Ed Atkins & Steven Zultanski - 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.

 

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.

Part script, part novel, part manual, Sorcerer (Prototype) is the latest unclassifiable book written in collaboration between the artist and writer Ed Atkins and the poet and critic Steven Zultanski – a gentle, contemplative work about the pleasures of conversation, being with others, and being alone. ‘Unlike many narratives, Sorcerer does not put crisis and conflict at the centre of the story’, write Atkins and Zultanski, describing their theme as ‘the intractability of reality – both its resistance to clear meaning and its sweetness, weirdness.’ Atkins and Zultanski were in conversation with the art writer and journalist Emily LaBarge.

‘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 and Steven Zultanski on their Daring New Play

The artist and poet speak to frieze about staging the domestic intimacies of the pandemic and post-pandemic worlds

Andrew Durbin: How did you meet and when did your collaboration begin? Ed Atkins: We both moved to Copenhagen at about the same time and we quickly became friends. When Rikke Hedeager, the chief dramaturg at the city’s Revolver theatre, approached me about mounting a production there, the thought of inviting Steve was very quick and very easy. I was anxious not to superimpose some sort of contemporary art project onto a theatre setting but, rather, to take the invitation and the specific context at face value, and to approach it as an opportunity to do something new: to write, design and direct a play. Steven Zultanski: We wrote the script (Sorcerer, 2022) in the form of a novel and, at some point, we’ll probably publish it as such. It’s full of digressions, confusing formal shifts and descriptions of actions that don’t happen in the play. We see the project as moving across media – theatre, dance, literature. AD: Sorcerer is divided into halves, both of which you describe – in the play’s treatment – as ‘quiet, intimate and slightly awkward’. I’m curious about that awkwardness, something traditional theatre often wants to avoid. We hate it when an actor stumbles, misses a line, does something off-script – it’s worrying, anxiety-producing. Why make an awkward play?

SZ: We wrote Sorcerer over the last two years. For much of that time, due to the pandemic, we weren’t seeing anyone except for close friends. We hung out all the time and, even though nothing new was happening, we kept talking; that’s how we kept each other afloat. We recorded some of those evenings and used them to build the dialogue in the play. The transcriptions are awkward and meandering, but also completely comfortable, placid. Part of the awkwardness stems from its likeness to life itself, but it’s also an aesthetic preference that comes out of our interest in art film and documentary. We both tend to enjoy extreme virtuosity as well as things that are uncrafted, unedited or deliberately spoiled. To that end, we wanted the play to move between fidelities, between naturalistic action and floundering artifice. EA: It’s something I’ve been transposing to other media for a long time: the awkwardness that stems from the basic volatility of a body being there – or, in my case, in the heretical faking of that volatility. My work tries to repurpose the awkwardness endemic to live theatre, in order to draw attention to other kinds of failing performance and representation. I had a show at the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt a few years ago titled Corpsing, and the specific rupture that term connotes – an actor breaking character – is pretty much the effect that governs most of the formal decisions in my videos and my writing. Relatedly, everything onstage in Sorcerer will be mic’d. Every creak and blurt will be excessively audible; those auditory coincidences of performative action will be rendered conspicuous. One of the things I learned from using animation is the outsize role sound has in materializing stuff – of corpsing things.

AD: What were some of the theatrical – or filmic or literary – precedents for you? EA: There are so many. Steve and I talk incessantly about our work and the things that inspire us. Our shared affinities allow us to speak a common language: they enable us to work with a certain presumed understanding, and without the need to explain too much. SZ: Chantal Akerman, Pina Bausch, John Cassavetes, Cornholio [from Beavis and Butt-Head, 1993–2011], Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Jacques Tati, Apichatpong Weerasethakul ...

EA: … and Robert Bresson. In that vein, we also really love a lot of young composers and musicians who are working with domestic sounds and everyday field recordings, such as Derek Baron, who makes a lot of pieces that sound like friends hanging out and playing music. They have a YouTube channel where you can watch them sight-read 18th-century chorales by Johann Sebastian Bach; something about the combination of Bach’s insuperable compositional virtuosity and the meticulous, yet slow and broken, nature of Derek’s sight-reading makes for a terrific example of what we’re talking about – of what we’re really drawn to. SZ: We’re also interested in and inspired by the social effects of intimacy – how it actually feels to be intimate. How the comfort of one’s closest friends can also be a kind of automation. When you really love other people, and you see them often, you act like automata together. You don’t need to be clever, and conversation can be a bit blank. There’s a nice paradox between extreme intimacy and nearly empty talking. EA: I think this is related but the opposite of awkwardness. The anxiety about an actor stumbling or a performance collapsing is about as far from this vacated intimacy among friends as I can imagine. Though they’re brought into proximity by the transposing of such intimacy to the stage. AD: How did the actors change – and develop – that intimacy? SZ: The actors – Lotte Andersen, Peter Christoffersen and Ida Cæcilie Rasmussen – quickly found their way to a warm, naturalistic interaction, as if they’re not even acting. The rehearsals mostly involved the detail-work of establishing the tone, and then figuring out where it could be broken or exaggerated. In the second half, Peter is on stage alone, in kind of a solo dance performance, so, for him, there’s the extra challenge of finding that intimacy with himself. He’s been working closely with the choreographer Nønne Svalholm to both remember and forget his body. EA: The stage convenes and sort of models the intimacy. It’s a small, naturalistic apartment interior, but with several conspicuous effects that serve as psychological and sensorial surrogates: just off-stage stands a bed, the covers of which writhe unceasingly; and there’s a huge mirror-screen at the back of the set, poised to vastly magnify whatever is placed before it. Transposing intimacy to the stage for Sorcerer has meant, in part, employing theatrical technologies to metaphorize it. - ANDREW DURBIN

https://www.frieze.com/article/ed-atkins-steven-zultanksi-sorcerer-2022-interview

Ed Atkins’s earlier work brought joy in the act of comparing our eczemas rather than our mythologies. In the 2010s, he appropriated 3-D characters from prosumer platforms to animate imperfect skins in micro-narratives of soft melancholia. The appeal lay in the fact that his computer-generated imagery never took the form of dystopian platitudes. Instead, he made use of CGI with the intentions of a playful and reclusive performance artist.

In William Friedkin’s Sorcerer (1977), four men ride through Colombian badlands in modded GMC M211 U.S. military cargo trucks loaded with sticks of dynamite, “sweating” nitroglycerin. One of these M211s bears the name Sorcerer, allegedly a symbol for the wizardry of fate. In retrospect, the title is enough for the film to share the aura of Steven Spielberg’s Duel (1971) or, to push the thriller axis further into the supernatural, of John Carpenter’s Christine (1983). These cultural landmarks make the title of Ed Atkins and Steven Zultanski’s own Sorcerer (2022) a strong modifier of its reception, setting a horizon of expectation for the emergence of horror within otherwise uneventful material.

The dialogue of the filmed play is based on the recording of a banal conversation between three friends. On stage, the protagonists are casually sipping beers around a coffee table. In this setting akin to that of a bizarro sitcom, they behave like über-stoic toons, as if they were secretly monitored by an unseen Judge Doom. As the main protagonist was left alone on stage, I thought of Goodbye to Language (2014), in which Godard quotes his younger self: "The difficulty is not in showing the forest, but in showing a room where one knows that the forest is a few paces away." In Sorcerer, Atkins and Zultanski effortlessly show a room from which you know a Spar convenience store is a long, cold half-mile away. All it takes is Peter Christoffersen rummaging through the bottom of a low fridge for leftovers. To see him sucking up soggy spaghetti late at night is to witness a drab triumph over inert tentacles. Sorcerer is also a game of gestural primers, in which one sees cold pasta become form in the way Wallace Stevens’s Necessary Angel sees a pineapple on a tabletop turn into an owl sitting humped (“it has a hundred eyes”).

Intervening on historical film material often feels like an act of defacement. Atkins’s Voilà la vérité (2022) is an enhancement of a short sequence from Dimitri Kirsanoff’s silent Ménilmontant (1926). The sequence stages the encounter between an old man (a bougnat, probably) and a young grisette in Paris’s northeastern district. In Kirsanoff’s original, the story begins with a ruthless axe murder, but Atkins selects one of its softer moments. While the destitute girl daydreams of the comforts of bourgeois interiors from a park bench, with her baby on her lap, the man hands her a piece of bread and a slice of dry sausage without a word.

Atkins pushes a whole array of digital tools powered by AI beyond mere restoration purposes, to a point that allows him to populate Kirsanoff’s images with vivid colors and teeming details. The video stands as a virtuosic play on the excesses of realist technique, as in the early colorizations of postcards, with their sometimes outrageous sentimentality. On the soundtrack—heavy breath, running tap water, bread crunching—Atkins and David Kamp make overexpressive use of Foley, without deference to the original images.

The sound of breathing plays a stronger role in Pianowork 2 (2023), in which Atkins’s hyperrealistic CGI alter ego interprets Jürg Frey’s 2001 piano composition Klavierstück 2. Atkins’s virtual performance evinces a signature attention to the minute movements and expressions rendered by the modeling software: seemingly unassured, briefly contemplative, quasi-simian at times. In this journey in and out of 468 soundings of a perfect fourth, they imbue our perception of Frey’s conceptual piece with the allure of a private struggle with the instrument, punctuated by moments of epiphanic relief.

In their exploration of the delicate balance between technological under- and overinvestment and through a commitment to uncanny realism, Atkins and his collaborators skillfully depict the inherently alien nature of intimacy. - OLI SUREL

https://www.screenslate.com/articles/ed-atkins-steven-zultanski-sorcerer

Gladstone is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by British artist Ed Atkins. The dual-venue installation is mounted in our 21st and 64th Street locations and marks the artist's first New York show with the gallery. Known for creating videos in which computer-animated proxies reflect on themes of loss, intimacy, abjection and melancholy, the artist's multidisciplinary approach to artmaking examines the increasingly permeable boundaries that separate life from its digital simulations. Addressing contemporary culture's fetish for media that painstakingly mimics the aesthetic contours of reality but fails to accommodate the burden of its subject, Atkins mines performance, theater, cinema, literature, and himself to examine the alive/dead dichotomy that ricochets between all bodies and their cybernated doppelgangers. A new booklet featuring an excerpt of the artist's recent writings accompanies the exhibition.

Premiering at 21st street is Pianowork 2, a new computer-generated animation that depicts the artist playing Jürg Frey's piano composition, Klavierstuck 2. Realized via a motion capture process that translated Atkins' real-time performance into a hyper-realistic 3D digital model, the video is charged with the task of maintaining its self-aware artificiality while also remaining faithful to the event it resuscitates. Eschewing his typical preference for generic digital surrogates and choosing instead to animate a model with his own likeness, the artist unmasks himself under the skin of a new avatar that edges incrementally closer to 'Ed Atkins,' but inevitably misses its mark. Captured in a single 20-minute performance, the film is a recursive compendium of duff chords, anxious grimaces, and phobic uncertainty. Though each failure is rendered in high-definition detail that suffuses Atkins' digital effigy with something familiarly human, the figure consistently exposes its own artifice. Running parallel to the insufficiencies of Atkins' performance are the video's own intentional technological shortcomings; here the real and the virtual shadow one another, becoming twinned models of inadequacy that unfold in alternate dimensions. Like the ventriloquist's dummy, the artist's double is fraught with the disorienting contradictions inherent to the uncanny; imbued with a surplus of artificial life, it cannot help but indicate death.

Shown in concert with Pianowork 2 is Sorcerer, the cinematic adaptation of a play written and produced in collaboration with writer Steven Zultanski. Documenting an uneventful evening at home among friends, Sorcerer examines the casual horror that often undergirds banality. Written, staged, and filmed to exploit our understanding of the structural tropes that drive sit-coms and teleplays, Sorcerer teases what Atkins and Zultanski refer to as a 'counterintuitive realism.' Though the script is constructed from transcripts of real conversations between a group of friends, the production remains formally bound to both dramaturgical strategy and televisual sleights of hand. Just as we slip in and out of believing the figure in Pianowork 2 is a representation of the artist himself, we encounter Sorcerer with a series of narrative expectations that remain dissatisfied when the first act collapses into the last without climax. The film's closing scene dramatizes this intentional failure; alone at the end of the evening, one of the players sits calmly down and disassembles his face, revealing himself as a double agent who straddles the parallel constructed realities unfolding both on the stage, and in the audience.

A pair of mechanized beds conceived by Zultanski and Atkins as props for Sorcerer dominate the artist's 64th street exhibition. Undulating as though occupied by some nebulous unknown, the sculptures function as both trespassers and referents, material indexes of the intractable distance between performance and life. Further activating the connection between the works in both galleries is a group of ten self-portraits rendered in colored pencil on paper. Executed in excruciating detail, these drawings formally present themselves as documentation of material reality, but like the artist's self-referential avatar, they are simply another series of Ed Atkins masks. Drawn from a perspective so close that the artist's face appears almost magnified, these works intentionally over identify with what Atkins refers to as a 'slavish fidelity' to the image. Recalling the unheimlich qualities inherent to his computer-authored virtual body, these portraits probe at issues of time, aging, and the possibilities for objective truth within the realm of representation.

Also included at 64th street is Voilà la verité, a short video in which Atkins reworks a single scene from Dimitri Kirasnoff's 1926 silent film Ménilmontant. The sequence depicts a distressed young woman who seems to be recalling the downward slope of her life while sitting on a park bench, locked in a reverie of trauma until an elderly man sits next to her and wordlessly begins to share his lunch. After Atkins digitized, colorized, and re-rendered the scene with the assistance of artificial intelligence software, he added a Foley soundtrack of naturalistic ambient sounds. Reanimated by technology, the video rejects its status as projection and gestures towards something more akin to the haunted house. The past has returned to the future, but it doesn't look quite the same. The title of the video is taken from the only discernible text in the film: the fragment of a headline visible on the newspaper in which the food is wrapped. 'Voilà la vérité' — 'This is the truth.' In Atkins' world, we know that what we're seeing is never exactly the truth, but perhaps it's something even closer.

Press release courtesy Gladstone Gallery.

https://ocula.com/art-galleries/gladstone-gallery/exhibitions/ed-atkins-with-steven-zultanski/

At Eden Eden, Ed Atkins and Steven Zultanski present a feature-length film adaptation of their play, Sorcerer. The film is accompanied by a motorised bed that faintly writhes. Sorcerer is a film about the pleasures of being with others and of being alone. Three friends hang out and share a long and unremarkable conversation about getting dressed, headaches, ticks, compression fantasies, surgery, and their aspirations, among other things. When two of the friends go home for the night, the remaining one watches TV, dances, and takes apart their face in front of a giant mirror. 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 mechanically exported to the set and to the camera: the stage is demarcated by unnecessarily hot, working radiators; the sound is relentlessly hissy, the result of dozens of microphones hidden in the furniture and under the floor; and many of the shots are claustrophobically tight, cutting off attention to the expansive space of the theatre and directing it toward insular, inscrutably private gestures. The dialogue for Sorcerer was built from transcriptions of Ed and Steven hanging out together with their friends. Sorcerer’s is a counterintuitive kind of realism, lying somewhere between the procedural and the miraculous. Magnifying a face or amplifying a couch brings the face or the couch into wild proximity via technological process. Gadgets (radiators, lighting, microphones, a mechanical squirming bed, etc.) are a way to access otherwise unavailable compassion. Or to facilitate voyeurism. Choreography is used to heighten or defamiliarise the banal in the bodies of the actors, in the same way as amplifying the couch pulls it nearer and pushes it further away at the same time. There’s the intractability of reality — both its resistance to clear meaning and its hyperbolic closeness. There’s levitation.

https://www.contemporaryartdaily.com/project/ed-atkins-steven-zultanski-at-eden-eden-berlin-25005