasy, but it makes cancerous growth an appropriately unconscionable metaphor for the work’s aggressive energy. John Wilkinson has already developed the term ‘metastasis’ as metaphor for compositional logic in The Lyric Touch:

metastatic tumours echo about the body and these nodes define the shape of the body subjectively, through pain. Of course, the location of the primary tumour is outside the poem’s realm; the poem develops around the metastatic nodes, and these gestures come to evoke its physical lineaments.

Here poems are conceived of as satellites busily signalling an organising void. Throughout the course of ‘A TUMOUR…’ we encounter a carousel of dim psychic landscapes, each figuring the difficulty of the originating thought, and housing the promise of the title – a dilapidated folly, which the narrator has you scrambling toward at night, the building scrotum-textured like the lone, blind tenant it contains. The scene phases nightmarishly into a stricken, almost lyrical notation of a relationship – ‘you’ are the tumour’s host, addressed by your accommodating and bewildered partner, who works their way through a six-pack of Kronenbourg while watching the 1998 Michael Crichton film Sphere, its plot described in the fixating detail of fierce emotional displacement. The gross-outs recur – ‘pullulating blank gunk from what I thought was stubble but is in fact a network of gaping pores’, but a thin, painful note of compassion persists too, more affecting because of the overwhelming tonal opposition it faces. Later the tumour carries your shopping list forlornly around Sainsbury’s, returning to have you cook for it:

Radio 4

distortedly loud from a tiny Roberts radio,

the tumour sat massive and oozing under the

kitchen table, waiting. The cat seems to like IT.

Much of the book’s copious invention is generated by anaphora: everything here trials some method of attracting and collating material, a way of wadding it together (the book is a kind of anatomy of malignant forms: a nervous search session, each phrase beginning ‘Or…’, prose poems graffitied with ornate growths…) – there’s nothing particularly elegant about any of this, but there is sustained immersion, and velocity off the charts.

Inextricable from the formal ingenuity is the unrelenting corporeal focus. It appears not only as a queasy contradiction of the immaterial presence of technology and its smooth ergonomic interfaces, but also as a kind of fantasised interior that is somehow correspondent to what the language of new media determinedly obfuscates – the back-end of the virtual, the real human and mineral costs behind The Cloud.

In all of his work, Atkins remains enduringly loyal to an original impulse of writing: the knowledge that language comes from the body, and that poetry can return it there. When it hits you feel it behind your teeth. I still don’t know if he’s a poet though – he’s way too productive. - Sam Riviere

https://poetrylondon.co.uk/mania-of-aggregation-sam-riviere-on-ed-atkinss-malignant-poetics/

Ed Atkins is a British artist based in Berlin. In recent years, he has presented solo shows at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London, and MoMA PS1 in New York, among others. His writing has appeared in October, Texte zur Kunst, frieze, The White Review, Hi Zero and EROS Journal. A Primer for Cadavers is his first collection.

Ed Atkins: A Seer Reader, Koenig Books, 2015


This volume presents the titular text by leading UK video artist Ed Atkins (born 1982), well known internationally for his explorations of the impact of high-definition technology, on language and literary comprehension. Curator and academic Mike Sperlinger contributes a text contextualizing Atkins' writing.


Focussing on the artist’s use of language within his practice, A Seer Reader  is both the title of the book and of the new text written by Atkins which also includes his distinctive drawings. In addition, it features a foreword by Serpentine Galleries directors Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist as well as an essay by writer, curator and academic Mike Sperlinger, which explores and contextualises Atkins’ writing.


Technology developments such as High-definition, surround-sound or prosumer means of production brought forward the promise of increasingly realistic depictions of the world. In a somewhat paradoxical way, contemporary visual culture seems progressively dominated by stylised images whose craving towards perfect composition drifts away from reality, creating a visual regime which to a great extent looks more abstract, artificial and flat that one would expect. Current digital technologies are able to produce highly detailed representations of texture and surface but have seemingly lost their material substance as if trapped by the same surface they so accurately portray. Far from the magical transformation of still images into moving pictures, we are now left with the mysteries of invisible data and intangible codes, matter lost to encryption and replaced by flatness and intangibility.

Amidst the range of artists engaging with these dynamics, Ed Atkins has chosen a frontal line of investigation by fully exploring high definition digital technology. Rather than commenting obliquely on these developments, either by reverting to analogue processes or by exploring low-fi or archival digital sources, Atkins explores the immaterial
body of the images first hand, laying bare its or structural elements while manipulating its most visceral organs. In order to rediscover the material possibilities of contemporary audiovisual developments, the artist uses the elasticity and vulnerability of the digital to reconsider the way we interact with visual culture, staging uncanny and liminal spaces on and off screen that are centered around the viewer’s body, hereby seen as a site where the lost corporality of the images may coalesce.
Following Atkins’ line of work the exhibition at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery presents moving image installations alongside sculptural sets where still images are displayed in panels and also a new publication—A Seer Reader—which includes an essay by the artist. This combination of different media is a central feature of the artist’s method, reappearing throughout his displays and playing an essential part in the process of retrieving the presumably absent materiality of the digital. The show is anchored around Ribbons (2014) a multi screen High- definition video whose main character is an internet troll. By presenting an online avatar as its central character, Ribbons develops on Atkins’ longstanding interest around the figure of the corpse which permeates his entire body of work. Like the avatar, the cadaver is understood as a hollow container of pure representation without predefined meanings, their emptiness standing as a reminder of our own physical existence. This set of ideas also spills into Atkins’ regular use of stock sound and imagery. Like indexes open to interpretation, stock materials have the ability to be specific in particular contexts but lack any intrinsic signification, being rather vessels of ambiguous connotations. Digital film and video are also seen as deceased bodies having been reduced to mere codes, cinematic carcasses void of material content.
Text is an additional focal point in the artist’s practice and may also be understood as part of his interest in the idea of the cadaver: its dependence on context to produce immaterial representations echoing the digital code in which contemporary images are grounded. The written phrases and voice-overs that populate Atkins videos fiercely incite the viewer’s engagement by triggering tactile perceptions, sound being a further and important instrument in this process. The videos present an elaborate array of bodily and machine-like noises such as whistles or clicks, which bring forward the presence of the apparatus as well as the body behind the camera (or better still the computer) and once more underline our bodily existence. Surround sound is recurrently disrupted by the absence of reverb in the audible breathing and clapping noises while simultaneously sub-bass frequencies penetrate the viewer’s body. The immateriality of sound creates another parallel with the digital code understood as a cadaver: both without visible/ material existence and yet able to produce palpable representations that stimulate corporeal interactions.
In Ed Atkins’ shows the space of display is not transformed into a cinema, there is no safe haven for spectatorship. Instead the exhibition rooms become an immersive set that teases out the potential and limits of technology as well as of human perception and communication. The diagetic and non-diagetic layers of his work merge in order to analyse the material qualities and existential echoes of representational regimes. Classical topics such as death or love are explored in a wide ranging investigation grounded around blurred dichotomies such as body and emotion, text and image, horror and humour, belief and skepticism or dissimulation and illustration. Atkins is a contemporary visual surgeon, resisting the call for perfection and abstraction and preferring to autopsy the dead in order to forcefully revive those still living. - João Laia


High definition videos and B-movie soundtracks; technical effects and cadavers


Interview with Ed Atkins: Cadavers Telling You to Shut Up

Ed Atkins & Steven Zultanski, Sorcerer. Prototype, 2023

Three friends hang out and share a long and unremarkable conversation about getting dressed, headaches, ticks, compression fantasies, surgery, and personal aspirations, among other things. When two of the friends go home for the night, the remaining one watches TV, dances, and takes apart his face in front of a giant mirror.

Originally a play, Sorcerer is a book about the pleasures of being together and being alone. The characters find contentment in each other’s company, conversing in the placid, eerie rhythms of a sitcom in which conflict never arises. Unease is exported to furniture, gadgets, and bodily movements. The result is a counterintuitive kind of realism, lying somewhere between the procedural and the miraculous. There’s levitation.

‘I once compared Sorcerer to a Harold Pinter play. But Pinter never instructed you on how to dismantle your face, amplify your house plumbing, levitate your computer, dance with your sofa, or place a penknife on a bed so that it appears as if no one put it there. Atkins and Zultanski’s play redesigns the contemporary home as a machine for comedy, sadness, and anxiety. Sorcerer is a unique work of theatre and literature, beautiful and unsettling. I can only relate it to the words of the late, great Angela Lansbury: “My family always said I’d travel anywhere to put on a false nose.”’ – Dan Fox

‘Sorcerer is the emphatic magic of lived-time actions. Those innocuous motions, felt and repeated, held in the muscular memory of our bodies and eyes and viscerally present. That we cannot see, but here, for a slowed minute, might feel in the familiarity of an action so often performed as to be invisible as an action at all. This is a dialogue between the object body and other objects, so distended and loud as to be near silent. Where each action held might also begin to corrupt, or stain, pulling too hard, tuning in and tearing out. A politics of who we are in how we are, learnt, programmed, actioned, and acted, felt and not always forlorn.’ – Ghislaine Leung

‘In this ingenious work, Zultanski and Atkins innovatively deploy both material and human gesture to paint a sad yet almost comic scenario of contemporaneity. While a group of friends conduct inane conversation about subjects like how to take off your pants, the material objects in the apartment bump and grind as if Satie’s Musique d’ameublement has come to life. The interminable redundancy of radios, kettles, radiators, squeaking, hissing, etc., finally dominate the set in a way that is as flat and nondescript as the friends’ conversation. Yet these people raise serious compassion in us, for they are us. Atkins and Zultanski’s brand of drolly underwrought utterance shows us once more that innovative device is the sine qua non of really good art.’ – Gail Scott

‘Vivid on the page, Sorcerer is a surprising and compelling hallucinatory theatre text for a cast of three. In it a set of hyper-naturalistic micro-conversations are laid out in an unblinking deadpan; crisp dialogues that focus in on the body, mapping the detail of daily actions and experiences from the removal of clothing, to the acquisition of new skills, and the precise interior feeling of headaches. Meanwhile, in a dynamic counterpoint to all the talk, a series of playful and increasingly strange physical transformations of the performers and the space they inhabit are proposed. Atkins and Zultanski have made the score for a complex, haunting event.’ – Tim Etchells

‘With Sorcerer, Ed Atkins and Steven Zultanski invite us ’round for an evening of conversational bricolage, word games, and mild social debarment (with grapes). As guests, we are welcomed to an inanimate space, every bit as active as the gathering held within it, and duly reminded of the potential infallibility of a mixed company setting. We are privy to the trivial crosscut with the vital; we submit to compression fetish and sulphuric mythology; we ruminate on the merits of facial deconstruction, and most crucially of all, we are reminded once again about the awful sad joy of humanness and what it means to be alone.’ – Graham Lambkin

Ed Atkins, Old Food. Fitzcarraldo Editions,

2019

From one of the most lauded artists of his generation comes a purging soliloquy: a profound nowt delivered in some spent afterwards. Scorched by senility and nostalgia, and wracked by all kinds of hunger, Ed Atkins’ Old Food lurches from allegory to listicle, from lyric to menu, fetching up a plummeting, idiomatic and crabbed tableau from the cannibalised remains of each form in turn. Written in conjunction with Atkins’ exhibition of the same name, Old Food is a hard Brexit, wadded with historicity, melancholy and a bravura kind of stupidity.

Ed Atkins is an artist who makes all kinds of convolutions of self-portraiture. He writes uncomfortably intimate, debunked prophesies; paints travesties; and makes realistic computer generated videos that often feature figures that resemble the artist in the throes of unaccountable psychical crises. Atkins’ artificial realism, whether written or animated, pastiches romanticism to get rendered down to a sentimental blubber – all the better to model those bleak feelings often so inexpressible in real life.

‘Violent, emetic, immoderate, improper, impure – that’s to say it’s the real thing. Atkins’s prose, which may not be prose, adheres to Aragon’s maxim “Don't think – write.”’— Jonathan Meades

‘Atkins, reflecting on the absence of humans in the exhibition, here favours the visceral impact of associated images and words, pumping the poetry-prose with lines that speak of our primeval instincts, needs and desires, in order to “seek empathic commons”.’— ArtReview

‘Ed Atkins is the artist of ugly feelings – gruesome and smeared and depleted. But everything he does in his videos or paintings, I’ve always thought, he really does as a writer. He uses language as a system where everything gets reprocessed and misshapen – a unique and constant mislaying of tone that’s as dizzying as it’s exhilarating.’— Adam Thirlwell, author of Lurid & Cute

‘The universe is a rabble of contagion and miasma. The universe is a rabble of spheres, moved by mystical forces. Ed Atkins pokes this condition. He strokes and bursts it. He is the barber who doubles as doctor and a dentist, quick with his knife and flushes of blood. No page of Old Food is dry, it seeps with life, it breathes, bleeds, engorges, sticks you together with spit. Like bacterial cells on an errant loaf, Old Food is language in growth. ’— Helen Marten, 2016 Turner Prize winner

‘Whether Old Food is poetry, dystopian fiction, script for an exhibition, metabolic literature or all and other, is up for discussion. What is not is the artist-writer’s limpid poetics, carnal and hungry as the wolf. Atkins’s writing is real and a relief. And if grammar is politics by other means, per Haraway, then so is food – as trope, as lack, as romp, as sustenance.’— Quinn Latimer, author of Like a Woman

‘Like a McDonald’s hamburger or a cockroach or the Global Seed Vault, Old Food perseveres beyond mortal reason and enters a Beckettian afterwards. We cannot know the reason for all those tears, and it scarcely matters.’— Vivian Rycroft

‘Old Food will eat you up. Ed the head plays a vampire chorus singing of rotten old England, a magic wasteland which comes stuffed with a Supermarket Sweep of sinister flesh, goo, and other putrid treats. What’s that growing in the kitchen sink? Stick the kettle on, love, and feel the sickness descend.’
— Charlie Fox, author of This Young Monster

‘T.S. Eliot’s definition of English culture ran right down to ‘boiled cabbage cut into sections’. Ed Atkins scrapes in Cathedral City, battered calamari, excess margarine, peach cobbler, robin heart, Wotsits, mum, dad – and puts it all on a rotary spit of enjambing sentences. His turns of phrase are exceedingly toothsome: ‘buttered, asteroidal crumpets’, ‘the lush, truffled / belch of Superunleaded’, ‘a crush of / neighbours jostling for gratis / crackling’. A post-apocalypse filmed on location in the colon of this country, every moreish page of Old Food is disgusting as a gastropub, the mince of a language going richly off.’— Jeremy Noel-Tod, editor of The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem

‘Reading like the accelerated brain patterns of a ravenous soothsayer-cum-scavenger-cum-time-travellingsalesperson, auto-translated into an almost recognizable diction, Old Food tastes of sick period drama, nostalgic for a time just around the corner. As singular as electrocution, it emits from the demented ditches, the euphoric crusts, disappointed hearts and bad gut-feelings as much as the patterned constellations, throbbing with multidimensional love-songs. From inside these erotic and squalid operatics, Ed Atkins revamps the scene of our selves. His writing advances like a daredevil knife-thrower, nervy and elastic, spinning words at the reader’s throat.’— Heather Phillipson, author of Whip-hot & Grippy

‘If “Chocolate coins seemed doubly cryptic with the collapse of banks...” as Ed Atkins writes towards the end of this almost unbearable but compelling work, then dystopia and climate catastrophe are in our mouths and bodies: they pour through cataracts of names of herbs and meats and slime, of commonplace gestures in strange locations, they disrupt spelling and produce unnatural words and the suspension of proper grammar. Atkins’ fiercely flowing anti-poetry takes up the disruption of unthinking indulgence at a point near to where Theodor Adorno left off, moralia now definitively below the minima we need to carry on – other than in the turbulence of the text.’— Adrian Rifkin, author of Communards

‘A poetic bleak comedy, in which all flesh is carrion and dinner is served, and I can’t help but admire it for its sheer insanity.’— The London Magazine

‘It’s credit to Atkins' talent as an artist that he can move between visual art and prose poetry without seeming to lose his bite.’— SPAM

Old Food / by Ed Atkins / a contemporary artist / known for his video art / uncanny 3D models and esoteric mutterings / is a compact / dense / hybrid work / that reads as if written in a singular fit of mania / scrawled haphazardly onto the page / triggered by poisonous madeleine cakes / What’s at stake with the sandwich? / language spews forth / seemingly unfiltered / guttural and half-formed //

The text exists / like this review / somewhere between / prose and poetry / ambiguous zone / where the font size is large / maybe 14pt or 16pt / columns thin and long / left-justified / the space between paragraph and stanza / difficult to define / both flow down the page / lines or sentences enjambed / dimensions of the space utilized as a means of hybridizing / the format rendered in a super-position / where you cannot know if it is / stanza or paragraph / until you expand the page / and reveal where the author has clicked the ‘enter’ key //

Atkins’ book / as the title suggests / is infected with mentions / of food and drink / that trigger memories and tangential thoughts / appearing mid-sentence / only to re-vitalize / the narrator / sending him down another line of memories / not unlike Proust’s madeleine cakes / where the narrator inhales the aroma / and an onslaught of memories rise to the surface / Drinking used to be as basic as upending an animal’s open neck into your mouth. //

An endless stream of images / is evoked / tall plates of food packed onto wooden tables / marshlands and rural towns / fat parents hunched over their meal / often a with a grotesque nature to the language / depicting a dilapidated pastoral / We slept gross and happy at night while mum gathered a nocturnal yield of forced rhubarb… / atemporal / anachronistic / the narrative flows between almost medieval settings / and jarring appearances of technology / as if all timelines have collided in the same marsh / the past a mystical place / unbarred by / the confines of the present //

Further mentions of food / further dampness and familial dialogues / The body and its food begin / to muddle together / swaying between remoulades / and John Carpenter’s The Thing / There’s the sense that / everything can be consumed / everything can be minced and garnished / over yoghurt //

You begin to feel as if / the author is drowning you in food / pouring each mentioned dish / down your gullet / until you are unable to move / stuck in your seat / stared at / with an unsettling expression / fork and knife in hand / ready to portion you into different cuts / boil you in salt water / saut é you with onions / dress you in various vinaigrettes / Those days we knew how to eat a witch: with gloves on and in one go. //

Old Food conjures a uniquely uncomfortable environment / uncomfortable on a physical level / reminiscent of Aleskey German’s film Hard to be a God / specifically in regards to the mise-en-scene / where everything is made out of wood / and it is always raining / or always had just finished raining / a universe without dryness / where your socks are always drowned in sweat and wintery slush / your fingers are always pruned / rendering your flesh tediously fragile / so easy to tear / Atkins expertly has crafted a world that is almost medieval in its lack of hygiene / summoning a visceral response in my body / making each page feel / as if it is being / spoken into my ear / by an unkempt stranger / with food particles leaping from his lip / with every syllable //

This is not the first collaboration / between Fitzcarraldo Editions and Ed Atkins / A Primer for Cadavers (2016) / collects many of the artist’s short texts / each oozing / guttural / bodily / flesh / rendered into text / the first piece “A Tumour (In English)” / erases a round space from the center of two columns / the first sentence / Reading this text will conjure a tumour up inside you. / each additional sentence adding to the incantatory atmosphere / as if the distorted flesh of the creator / is rising off the page / crawling from the portal that / you—the reader-—has summoned//

Old Food by contrast / summons itself / after a set of simple stage directions comes the title / PERFORMER / the rest of the book follows uninterrupted / in one sense the text is seemingly made to / be read aloud / by an actor or the artist themself / the acknowledgments mention / related exhibitions in England and Germany / but in another sense / the text feels as if it is capable of uttering itself / the page as the performer / speaking to the reader / projecting its voice into your skull //

This sensation is / possibly / the result of the unending flow / the performer speaks forever / with no need to stop / to take a breath / line breaks breaking the running column / into manageable segments / but they never quite feeling complete / as if they are interrupting one another / starting and ending before they are ready / this is a book that begs / to be read in one sitting / making the reader feel / they are not / allowed to stop / that there is always more to hear / more to read / the performer mouth agape / mid-sentence / when you are ready to stand up / you feel obligated to remain seated / to listen / as saliva pools in your mouth //

Sentences are rife with unique grammar / “a” often replaced by “an” / um‘s appear mid-thought / There is no margarine at all on the lid of the tub that rests against one um grey sock… / almost as if the book / is written in a different dialect / one constructed using the English language / but repurposing / an ill-fitting lexicon / until it can be tooled into something / new and useable //

This constant flow / can turn the book / into an ambient kind of literature / where the reader enters a trance / is carried through the text / not quite reading / really just looking at the words / grasping onto different anchors / familiar words / um’s / the unexpected appearance of a name / Hannah or something similar / entering the dreamscape of the text / there is no true chronology / only the streaming rhythm of the sentence-structure //

Memories resurface / half-formed / the text’s ambience marked by a certain / quasi-comprehension / as if the repetition of a name will convince you / that you know someone / the deluge of food marked by its ability to connect the past / long dormant / ambient reading accentuated by a sense of familiarity / familiality / an experience that sometimes / feels like waking up / with part of your last dream still in the forefront of your mind / right before it has disappeared completely / into the unconscious / or the oddness of / having a dream / of arranging plans with a friend / or having a random conversation / only to wake up / and find that no one else remembers it //

If A Primer for Cadavers is / a metamorphosis from text to corpse / Old Food is a metamorphosis from text to wetlands / to clammy chicken breast / raw meat / expired cheese / it is a beautiful landscape of grotesque and soggy dreams / the resurrection of memories / an altar made of food // - Mike Corrao     https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/an-edible-flow-old-food-by-ed-atkins/

Extract:

PERFORMER

Spring finds medium son just on the floor. Looks maybe six? evil, holds the red plastic-handled table knife in a small right fist, fishes a slice from the open bag of bad bread with a left.

Crumb-stuck margarine blouses with the draw of the knife’s few dull serrations. Excess margarine skimmed against the rim of the tub. Margarine also stuck in a different manner to the underside of the blue foil peel, also. There is no margarine at all on the lid of the tub that rests against one um grey sock, looking perfect, plastic, the lid. Margarine also dark marls grey sock. Grey sock’s cuff ’s elastic unambiguously resigned, wilting round the blub edge of a pair of nice slippers. Untucked beige polyester short-sleeve also with margarine fat seep tabbing, also. Lax brown cords’ shot waistband frayed low. Slight merry muffin-top mini debouch? An ease of flesh into the room.

Lighting is palpably dawning. Motes and amber digits depend on young blue air. All the visible skin would shone with marge fat and the floor is a ghastly rink with it in the corner a whole family, their horse and worse.

*

What’s at stake with the sandwich?, to a crush of neighbours jostling for gratis crackling. Allegories used to be clear and dogmatic as baby’s beer. Foaming teats sopped in The People’s bra.

Later, eating just stopped. Snails caulked black treacle, then. Then wigged cassoulet and an humming hard cheese wheel spoke thermal death-time. Sorry year’s Harvest Festival focussed a depleted congregation’s prosy grace of canned misc. and dry goods for an lull

for example we’d prayer pack and tape small boxes of unknown pulses, Birds powder, powdered eggs, UHT, mulligatawny cans for maybe orphans who’d we’d prayed about inside of their distant orphan fast, woolgathering, we’d pray our blind frippery as a romance of sorts an unrequited cursorial, even as we too had nothing to eat even at all. Was the last of it, frittered.

In March we’d spoon molten bootblack over its head and beat the poor collie with an idea of tuck and fuck and a steel ladle. Later we’d see um them in the distance on a podium speaking with candour, really very moving. In winter we’d dress as low ranking public servants we’d leverage our status to hawk greengages and whiskered courgettes and the twee pickney gooseberries smote all pressed on humid slices of

Soreen

with mustered portent and really cool local slurs at a stall near the main prison or thereabouts. Our banner read ‘Old Food’ and could be read um from solitary. Out loud we also had a big bell we’d’ve rang.