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Episode......................................................................
Contemporary artist Ed Atkins’s survey at Tate Britain is best described as an existential theatre with avatars, CGI, motion capture technology, traditional figural drawing, Unreal Engine, filmed performance, experimental writing and much more.
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Architect and first-time guest on the podcast, Nick Taylor, and I, get lost, fall into the temporary exhibition through a faulty door, rush through the show to watch the timed film, return a second time because one of us went to Tate Modern first, discuss exhibition-visiting methods, critique wall texts, and reflect upon our own relation with time, narrative, devotion and death.
If you enjoyed the episode, you may enjoy my essays on Substack: https://joanaprneves.substack.com
Across all technologies, we've asked the same questions:
…are we spectators or actors?
…contemplative or engaged?
…are images and the people in them dead?
…and if so, why are they moving (both as a verb and an adjective)?
Hailed as a pioneer of digital technology, Ed Atkins' work found its groove in early experiments with video-editing. These quickly migrated into the world of gaming, with its motion capture and CGI animation, and their striking similarity with live performance through timed duration, but with a complicated relation with the physical world and real, fleshy bodies.
For behind the scenes clips and visuals follow us on Instagram: @exhibitionistas_podcast
We discuss: #parenting, #audience #engagement, #theatre spaces, fear, #vulnerability, #narrative building, #virtual realities, #self-representation, #identity, spatial dynamics, #modernism, #existentialism, #mortality, #parenthood, #theatre, #experimental film, emotional detachment, #intergenerational connections, #illness, #family dynamics.
Instagram: @exhibitionistas_podcast
Bluesky: @exhibitionistas.bsky.social
Website: https://exhibitionistaspodcast.com
Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Setup
02:31 Memories of Tate Modern
07:07 Pivotal Moments in Ed Atkins' Career
14:03 A Few Points Of Reference For Ed Atkins' Work
18:21 When The Artist Writes Their Own Wall Texts
22:35 Narratives On And Off The Screen(s)
27:17 The Exhibition as Experimental Writing
32:07 Narrative Building in Art Experiences
37:33 Theatre Without Actors
41:03 Self-Representation and Identity in Art
46:19 Spatial Dynamics and Human Scale in Art
53:23 Modernism and Its Absence in the UK
55:31 Life As Utter Devotion, Art As Its Awareness
01:02:36 The Disconnect Between Generations in Art
01:07:18 Reading Emotion: Ed Atkin's New Film With Real Actors
01:11:40 The Journey Through Illness and Art
01:16:51 The Mysterious Case of the Disappearing Spectators
01:22:16 OUTRO
About us: If you enjoy the podcast If Books Could Kill and You Are Good, you will enjoy Exhibitionistas, where artists are unveiled through current and pertinent angles, and through thoughts and feelings. These podcasts were a great inspiration for our format because they're nerdy and engaging, researched and approachable. The co-host and the guest co-host engage in a conversation informed by an accessible and lively presentation of the subject, through which you can reflect on a show you've seen or discover it if you can't go, learn or re-evaluate artistic topics crossing over into our everyday lives.
00:00:04
I'm Joanna Pierre Nevis, your host, and this is exhibitionist
00:00:09
this. I'm an independent writer and
00:00:15
curator with a wide-ranging 2 decades career in contemporary
00:00:19
art, from commercial galleries to art fairs, from research to
00:00:23
curating, from Lisbon to London through Paris.
00:00:28
But when I'm asked what I do outside the out world, the
00:00:32
inevitable reaction is, oh, I don't know anything about
00:00:35
contemporary art. Ouch.
00:00:38
So call it a midlife crisis, call it arrogance, but I gave
00:00:42
myself the task of trying to fill that gap with Co host
00:00:46
conversation Episodes centered around a genuine exchange of
00:00:51
thoughts, feelings and precious context around solo exhibitions,
00:00:57
interviews and special episodes based on a particular topic to
00:01:03
keep you alert and on your toes. If you want to read further into
00:01:07
some of the topics discussed in the episodes and more, you can
00:01:11
also find me on Sub Stack under my name, Joanna Pyroneves.
00:01:20
All right, so we're talking about the Ed Atkins exhibition
00:01:25
at Tate Britain. Today.
00:01:26
The Tate has several buildings, so there's Tate Liverpool,
00:01:30
there's Tate St. Ives, which is a marvel of
00:01:33
modernist architecture in Cornwall.
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And then in London you have two Tates.
00:01:38
So you have Tate Modern, which is dedicated to contemporary
00:01:41
international arts and then you have Tate Britain, which is
00:01:45
modern and contemporary arts for artists based in Britain or
00:01:49
British. So that's where we're headed
00:01:52
today. And today I have a newcomer, a
00:01:54
new Co host. He is my favorite type of Co
00:01:58
host because he is an exhibition goer, but he does not work in
00:02:03
the contemporary art field. So Nick Taylor is here with me.
00:02:06
He's an architect. He did study Fine Arts.
00:02:09
He's he's cheating a little bit, but he's now an architect in
00:02:13
West London. So if you're nearby and if you
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need an architect, he's your person.
00:02:18
So Nick, how, how are you feeling about this?
00:02:21
I'm excited, I'm great, I'm happy to be here.
00:02:24
You make me sound like a Ghostbuster.
00:02:27
Why? If you need if you need someone
00:02:29
to help. Who are you going to call?
00:02:31
I seem to remember you telling me that it's your favorite Tate
00:02:35
and even your favorite Museum in London.
00:02:39
Yes, it's definitely my favorite Tate.
00:02:43
Whether or not it's my favorite Museum in London is slightly
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because you have, do you classify the Barbican as as a
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museum? There's a museum in the
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Barbican, So yeah, it probably falls short on the museum.
00:02:53
But in the rankings of tape buildings, the the tape Britain
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is by far my favorite. Yeah.
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But being an architect, that sounds weird to me because I
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would think that you would choose Tape Modern as opposed to
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Tape Britain, which is kind of this imperialistic old building,
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although it has been renovated in 2013.
00:03:14
So why? Why is it so special to you?
00:03:16
Yeah. It's a good question.
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So if you were, if you were speaking purely from an
00:03:20
architectural point of view, if you were to show me the drawings
00:03:22
or the models or the renders and describe the project from a as a
00:03:29
as a as a project, then the tape modern is by far the best
00:03:32
building of the lot, I think. And OK, so I'm going to do more
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on masters and almost created a new genre of art gallery with
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the Tate, with the Tate Modern. It was this amazing thing on the
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on the South Bank in London. But being a Londoner, my
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experience is personal. And I started going to the Tate
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Britain before the Tate Modern was even there.
00:03:56
And so my connection to that building is deeply personal.
00:03:59
And it was the Tate Britain was my was my joy space that I would
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go to when I needed time alone, time to reflect, time to expand
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my mind. I have, I have many personal
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memories of going to this building and leaving a better,
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happier person. So for that reason, purely
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romantic it is. It's my favorite.
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But then, having said that, it's also a great building.
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It is. It's a great.
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And then I think the the dialogue between the traditional
00:04:30
building and the new architecture is so each time I
00:04:35
go there, I find it so successful.
00:04:37
It's one of those successful exercises, I think in
00:04:39
architecture. I mean, I don't know if you, I
00:04:42
mean from an architectural point of view, do you agree with that?
00:04:45
Absolutely. Yeah.
00:04:47
The, the, yeah, absolutely. When you have a, when you have a
00:04:50
building that's so rich in heritage and, and, and obviously
00:04:54
of its era and its time and it's such a stand out building in
00:04:59
itself. I can't imagine the pressure as
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an architect, you would have to then create something new onto
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that. And and what they've achieved is
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just, is amazing. By the way, you know, the Tate
00:05:13
is 25 years old, So the Tate Modern, do you remember because
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I wasn't here, Do you remember as a Londoner the Tate kind of,
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you know, the decision to establish it, the the building
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or building it and then the inauguration.
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Do you have any memories of that?
00:05:31
No, you, you. You would have been 18 or 19.
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Yeah, I would have been in my late teens and and I would have
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been a typical teenage chasing silly things and just not
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concentrating. On not aware on things.
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Coming. Up so say who in?
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Fact. The Tate, the Tate Modern kind
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of just landed. And for me it was, I wasn't even
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aware of it being under construction.
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And I think I think it opened when I was probably in my first
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year at architecture school. So it was this spaceship that
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just landed in London. And even at that stage, you
00:06:06
know, I was incredibly naive and didn't know anything.
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So who's it designed by Herzog and who Herzog?
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And, you know, it was a complete education for me at that point.
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Yeah. And of course, because it was
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such a big deal, we then went, visited, studied it had a look
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and. And.
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Yeah. And so I kind of I grew into
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architecture as the tape modern was emerging on the on the
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consciousness of of everyone who visited.
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So it's kind of I think maybe our paths are quite are quite
00:06:36
similar in that sense. Shall I go and introduce Ed
00:06:44
Atkins to you and to our listeners?
00:06:48
So Ed Atkins is a British artist who is a child of the 80s, much
00:06:54
like yourself, Nick, and he came of age in the 90s.
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He now lives in Copenhagen with his partner and his two
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children. But he grew up in a small
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village near Oxford called Stones Field.
00:07:07
He's a really great writer. I'm reading his book Flowers, so
00:07:11
his last book. He talks a little bit about his
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childhood, also his compulsions, all that glitches in his body.
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But one of the things that kind of stuck with me while I was
00:07:21
researching him was that he would sit at the top of the
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stairs when his parents left home.
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He would itemize the number of ways in which they they could
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die and that he could lose them. You know, by all accounts, an an
00:07:39
anxious kid whose parents were quite, well, not your regular
00:07:43
parents. So his mum was an arts teacher,
00:07:46
his dad was a graphic designer. And he, he has a sense of a
00:07:50
certain sadness coming from them because his dad kept insisting
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that you should follow your vocation, that you should always
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do what you like for work. You, you should earn your money
00:08:04
and your life through the things that you like doing.
00:08:06
Because they were both artistic and they both sacrificed their
00:08:10
work in order to have a steady job.
00:08:12
He talks about his career as being a way for his parents also
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to make it to take Britain, let's say.
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And so his education was very steeped in arts, in arts of all
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kinds. So apparently they would watch
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lots of great films that wouldn't be mainstream films
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particularly for example, Verner Herdog films.
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His mom played the piano really beautifully.
00:08:38
His dad loved jazz. And in 2009 he was working with
00:08:42
Christian Markley. And so Christian Markley is an
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artist who was then producing a Seminole work called The Clock,
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which was a 24 hour film that was in real time, so 24 hours.
00:08:58
And the time was counted in the film through found footage of
00:09:05
clocks in films. So what's Ed Atkins was doing
00:09:10
was trying to find footage of clocks in everywhere.
00:09:15
And so he says that at a certain point he would he he exhausted
00:09:18
everything of the culture around us and he went into Eastern
00:09:23
European films, Russian films. So he watched everything and
00:09:27
that was really crucial in his work.
00:09:30
Another thing that happened was that he was asked to produce a
00:09:35
video and while he was still at Slate 2009, and he was a bit
00:09:41
tentative about it. He doesn't know why he agreed to
00:09:44
it. And when he started looking at
00:09:47
images and editing, he found the deepest of pleasures like he
00:09:51
found home. And that was a real pivotal
00:09:54
experience for him. And he still sees himself as an
00:09:57
editor in some ways across all his work.
00:10:01
Then another thing happened which was also more on the
00:10:05
existential side of things. And the really sad event which
00:10:08
is that he lost his dad to cancer.
00:10:11
And at the same time he was producing work.
00:10:14
He was very prolific as soon as he finished his MA and in 2011
00:10:20
he showed his work at Tate Britain, actually in the Art Now
00:10:26
section. So Tate Britain has a room along
00:10:30
the other rooms of the permanent collection where young artists
00:10:33
are invited to do a presentation of their work, to do an
00:10:37
installation. Then he went on to be, I think,
00:10:41
writer in residence at the Chisenhill Gallery in London.
00:10:45
And it was while he was producing the work for that
00:10:49
particular gallery that he had another experience with
00:10:55
technology, which was to associate an Xbox Kinect with a
00:11:01
software from a startup called Face Shift, which was facial
00:11:06
capture and this motion tracking video device that he used to
00:11:12
film himself. And while he was filming
00:11:14
himself, he was being rendered in terms of animation.
00:11:20
He was really taken by the ability of that those devices to
00:11:26
capture something of the liveness of a performance
00:11:29
somehow and at the same time to create a piece and a detached
00:11:33
video piece that he could show later.
00:11:36
And in 2014, so really quite young, he had a sort of Seminole
00:11:42
exhibition because of what he showed there at the Serpentine
00:11:46
Gallery, a multi screen installation which features for
00:11:51
the first time an avatar for which he used himself, not as
00:11:57
the visual, the the final rendering of the character, but
00:12:01
he used his own body to kind of create that avatar named Dave.
00:12:05
I've seen that exhibition. And for me that was kind of a
00:12:08
turning point as well, I have to say, because I remember visiting
00:12:13
it and really intensely disliking it.
00:12:17
So it's a white dude in a sort of a digital basement.
00:12:24
He looks a bit like a Skinhead slash troll in Cell, Proto in
00:12:29
Cell, but at the same time he's so lonely.
00:12:32
He's smoking, he's drinking, and he's deflate.
00:12:35
At a certain point the character deflates like a balloon and
00:12:39
falls on the table. So you kind of feel for that
00:12:42
character and you're filled was with a sort of contradictory
00:12:47
paradoxical emotions. And then my mind kept going back
00:12:52
to it after having visited it, and I realized that I was really
00:12:57
taken by the exhibition. It was a real shift of kind of
00:13:01
learning how to look at something new, actually
00:13:04
something that I've never seen before.
00:13:06
I don't know if you felt that in the exhibition.
00:13:09
I find it very effective. There's a connectivity in in his
00:13:13
work that I don't see in other video.
00:13:17
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's really, it's really
00:13:20
interesting to hear that back story, having seen the
00:13:24
exhibition, but not knowing that before going in.
00:13:29
Because as you're speaking, I'm thinking of the things that I've
00:13:32
seen in the show. When you're talking about Dave
00:13:35
and this guy in the basement, immediately I'm thinking of the
00:13:37
guy who, who is in the apartment in the bed, who, who falls
00:13:41
through the the floor into this sinkhole.
00:13:44
But the idea that this guy is low, he's lonely.
00:13:48
So you, yes, you're drawn into an emotional response where you
00:13:52
are you're feeling for this person.
00:13:55
You don't know why he's sad or why he's feeling like this, but
00:13:58
as you're watching it, you can't help but but get emotionally
00:14:02
involved. And there's also another moment
00:14:06
in his work, which is really important.
00:14:08
It's a film called Refuse or Refuse both work, and it's done
00:14:14
on purpose. And it's the first time that he
00:14:17
uses Unreal Engine. So Unreal Engine is a 3D
00:14:23
computer graphics game engine. It was developed by Epic Games
00:14:28
and it was first used in 1998, which is weird.
00:14:33
I was kind of surprised to know this.
00:14:36
For the purpose of the exhibition, I would say that
00:14:40
what I kind of can present as being the main reference points
00:14:47
for him would be the editing aspect.
00:14:51
And I would venture this and I, I'm interested in knowing what
00:14:55
you think. I think the edition part is
00:14:57
really important. And I see the exhibition as as
00:15:01
an edition, as an edited form of creating an experience for a
00:15:08
viewer, a spectator. Then there's the liveness
00:15:11
aspect. So that experience he had with
00:15:14
the Xbox and the the facial motion capture rendering in
00:15:20
animation of a live moment and the fact that he chooses gaming
00:15:26
as opposed to film. So he really chooses a specific
00:15:32
medium that for him is interesting not only because of
00:15:34
the liveness aspect of it. So the interaction with what
00:15:38
you're creating as a creative but also as a gamer, you have a
00:15:42
duration to it, which means that you start a game, there's a real
00:15:47
time duration, something happens that is reflected on the image.
00:15:52
So you have an impact on the image, but also it ends and you
00:15:56
can start over. But when you start over, it's
00:16:00
never the same experience. I went to Take Modern and you
00:16:04
know, realized when I was there that it was at Take Britain.
00:16:07
So I had to go 2 times and it was interesting because it is
00:16:11
true that something's change as you cross, as you go through the
00:16:16
exhibition. And then to end on something a
00:16:19
bit different is the reference and the interest he had in
00:16:25
experimental theatre. So he he did drama at school.
00:16:29
So there's this whole line of a specific kind of experimental
00:16:33
theatre across the end of the 19th century and the 20th
00:16:37
century with Alfred Jarry who created Yubu, King Yubuhua.
00:16:42
He was really considered a pioneer even for Dada
00:16:45
surrealism. And then there's Anton Artur
00:16:48
with the Theatre of cruelty. So notion of theatre as not
00:16:52
having to be based on text and and being based on the presence
00:16:56
and the interaction between what's going on on the stage and
00:17:00
the spectators. And then you have The Theatre of
00:17:03
the Absurd with Samuel Beckett, who is very well known with his
00:17:07
piece Breath, which was based on on, On the Breath on Breathing,
00:17:12
but also Luigi P Randello with his famous play called 6
00:17:18
Characters in Search of an Author, and also Beckett.
00:17:21
So you always have this idea of absence in the theater of the
00:17:25
absurd. So Godot is not coming in
00:17:28
waiting for Godot in Pirandello, characters slash actors are
00:17:32
waiting for the the author who doesn't materialize.
00:17:35
And there's always this idea of boredom and and waiting, but
00:17:39
also this idea of absence. And Ed Atkins talks a lot about
00:17:43
loss, which is obviously connected to things and events
00:17:46
in his life, but also as a spectator.
00:17:49
You agree to look at something, but you're losing an aspect of
00:17:53
it. So if you're watching film, you
00:17:55
lose the three dimensionality of it.
00:17:57
If you're watching theater, you lose the connection and the
00:18:03
reactivity. When you're looking at a person
00:18:06
who's talking to you, you can't talk.
00:18:08
And finally, there's film. I think I will invite you to
00:18:12
lead us into the exhibition. The first space you move into is
00:18:16
immediately, it's a dark room with music.
00:18:21
So it's a nice sensory experience as you're warming up
00:18:24
into this thing. And then you the first
00:18:28
installation is the I don't know what it's called, but it was
00:18:31
the, it was like bedding. It was.
00:18:34
Embroidery. That's cool, I think.
00:18:36
Material with. Yes.
00:18:37
With the words very, very, very, very small.
00:18:43
So did you read that those were the writings of his dad's?
00:18:47
Yeah. Sick Diary.
00:18:50
And I was, I admit I was acutely aware that there is a 2 hour
00:18:58
film at the end of this where I will have to listen or have to.
00:19:03
I will listen to this diary being read and.
00:19:07
So how so the thing How did you know that there was that film at
00:19:11
the end? Because when because I'm not a
00:19:14
member of Take Britain, I have to, I have to buy the ticket.
00:19:17
And when you're, when you're on the website buying the ticket,
00:19:19
it has show times for that film. I had to plan my visit to the
00:19:25
exhibition knowing that OK, there are three show times I
00:19:29
want to get there for one of them.
00:19:30
And so working backwards, what time do I need to arrive?
00:19:34
So it's a completely different way of going to see an art.
00:19:39
Show where absolutely I was an innocent bliss because I have
00:19:43
the the tape membership card. They scanned the card, didn't
00:19:47
say anything. But that's a completely
00:19:49
different experience then, because yes, I I was regimented.
00:19:54
Yeah, but we'll we'll talk about it.
00:19:56
We'll talk about it. So we're still on Death Mask 2,
00:20:00
The scent and Kerr of 2010. So this these are his kind of.
00:20:06
Experimentations with digital editing.
00:20:09
Film montage with yeah, so high definition videos basically.
00:20:16
And he's, am I right in saying that he didn't, he doesn't want
00:20:20
to display his work in any kind of chronological order.
00:20:22
Yeah, he said that he doesn't like the idea of a
00:20:25
retrospective, which, you know, kudos to him because I mean,
00:20:28
he's 42 years old, there's no reason.
00:20:30
But it's a survey exhibition. It's a mid career survey
00:20:33
exhibition and that's how we saw it.
00:20:36
And not to bury the lead, he did something.
00:20:40
You can see that he's uncomfortable with the exercise,
00:20:44
but he's very good at deconstructing the rules.
00:20:48
And So what he did is, for example, the text at the
00:20:52
entrance usually is written by someone who is the person who
00:20:58
writes the text for exhibitions. And for those of you who listen
00:21:01
regularly to this podcast, you know I have a bone to pick with
00:21:05
them. They're usually like the
00:21:07
blandest texts. So the text that you read at the
00:21:10
entrance is him, and the first person he's talking to you is.
00:21:12
That a bit of a cheat code because really, so this is him
00:21:17
saying this is my show, this is my work.
00:21:19
This is how I want you to experience it.
00:21:22
This is how you should read my stuff before you go in.
00:21:26
So whereas if if he's not saying that, then he has to do that
00:21:31
work through his, he has to do that through his work.
00:21:35
Is it not a bit of a cheat to say go into my show, look at it
00:21:39
and feel like this or experience it this way?
00:21:43
I read a few interviews before going to the show, and I knew
00:21:45
that he had kind of fumble the game.
00:21:48
So I can tell you what the text says.
00:21:50
So it says my life and my work are inextricable.
00:21:55
How do I convey the liveness that made these works through
00:21:58
the exhibition? Not in some factual,
00:22:01
chronological, biographical way, but through sensations.
00:22:06
I want it. So the more you see, the richer,
00:22:10
more complex, less authored, less gettable things become.
00:22:15
And it's signed at Atkins. And then you have the Tate text,
00:22:20
which I am not going to read. Maybe he used this text to kind
00:22:26
of to, to disrupt the following texts.
00:22:32
I guess in some ways because when you read, yeah, it is
00:22:37
because when you read his text, you don't have a sense of the
00:22:39
exhibition at all. So you go through a corridor and
00:22:44
then you get. 2 with What was the name of this piece?
00:22:50
Hey, Sir. You've got three screens of
00:22:53
different sizes. They each screen is one behind
00:22:56
the other, maybe about 3 or 4 meters away from each other,
00:23:01
increasing in scale as they go back into the back of the room,
00:23:06
which was I don't know why actually I, I didn't, I didn't
00:23:10
even question why that was. I just chose the screen and
00:23:13
watch that one but. But you chose the screen.
00:23:18
Sorry. Interesting you chose the
00:23:20
screen. I did, yeah.
00:23:21
I chose the middle screen because it.
00:23:23
Made like this the. Wall.
00:23:25
Really, because I, for me, was really playful, so I moved
00:23:30
around and I liked to see the repeated image because it's
00:23:35
always the same film. It's not one of those video
00:23:37
installations where you have different videos going on, which
00:23:40
always confuses me. I think, yeah, I just, I was
00:23:42
focused on the content because I knew that there was there was a
00:23:46
narrative in this. So I wanted to understand the
00:23:50
narrative and see, OK, what what's happening, those more
00:23:54
kind of morbid thoughts. It's the fourth pattern of what
00:23:58
would it be like if if a sinkhole just swallowed me up or
00:24:02
swallowed someone up and that was the way you went So when you
00:24:05
were. Talking so the the video, so the
00:24:08
text tells you that this is based on the sort of fizzy there
00:24:13
that he read about that happened in Florida where this person
00:24:18
when it was in a room and his whole house was swallowed by a
00:24:22
sinkhole and the person just disappeared.
00:24:24
So you so you know it's not going to end well, you know this
00:24:27
OK, this is going to be a a thing where eventually someone's
00:24:30
going to get someone's. Going to get, yeah.
00:24:33
It's like, it's like seeing, it's like going into a horror
00:24:36
film. Yes, which is which is really
00:24:38
interesting, right. So I'm sat there and I'm
00:24:40
watching it, but in also in the back of my mind, I'm thinking,
00:24:46
knowing now what I've read about the technology and about playing
00:24:50
with the reality and the I kind of felt like, OK, so this
00:24:57
doesn't look like realism. This is, this is almost, almost
00:25:02
like naturalism. It's it's a man in a room, but
00:25:05
he is alone and he is sad. He is.
00:25:10
You get all of this stuff. And there's a soundtrack as
00:25:12
well, which also pumps these emotions into you.
00:25:15
So you know what? You know what?
00:25:16
What you're watching. And yeah.
00:25:18
And there are close-ups on his face.
00:25:20
So he's singing a song, this this sorrowful song.
00:25:26
And you don't know why he's singing it or who he's singing
00:25:29
it to, but just the emotion gets you.
00:25:32
I forget the name of the cards. The psychologists would.
00:25:35
Famously used Oh, the Rorschach tests you would have
00:25:40
interpreted. Yes, he's holding exactly.
00:25:42
You're seeing a closer. Sit.
00:25:44
That's. It and you can see his thumb so
00:25:46
you know he's holding it, but the card is kind of oscillating.
00:25:52
Yeah, it's it's. It's vibrating.
00:25:54
He's holding it. He's not holding it still and
00:25:57
watching it, I think. Is he jerking off to one of
00:25:59
those cards? Me too.
00:26:01
I thought the same thing. And I thought, how can you show
00:26:06
a person holding a card and immediately you know what that
00:26:11
person's doing? Yeah, in an animation that is.
00:26:15
You hate yourself for thinking it.
00:26:16
You think? Not me, I.
00:26:18
Think, have I got? Is there a problem with me?
00:26:20
Why am I thinking this? And then and then you go and
00:26:23
then it pans out and think, oh, I was right.
00:26:26
That is what's happening. For me it was more confusing
00:26:29
because I don't have the appendage so I was even more.
00:26:36
It's an abstract. Disturbed because I was
00:26:39
thinking, how do I know how subjectively that?
00:26:41
Looks so so you see him at his most intimate and he's naked a
00:26:47
lot of the time he's got his clothes are on the floor and I'm
00:26:50
you're not sure is it daytime? Is it in the middle of the
00:26:52
night? You don't know because the
00:26:53
curtains are pulled and it's all artificial light.
00:26:55
And then it's and. But then it happens.
00:26:59
The sinkhole eats everything. Out and it gets pretty violent,
00:27:03
yeah. It's really, and also not in the
00:27:07
dark anymore. It's very white.
00:27:09
And you see the third room and also there's posters.
00:27:14
There's stuff on the walls. So there's a drawing, there's a
00:27:18
poster that's really weird of a dog placed upward and it says
00:27:24
fear. And then there's a quote by
00:27:26
Helen Keller about fear, which I can't remember, but I took a
00:27:29
picture. It says avoiding danger is no
00:27:32
safer in the long run than outright exposure.
00:27:36
Life is either a daring adventure or nothing, which
00:27:39
sounds in the face of what happened to that poor bloke.
00:27:44
You have a glass wall so you can see into the other room where
00:27:47
there's two beds and the poster of a little kitten holding on to
00:27:53
a branch saying hang in there, which is so cynical.
00:27:59
And then you go into the experimental writing, there's
00:28:04
wood panels that will punctuate this first half of the show.
00:28:08
And it's called Contemporary Art Writing Daily.
00:28:11
And you think, oh, what is this? And so it just says these texts
00:28:15
are by the anonymous writing projects, Contemporary Arts
00:28:18
Writing Daily CAWD. So it's an entity that's
00:28:22
anonymous and and writes on Commission.
00:28:25
And so he commissioned texts to them.
00:28:28
And then he says that he described the videos and the
00:28:31
thinking behind the videos, sent all of these via e-mail and
00:28:35
asked them to write whatever they wanted in response.
00:28:38
And he describes the text by writing.
00:28:42
They sent me a backwash of institutional ventriloquism,
00:28:47
Wikipedia entries, grotesquerie and humor.
00:28:51
The texts are laser burnt into off cut bits of museum trash, so
00:28:56
this is a real commentary on the institution of the museum if
00:29:01
ever there was one. I'm.
00:29:04
Glad you've explained it to me because that went over my head.
00:29:07
Did it? Yeah, it's another layer of the
00:29:12
exhibition for sure. Yeah, because there's.
00:29:15
I loved his, I loved his description of what he got back.
00:29:19
But in terms of what it what it meant in that on that layer, I
00:29:23
didn't get it. So interesting because it really
00:29:26
is a discourse. I mean where he writes about
00:29:29
what he received could also be a description of museum texts.
00:29:32
Basically sort of ventriloquism, Wikipedia entry and then the
00:29:38
text. Like for example, he has a
00:29:42
discarded MDF sort of pulpit on the wall and he and engraved on
00:29:49
it is the European output of manuscripts from 500 to 1500.
00:29:54
And then there's a graph and that's it basically, which I
00:29:57
find so funny. And it has a lot to do also with
00:30:01
technology because the book was kind of this first mass media
00:30:05
technology of communication and information.
00:30:08
And so of course it's silly and it's stupid and no one would
00:30:13
ever put that. But that that's what I would
00:30:15
dream to have as exhibition texts.
00:30:18
And I don't know if I said this on the podcast or not, but I was
00:30:22
really thinking about this and I was thinking I would just love
00:30:25
that one person in the museum really worked with the artists,
00:30:29
found out what the project was and just had a go at it.
00:30:32
I think you you need that kind of Comic Relief when you at the
00:30:39
end of this room, which you clearly did not have and.
00:30:42
Yeah, completely. Yeah, because it's such a
00:30:44
breakaway from anything you you've just seen to go into that
00:30:48
completely different space. Absolutely.
00:30:50
Yeah, yeah. So you didn't read the text, did
00:30:52
you? No, I not really because it
00:30:56
because it was. There are also many.
00:30:58
Yeah, there's just too much. And also going back to the whole
00:31:01
time thing. Oh, you were.
00:31:03
You were in a hurry. Yeah, If I was just wondering
00:31:05
around, maybe I would have read them, but I'm thinking I have
00:31:08
another hour and a half before the film starts or another
00:31:10
night, you know, I need to move on to that maybe.
00:31:13
I'll come back. To this but I never did.
00:31:16
So because for me the experience was very much an editing
00:31:20
experience, as in you go in, you learn about the that's cancer.
00:31:25
So each screen, each lone standing wall is covered with
00:31:30
those embroideries. And so you regularly come across
00:31:35
the the Sick Diaries and then you learn about that.
00:31:38
And when you're in that that piece Hissa, where the person's
00:31:44
going to be kind of eaten up by a sinkhole, you have next to it
00:31:49
2 beds, which were a play that he actually created with someone
00:31:54
else. And I forget the name of the
00:31:56
person. Apologies for that, which were
00:31:59
just two beds with a device under the covers, under the
00:32:03
duvet that make them makes the duvet move as if breathing, but
00:32:09
also as if a very little body was underneath it.
00:32:13
You don't quite know exactly. So for me that was kind of the
00:32:16
the sick bed, the surprise of death.
00:32:20
So I was kind of also doing my own film in my own head.
00:32:25
And it's the same bed or a similar bed to all the one on
00:32:27
the. Screen.
00:32:28
Yes, the white bed. The poster that's on the wall
00:32:30
that you mentioned, but the fear that poster is also in the film
00:32:34
as well on the wall of the guy. Does that maybe make you start
00:32:38
to feel maybe vulnerable in that, well, this guy had no idea
00:32:43
what was going to happen to him, what was going to and, and that
00:32:46
physical connection of the poster in his room that's now in
00:32:49
the room that you're in. Are you potentially in the same
00:32:53
scenario where who knows what's going to happen in 20 minutes
00:32:56
from now for you? Exactly.
00:32:58
Those kinds of fidi ver are those kinds of things that you
00:33:02
do your best to practice your best cognitive dissonance on
00:33:08
because you don't want to think about those in order to keep on
00:33:11
living right? You have to ignore that shit
00:33:15
happens and that you may not be here in 30 seconds.
00:33:20
So that kind of brings it home. Of course, bringing it to your
00:33:25
own space of course includes you because my theory is that we are
00:33:29
the actors of this play. So I mean, one of the
00:33:33
possibilities of experiencing the work, because I think it's a
00:33:36
very laid exhibition, one of the possibilities is you are the
00:33:40
actor in this theatre of the absurd that he's creating.
00:33:43
Because Dave, that character at Serpentine was for me the white
00:33:49
male threatening dude that you don't want to cross paths with
00:33:55
when you're going back home in the dark.
00:33:58
You know, you want to avoid that person.
00:34:01
But it's also a projection of projection of projections
00:34:06
because it was also he was also using his face.
00:34:10
And so there's a a thing of otherness and of, oh, he's
00:34:14
dealing with his own white males, cisgenderness, whatever.
00:34:18
And then here it's no longer that that's we're, we're really
00:34:21
not in that sort of more societal exploration of identity
00:34:29
and, and we're completely in another space for sure.
00:34:32
So we have. So we move on to the other room
00:34:36
that we can see a little bit of and it's really full.
00:34:41
It's so crowded. Yeah, so you're so you're
00:34:44
snaking through this zigzag maze like route and these costumes
00:34:53
there must, there must be, I think 3 layers going three,
00:34:58
yeah, three teams of of closed rails with so many costumes and
00:35:05
right the way up to the ceiling makes you feel tiny.
00:35:08
But you do feel like you're walking through maybe the the
00:35:12
back of an Opera House, these but so many costumes.
00:35:16
And then, but whilst you are, whilst you're walking through
00:35:20
your SO, your gaze is forced into the the path that you're
00:35:24
travelling, and there are screens at the end of each of
00:35:27
these corridors with what looks like a 90s computer game, or
00:35:33
maybe an early 2000s computer game.
00:35:36
Early 2000. That the right?
00:35:37
Is that the right passage? Of time I.
00:35:39
Don't know times, but yeah, but you're confronted with these
00:35:42
computer games effectively, which kind of they look like
00:35:46
they are the the computer games that my older brother-in-law
00:35:51
would have been playing when I was younger.
00:35:53
And they are those kind of fantasy worlds where you have
00:35:57
your own avatar and you and you have friends who are online and
00:36:01
they are also other people in their bedrooms somewhere playing
00:36:04
this game, living another an alternative life.
00:36:07
So it's a, it's a false reality and it's kind of a bit medley
00:36:11
medieval and the costumes that you're walking.
00:36:14
Around are also. Medieval.
00:36:17
And so, yeah, so you're walking around and you're trying to make
00:36:19
sense of of what you're seeing. I didn't watch that many of
00:36:23
those screens for that long. And again, maybe this is my own
00:36:27
anxiety because I've got to get to the end really in the next 45
00:36:32
minutes. So, So yeah, so I kind of, I
00:36:35
tried to understand as much as I could walking through it and
00:36:38
take in what I was confronted with.
00:36:41
But at the same time, again, that clock was ticking.
00:36:44
These films are in a sort of a loop and they so the idea of
00:36:49
these films is that these are characters that are so old men
00:36:54
and children who are crying and they have these viscous tears.
00:37:00
They're disgusting. They look like snot coming out
00:37:03
of their eyes. There's a parallel being made
00:37:05
with theatre. So again, the reference to the
00:37:09
theatre of the absurd where he's always interested in making the
00:37:14
either exploring a technology to its extreme and pushing its
00:37:19
boundaries or the the rules of the game.
00:37:23
And so you're not supposed to be crying viscous tears for ages
00:37:29
and arriving at a a cottage and the fire, but nothing's
00:37:32
happening. But then you have behind those
00:37:35
beds, you have the refuse refuse video, which is cut in half.
00:37:40
So he tells you that actually the whole video is really
00:37:43
interesting. It's the first time he used real
00:37:45
Unreal Engine, which was for him a theatre with our actors.
00:37:52
So there's this floor where things fall constantly.
00:37:57
And the idea was to study how different objects would behave
00:38:03
when hitting the pile of objects or the floor and making sure
00:38:07
that the machine could get them right.
00:38:10
And each time the video plays, it's a different version, so it
00:38:15
keeps changing the order of the objects the way they behave.
00:38:20
It's completely played for. It's very playful.
00:38:23
It's what I would do as a kid, but in real life.
00:38:27
There's an intersection between infancy where you just drop
00:38:31
things. Also babies, and he has small
00:38:34
children. They drop things to, to, to, to
00:38:36
know what happens when you when something's no longer in your
00:38:39
hand. But then there's also the
00:38:43
reference to Marcel Duchamp. You know the peace three
00:38:48
stoppages where he took a meter long thread and then dropped it
00:38:56
from a meter high and then indexed rulers to the shape of
00:39:02
the three fallen pieces of yarn and then presented them in a
00:39:08
little box. So there's this idea of dropping
00:39:10
something. Apparently he fudged that.
00:39:14
So apparently there has been some crazy, some nuts tried that
00:39:20
and it's impossible for the the the the yarn to or the threads
00:39:25
to fall like that and create those shapes that sounds.
00:39:28
Like an outrageous claim that that an artist has has lied.
00:39:33
It happens all the time. That's that's the basic of
00:39:36
creation is you lie. Architecture.
00:39:39
That's no, no, I think it's we have, we share that with you
00:39:43
guys. One day you come back and you
00:39:46
explain that theory to me. And also what is really funny
00:39:49
about this thing is that apparently so there were lots of
00:39:53
glitches, there were lots of problems creating this off
00:39:57
camera. There has to be a fish rotating
00:40:02
endlessly for the program to work because whenever they took
00:40:05
the fish out, the program would crash.
00:40:08
So. There's some fish out there
00:40:10
holding it all together, and the idea is to replicate gravity.
00:40:15
And of course it does and it doesn't.
00:40:17
So there's this kind of indecision between this thing
00:40:21
that you gain and this thing that you lose in this theater.
00:40:24
So and then at the end of the corridor, there's another video
00:40:27
of a sandwich being endlessly made with layers that kind of
00:40:33
floats and then fall on the bread.
00:40:36
Then the bread's compressed and it's real food, and then it's
00:40:40
just toys and stuff that make the sandwich.
00:40:45
He has a really weird relation with food because this whole
00:40:49
installation is called Old food. But so after this room, to your
00:40:54
despair, there's another video that you had to watch from
00:40:58
beginning to end as well. Yeah, yeah, this is the piano.
00:41:03
Piano Work 2, which is from 2023, so a COVID work and it's
00:41:16
again, it has that layer of embroidery.
00:41:18
Then you go to the other side and I was a bit like you this
00:41:22
time because I wanted to watch it from beginning to end.
00:41:24
And I did notice that people would sit, watch for a bit and
00:41:29
then leave. And he did the show really well
00:41:33
because of course I know what he looks like because I've seen
00:41:36
videos of his and I've done research on him.
00:41:38
Da, da, da. I work in the art field, so we
00:41:40
kind of know what he looks like. But your regular museum goer
00:41:43
doesn't. And so the the Polaroids, as you
00:41:46
call them in the entrance, show his face.
00:41:50
Then there's drawings all across the exhibition, Red drawings,
00:41:54
self portraits of him, either in really awkward positions,
00:42:00
usually his head, like he's dead.
00:42:02
It's a bit cadaverous kind of drawing.
00:42:07
Or on spiders, his head, on spider bodies.
00:42:12
And then here you finally meet him whole.
00:42:16
It's the whole Ed Atkins, but rendered animated.
00:42:22
So he had to sit in the room in Berlin in during so the pandemic
00:42:28
with a team on in the other room wearing a sort of onesie, really
00:42:33
uncomfortable. He had to have an iPhone kind of
00:42:40
on in front of his face. And it actually is a
00:42:44
performance. So he performs the, it's a
00:42:48
minimalist piece of music that is like 486 times the same note.
00:42:53
And you have to count the silence in between each note.
00:42:58
So he's very nervous, but it's not him, but it's him.
00:43:03
Yeah. So.
00:43:04
But did you get to watch the whole video?
00:43:07
Not the whole thing. I couldn't watch the whole
00:43:09
thing. So I was one of those people who
00:43:10
walked in and sat down for a bit.
00:43:12
I recognised it as him instantly, which is great.
00:43:15
And that's really clear, the way that you've described how he did
00:43:18
that. Because I, without even
00:43:19
realising, yeah. And you instantly, you know, OK,
00:43:22
this is him and I, and I did remember in the in the foyer
00:43:28
before you go into the show, you see a photo of him with the
00:43:31
iPhone on his head. So, you know, you know, I know
00:43:35
how he how they created this. It's not a secret.
00:43:39
Yes. It's part of it.
00:43:42
And again, just the emotion, the facial stuff.
00:43:46
It's a human being and it is him.
00:43:48
But it's it's him. Yeah, but it's not and it's I, I
00:43:53
liked it, but I didn't love it as much as the other the other
00:43:57
stuff. But again, it was it was just
00:43:59
another layer, but it moved me on to the next room, which then
00:44:02
I really liked. So I have, I have a quote of his
00:44:09
about about seeing himself. So that's from flowers from his
00:44:14
book. So his last book that he just
00:44:18
published, he it just came out. And so he says the final
00:44:21
renderings very like me. But unlike with a photo, I don't
00:44:25
find it paralyzingly repulsive. I find it, I find it
00:44:30
fascinatingly so. And the difference between kinds
00:44:33
of repulsion is very important to me.
00:44:36
It describes me, the double S and effigy I want to make suffer
00:44:41
in my steed. I find it liberating to be able
00:44:44
to do something about the repulsiveness rather than be
00:44:47
stalled by my being inside of myself and incapable of
00:44:51
apprehending myself. So it's really interesting
00:44:54
because he talks about this idea of being in imprisoned in your
00:44:58
own body, which I very much relate to.
00:45:01
I have a very peculiar relationship to having a body.
00:45:04
And my daughter actually has she, she kind of records
00:45:09
sentences of stupid or funny things we say.
00:45:13
And there's one of me saying like, ah, I hate the material
00:45:16
world. Why do we have to be material?
00:45:19
Like a rant of some kind that that I very regularly go on.
00:45:24
And also this idea that he talks a lot about, which is that he
00:45:28
loves not working with actors because these characters, you
00:45:34
can, he can make them suffer. They can be his victims.
00:45:37
Is he talking about an urge to want to make someone suffer that
00:45:41
he has, or is he saying that we all have this urge?
00:45:44
You're in a world where the rules are different and so like
00:45:48
making a painting, anything can happen.
00:45:51
And he says in an interview recently in Freeze, technology
00:45:55
can enable access to a different version of yourself.
00:45:58
So you can play out your fantasies, but those fantasies
00:46:02
also exist because there's this virtual world.
00:46:05
So. But.
00:46:06
So. Yeah.
00:46:06
So you skip that really quickly. And then you moved on to the
00:46:11
following room and to your, you know, increasing despair.
00:46:16
There were other films and. This room was dominant to me.
00:46:20
This room was dominated by the big empty ply box that was in
00:46:25
the centre of the room. Oh yes.
00:46:29
As you move in there, there's just this big empty void, which
00:46:33
was fascinating for me because it's a room in a room and I'm a
00:46:39
sucker for anything which is spatial architectural.
00:46:41
So I'm drawn to this and I want to know what is this?
00:46:46
Why is this here? And then you can't step into it.
00:46:51
Yeah, I read that. I, I, I walked right up to it
00:46:53
and then read on the floor. Do not touch.
00:46:57
And you're like, this is not architecture.
00:46:59
That's the limit of the exercise.
00:47:01
It's contemporary art. Exactly, and I'm trying to
00:47:04
remember the name of the artist and it's completely, completely
00:47:08
escaped me incredibly. The name of the artist.
00:47:11
T Gormley. Oh yes, a bit Gormley esque
00:47:14
because you're in the tape. You don't.
00:47:18
You don't think so. In the tape all the buildings
00:47:20
are the rooms are huge. Of course they are.
00:47:23
The ceiling is about 6 metres away from your head, and within
00:47:28
this space you've now created a smaller space that relates
00:47:33
directly to your human scale that.
00:47:35
Automatically. Where you are feeling like this
00:47:38
small entity moving through. Now you're a big thing in this.
00:47:42
I see. In this one so yeah, to me that
00:47:45
that brought me right back to OK, now I'm I'm my human scale
00:47:48
again. And that was that was my first
00:47:52
experience of that room. We're seeing this.
00:47:54
Thing that's so interesting because I've seen that piece
00:47:56
before. So this is the installation of
00:47:59
the video worm. So it's a there's a projection
00:48:02
on the other side that we'll talk about that you experience
00:48:05
as an empty room before coming in.
00:48:06
And I saw the I saw it for the first time three years ago or
00:48:10
two years ago in at cabinet, his Gallery in London.
00:48:14
And I remember not really getting it, like not, you know,
00:48:20
not the not gettedness of it. And it's funny that you on the
00:48:25
other hand, kind of go and go like, oh, I read this, I know
00:48:28
how to read this. This is what it's bringing me
00:48:30
back to my own scale. And I honestly did not get that
00:48:33
at all. That's.
00:48:34
Maybe I just got lost in the in the familiarity of it, and
00:48:37
that's my own failing, no? No, no, no, no, no, no.
00:48:41
Everything's valid as an experience.
00:48:44
Well, it's just that you didn't get lost in any point.
00:48:47
Everything is challenging is is challenging me to to understand
00:48:53
or to read into some or or to perceive something, but it's
00:48:57
work. You can't.
00:48:59
You're not just completely relaxed as you're walking
00:49:01
through your thinking and you're and you're and you're trying to
00:49:04
engage with something. And then I come into this room
00:49:07
and it's like maybe this was my my relief in that, OK, I can I
00:49:12
get this. I can.
00:49:14
It's that familiarity to it. And that's why, as soon as I saw
00:49:17
it, I thought. If you're here, you're probably
00:49:21
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perspective to the Digital Art village?
00:50:44
And then there's this. This film, old film called Voila
00:50:49
La Verite, which is which was really painted by him and he
00:50:56
hired actors to make the soundtrack, which is just
00:50:59
mastication noises and size and and, and noises like that.
00:51:05
So I was really taken by that and sat down and watched it.
00:51:10
And I think that's where he mentions Antonachto, the Theatre
00:51:14
de la Cruelty, Theatre of Cruelty, very important for
00:51:18
theatre, experimental theatre, figure of the beginning of the
00:51:23
20th century. So I was there.
00:51:25
I was kind of like going back to his references.
00:51:28
Then you're right, the empty stage.
00:51:30
So I can't remember. I know that someone said that
00:51:33
theatre is amazing, the problem of the actors.
00:51:36
And I've been trying to fight because when I was in the
00:51:39
exhibition, that's what came to mind.
00:51:42
I thought it was Alfred Jaffe, but I'm not sure who said that.
00:51:45
Or maybe it was just a friend of mine.
00:51:48
I don't. Know it's a great quote, I love
00:51:51
it. Guys out there please in the
00:51:53
comments tell me who said this. I can't find it and I know it's
00:51:57
French so it's back. It's back in my front days.
00:52:00
So some French friend told me this.
00:52:03
I've never heard it. And listen, I'm maybe now is the
00:52:06
right time to confess I have a theatre studies A level.
00:52:10
No. So maybe.
00:52:13
I should do it. You do though.
00:52:14
But here in the UK modernism didn't arrive.
00:52:17
That's my theory. And people like you and Nick are
00:52:20
very isolated. You are a modernist architect or
00:52:24
of a modernist inclination. And modernism didn't arrive
00:52:28
here. You study Shakespeare.
00:52:30
I mean, you don't study Beckett. Modernism still hasn't arrived
00:52:34
in the UK. We're still waiting.
00:52:35
I mean, it's still waiting. We, we have a very gothic
00:52:38
mindset. That's our, we have a romantic
00:52:41
gothic notion that we, that we just are, we, we can't help
00:52:46
falling back to that. And modernism, I think is a.
00:52:50
Is the gudu. It's the gudu of England.
00:52:53
It's we're still waiting. It's untrusted.
00:52:56
It's untrusted. Because it's foreign and.
00:52:59
And oh, it's German. Yeah, it's it's.
00:53:02
So we are. We are.
00:53:03
It's not of us. It's not British.
00:53:05
But why are we talking about modernism?
00:53:07
Because I was talking about the theater of Creotte and the
00:53:12
Antonachto, and I did ask myself to what extent people would
00:53:17
connect to the reference to Antonachto.
00:53:20
Because for me, it's a given. I studied in a French school.
00:53:23
I'm not sure that it would be familiar.
00:53:26
A little bit like his childhood. Who were the kids watching
00:53:29
Herzog films? I mean, to be honest, I did do
00:53:31
the same with mine. We watched the grizzly bear film
00:53:35
together. But he was watching Herzog films
00:53:40
with his parents in the 90s. No one, like no one would be
00:53:45
doing that. So he, he had a sort of a, a
00:53:48
very peculiar and unique, I think, upbringing and, and
00:53:51
education and. References.
00:53:53
They didn't have a Herzog section in Blockbuster.
00:53:57
No they they didn't have experimental film from German
00:54:04
weird dudes. The the the most you would have
00:54:07
would be David Lynch. I think that would be the the
00:54:09
most extreme. Yeah, yeah.
00:54:13
That, that would be the video that's always there.
00:54:16
You can guarantee and you could get that one out.
00:54:18
Yeah, exactly. So, yeah.
00:54:20
So I was kind of thinking that and I stopped and I looked at
00:54:23
the film and watch the film of of a film director that I didn't
00:54:27
know. And so it is a weird moment of
00:54:31
like suddenly being extracted from this very ultra
00:54:36
technological setting. And then you go into the next
00:54:40
room where there's this huge screen vertical that kind of
00:54:47
disrupts the cinema screen and just creates a line and where he
00:54:53
cuts refuse refuse into two. So usually the film is a unique
00:54:59
setting where you see the things fall and then they land on the
00:55:04
on the ground. And here you just see them fall
00:55:07
and it's as if they Pierce the floor, the real floor of the
00:55:10
Tate, and suddenly disappear into another dimension.
00:55:14
So there's this kind of fantastical, kind of a miracle
00:55:20
side to it. Yeah, yeah, this was for me.
00:55:24
This was the space before the space because I saw it, but then
00:55:29
I was so taken with what was behind it, behind the big screen
00:55:32
with the falling objects is a is a gallery space with, I'm going
00:55:38
to guess maybe 25 frames of a roughly A2 size white frames.
00:55:45
Each frame is filled with post it notes on a grid.
00:55:50
Just simple post it notes with hand drawn sketches, doodles,
00:55:54
etcetera on them. And it's 3 walls that you look
00:55:59
around and he says that these were post it notes that he was
00:56:04
that he started during the pandemic in 20/20/20 I think it
00:56:09
was. Yes, 2020.
00:56:10
He would make these little hand drawn sketches, almost as little
00:56:13
I love you notes to his daughter.
00:56:15
He'd put them in in her lunch box and then kind of slowly
00:56:20
dawned on him that these posting notes didn't really mean that
00:56:23
much to her. She wasn't aware of the real
00:56:25
value of what he's doing for her.
00:56:28
So he started to keep knowing, realising then that actually
00:56:31
they probably mean more for him than to her.
00:56:36
But I think it's kind of. So if I understand it correctly,
00:56:40
he's talking about the at that strange time when a lot of
00:56:46
people found that they had more time on their hands and and the
00:56:50
world shrank, say his world shrank down to these posting
00:56:53
notes because his work more. I don't know if his work
00:56:55
stopped, but he found he had more time and he could.
00:56:58
Some of these drawings would have taken a very long time.
00:57:01
They're not simple quick doodles of a stick man or a whatever
00:57:06
person doing these are mini pieces.
00:57:09
I love them. And you can only really do that
00:57:13
during lockdown unless, unless that was your, unless that was
00:57:17
your job to do that. I mean, I, I loved it because on
00:57:23
one level absolutely loved it on one level because of the
00:57:26
richness of the work, just the, the breadth of what he's drawing
00:57:31
and the randomness and the trying to understand where is
00:57:35
this image come from? Why is it?
00:57:38
And then realising maybe you'll never know where that came from.
00:57:41
And he may, he probably doesn't know it's a, it's a mind dump.
00:57:45
And that's what's also lovely about it is the care and
00:57:49
attention that's taken into these drawings is beautiful.
00:57:53
And it's for something as simple as a little note that you're
00:57:56
going to put in your child's lunch box.
00:58:00
And So what I, the elements of it that I really, really loved
00:58:04
and elements that I, I question. So the bits that I love is this
00:58:08
idea as a parent, because I have three children myself, where you
00:58:13
will go out of your way and, and you will go beyond what you need
00:58:20
to do for your child. And it's like a you're, you're
00:58:24
doing it for yourself, you know. So even lunches, for example, I
00:58:27
make my children's lunches still.
00:58:29
And it's like a little moment I have every morning where I get
00:58:34
to be a bit creative and do something.
00:58:37
I'm not really doing it for them.
00:58:39
I mean, I want them to enjoy the lunch, but I'm doing it because
00:58:41
this is me telling them that I love them.
00:58:44
And so I completely relate with what he's doing with the post it
00:58:47
notes in that sense. The bit I slightly question is
00:58:51
that at what point did he realise that the post it notes
00:58:57
meant more to him than to his daughter?
00:59:00
And at what point did he decide I'm going to start keeping these
00:59:04
in that little folder and and preserving them?
00:59:07
And then from that point onwards, when he is drawing his
00:59:11
post it notes is are they still the same thing or does he know
00:59:15
that he's collating something for a show?
00:59:18
That's the bit that I'm wondering about.
00:59:20
The genuine. There's an awareness and he I'm
00:59:26
sure he must know this will be great in the tape Britain in
00:59:30
five years when I have a room and I'm going to put all these
00:59:33
post it notes in a frame. I I just maybe that's the
00:59:36
cynical part of me that mean it robs it of its IT robs it of its
00:59:42
innocence because he's completely aware that yeah, I
00:59:46
mean, he's keeping them. If if he had if he had created
00:59:51
these drawings, given them to his daughter and then not known
00:59:54
what happened to them and she collected them and put them in a
00:59:57
folder. And then after however many a
01:00:00
year or whenever gave them to him and said, I kept all of
01:00:03
these by the way, they don't mean anything to me, but you may
01:00:05
as well have them. And then he.
01:00:07
Put them on display. That would that would for me,
01:00:10
that would have meant more because I think he's aware of
01:00:13
the value of these things and he's aware that.
01:00:16
So, So what I'm trying to get to is I think that in that
01:00:19
awareness, they completely stop being notes to his daughter.
01:00:24
They are now pieces for a show or pieces for himself.
01:00:29
It's funny you say that because he, I, he says that this is his
01:00:36
best piece for him. It's the best work.
01:00:41
And I wondered if it was because it was a moment where he wasn't
01:00:46
making art in my mind. I thought, oh, he liked these
01:00:50
because of course what you're drawing is always informed, but
01:00:54
you're making jokes to yourself, obviously.
01:00:56
And so he's informed by, it's still informed by the same
01:01:00
things as the other pieces in the show are.
01:01:03
I like that moment of awareness, first of all, because it's a
01:01:06
father talking about being a dad and being a good dad, which is
01:01:11
so rare in any exhibition in any film that you might watch.
01:01:17
They're like good dads or dads that just do you know something
01:01:21
for the enjoyment of it and not because their wives told them to
01:01:24
do. It's so rare that that in itself
01:01:27
is is a beautiful thing. And also it's a parent like his
01:01:31
dad and his mom who's communicating with the daughter
01:01:36
through his own passion because he loves drawing and also
01:01:44
through the passion of his parents.
01:01:46
So it's almost a generational thing that he's giving to his
01:01:48
daughter. And I think the piece is about
01:01:50
the disconnect. He said he talks about this
01:01:52
gesture as utterly devotional. That's the the expression on the
01:01:56
wall. And for me, the show then
01:01:59
shifted and it became about him as a son, as a child and as a
01:02:06
parent now, and us as the children as well, or the
01:02:10
parents. And suddenly you're playing
01:02:13
another role because you're everyone has a carer or the
01:02:17
absence of a parent. You might be a teacher.
01:02:20
He has a connection to the other generation.
01:02:22
So for me, it became about this utter devotion that you have in
01:02:30
certain moments of intense consciousness or of obligation
01:02:33
or responsibility towards others.
01:02:36
And I also saw the exhibition as his responsibility towards his
01:02:39
parents, which is a a displaced and defensible, indefensible
01:02:47
responsibility, but that he has nonetheless because there's a
01:02:51
painting of his dad in the exhibition and the next work is
01:02:56
also his mom's voice. So at this point it became too
01:03:02
much about him. I wondered.
01:03:04
My question was, I am so full of Ed Atkins's pathos, like do I
01:03:11
want to carry this person, this person's pathos as much?
01:03:16
But then, so how did you move in the?
01:03:18
Because this is the last bit of the show.
01:03:21
I guess you go from my memory. You then go into the Sky News
01:03:24
room into the. Room.
01:03:26
No, there's the film. There's a film before?
01:03:30
Or is it the Sky News? You have to walk in and then out
01:03:33
the spaces at this point, right? Yeah, yeah.
01:03:36
You go in and out of the posted space and then there's the major
01:03:39
space and then there's a feature film and I have no idea where
01:03:42
where that was and how I got there.
01:03:44
Well, I. And then there's a Sky News.
01:03:46
Trying to get out because. I me too.
01:03:50
Oh, OK, it wasn't just me. But you know what happened to me
01:03:52
in the Hissa room? OK, so I leaned onto the wall as
01:03:59
you would do when you were watching the screen.
01:04:01
And then suddenly I fall into the next room of the temporary
01:04:06
exhibition. The the so I had my sinkhole
01:04:12
moment where the door dematerialized and suddenly I
01:04:17
saw Damien Hirst sharp, which very appropriate by the way, for
01:04:20
this the theme. And then I kind of come in the
01:04:25
room again and, and being the good student only child's that I
01:04:30
am, like closing the door and kind of like not even trying to
01:04:34
understand what happened at that point.
01:04:35
Just kind of like Alice in in in Wonderland trying to not be
01:04:40
Alice and closing the door. And then I see this security
01:04:44
dude coming towards me and he just go like, did you lean on
01:04:47
the wall? I was like, yeah, I did.
01:04:49
Yeah. Oh, yeah, Yeah, I thought so.
01:04:51
And I was just like, what? There's a door that if you lean
01:04:54
on it just takes you to the other.
01:04:57
Side of the exhibition whilst watching that whilst watching
01:05:01
Hissa. What?
01:05:01
Yeah. Through a wall.
01:05:03
Yeah, that was a kind of butterflies in the stomach
01:05:07
moment. Yeah.
01:05:10
Brilliant. Tell me about the I'm really
01:05:12
curious about the end of your exhibition experience.
01:05:16
In my mind going to the show, I knew this was the thing that I
01:05:22
had in my mind. I am going to sit through two
01:05:24
hours of someone reading through an account of a diary of their
01:05:32
cancer experience. So that's not easy.
01:05:36
And I didn't, I didn't anticipate it was going to be
01:05:38
easy. So when you know that's coming
01:05:41
up, it kind of, it starts to dominate your, your mind as as
01:05:44
you're getting closer to it. So I get into the space and I
01:05:48
make sure I've got the best seat, which I think is the best
01:05:50
seat because there are three rows of sofas.
01:05:55
It's like a cinema. It's a nice, lovely big black
01:05:58
room with great acoustics, a huge screen at the front.
01:06:02
And then there are, it's like a posh cinema, 3 rows of black
01:06:06
sofas. So I of course am sitting on the
01:06:09
back row at the centre of the screen, get myself comfortable
01:06:13
and the film stops. And so the film's called Nurses
01:06:17
Come and Go, but none for me. It was produced by the Hot Wig
01:06:22
Art Foundation, and it has actors like Real.
01:06:29
Great actors as well, I love Toby Jones and Saskia Reeves.
01:06:33
Toby Jones. Yeah, both amazing.
01:06:35
I love this. So that relaxed me as well
01:06:38
because it's a, it's like your aunt and your uncle have just
01:06:42
walked in on the screen and you, you know that you're going to be
01:06:44
looked after. They're going to take care of
01:06:46
you. But they're also playing a sick
01:06:48
joke on you. I know.
01:06:51
Yeah, there is, there is that, but it yeah, yeah, there is
01:06:54
that. So I discovered it.
01:06:56
I was like, oh, there's a feature film.
01:06:58
I see the times I'm like fuck again.
01:07:01
Like I need to come 1/3 time, you know, because this was my
01:07:03
second visit and I was just like, shit, got, you know, got
01:07:08
had again. I need to come back.
01:07:10
I don't have two hours ahead of me because the film lasts for
01:07:13
two hours, right? I mean, or an hour and a half
01:07:15
for it's a feature film and it's the so it's a performative
01:07:20
piece. And that's, there's a reason why
01:07:22
it's so long. It's the actors performing for
01:07:25
six or seven or eight people, young people in front of them
01:07:29
sitting on chairs. So it's Toby Jones reading the
01:07:33
sick Diaries and Saskia Reeves in the back.
01:07:37
He just said that he creates these animations so that he
01:07:41
could do whatever he he he wants to them.
01:07:44
And now he has real actors was as if we've come to a point in
01:07:48
the technology that it's everything is so the deep fakes,
01:07:53
you know, everything is so realistic that it it there's no
01:07:58
point anymore and using that technology.
01:08:00
And so now you go to real bodies.
01:08:03
But that's yeah. But then but they're playing.
01:08:06
But they're also playing a very different role to the characters
01:08:09
in his earlier films with the with the technology, because
01:08:16
they're they're not really showing the emotion.
01:08:20
They're reading the emotion or Toby Jones is reading the
01:08:24
emotion, but it's not his emotion.
01:08:27
So he's just relaying to you and, and actually quite a it's
01:08:34
very clever because what he's saying is very moving, but he's
01:08:37
not moved. Saski Reeves is.
01:08:41
Did you see the beginning of the film?
01:08:43
No, I saw the end where they play, so there's two bits.
01:08:47
So they read The Sick Diaries and then the end is Saski Reeves
01:08:51
is actually his daughter and they perform the games that Ed
01:08:56
Atkins plays with his daughter, which is the ambulance games or
01:09:01
something. She's the nurse and he's the
01:09:03
patient. Yeah, yeah, so but at the very
01:09:06
beginning of the film you see them welcoming in the the
01:09:10
younger, the audience is very young.
01:09:12
I would say they're probably mid to late teens, maybe yes, early
01:09:15
20s, I'm not sure. But there's definitely, they are
01:09:18
the children in the room, if you like, and, and the grown-ups in
01:09:22
the room are Toby Jones and Saskia Reeves.
01:09:24
And you see them, welcome them in and it's all very polite and
01:09:27
nice. And so in that sense, you're
01:09:30
what you are. You are presented the two
01:09:34
grown-ups in the room as the host.
01:09:36
With the artifice, yeah. Exactly.
01:09:39
So they are then automatically they are the parents in my mind.
01:09:44
And so I found Saskia Reeves response to the the retelling of
01:09:50
the diary or the reading of the diary really interesting in
01:09:54
contrast to the audience, the younger audience that you're
01:09:57
watching, hearing it. Because if she is the mum, or
01:10:02
maybe she's not the mum, maybe she's just another grown up who
01:10:06
is closer to the experience just by her age and her stage in life
01:10:12
than these younger people. Listening to what becomes quite
01:10:16
a it starts off being sad, it starts off being a bit desperate
01:10:21
and then it becomes a bit more horrific.
01:10:24
At the beginning, the bits that the young audience find are
01:10:28
funny, they start to look because he's talking about poo
01:10:32
or things that are quite childish and you think like,
01:10:35
yes, OK, he's talking about, he's talking about emptying his
01:10:40
bowels or whatever. But is it I, I don't know if
01:10:44
it's funny. Maybe it's because my stage in
01:10:46
life and I'm closer to this. So I see it as as what it is,
01:10:50
whereas they see it. Maybe the whole thing that he is
01:10:53
discussing is you can see it's it's more abstract to them
01:10:58
hearing it. Whereas you see Saskia Reeves is
01:11:01
behind them. She's not facing him, she's
01:11:04
facing side on. So he's facing the people
01:11:07
listening and they are. It's like story time.
01:11:10
They're they're gazing at him. Saskia Reeves is listening, but
01:11:15
she's staring 1000 yards away, sometimes smoking a cigarette,
01:11:20
which I thought was interesting, and sometimes.
01:11:23
Because Ed Atkins smokes and eats junk food, but he talks a
01:11:28
lot about that in flowers. He has these.
01:11:30
Really disgusting habit. Yeah.
01:11:32
The Silk Cut cigarettes in the worm video is his.
01:11:37
He has these very unhealthy habits.
01:11:40
Jeanette as a film, I went in there with, I'm going to say
01:11:42
trepidation, but certainly wondering of how I'm going to do
01:11:47
this, how, how am I going to fare in this.
01:11:51
And it was remarkably, I'm not going to say easy.
01:11:56
It was remarkably possible you could do it.
01:12:00
Yeah. And it's OK.
01:12:01
And you did. By the end of it, you, you, you,
01:12:04
you went on the journey. It's, it's literally, it's just
01:12:06
a guy sitting on a chair reading diary entries from how he feels
01:12:10
every day and the treatments. And sometimes it's going into
01:12:12
details about the certain nurses that he likes or the nurses that
01:12:16
he doesn't like. So you get the, you get the
01:12:19
day-to-day sense of what he's going through.
01:12:22
And of course it gets worse and worse and worse.
01:12:25
And then they play the game. So it was and the game, I think
01:12:29
the last part of it is about maybe 20 minutes, the ambulance
01:12:32
game. OK, so there's, there's what I
01:12:34
have a huge question that I, I've not really, I haven't found
01:12:39
a suitable answer for myself, which in, in that game.
01:12:42
So the whole way through the whole retelling of the diary,
01:12:45
you're watching Toby Jones read the diary, but you're also
01:12:49
watching the audience, the camera, because again, it's
01:12:52
great editing the way that it's shot.
01:12:55
So you're watching the close-ups on the people as they're
01:12:58
responding to what they're hearing.
01:13:00
And then they play the game and it's kind of more of the same
01:13:03
thing going on, but it's an absurd piece of acting because
01:13:09
they are now children. I suppose.
01:13:11
Toby Jones is playing an older person play, pretending to be a
01:13:15
child, if that makes sense. If he's the dad.
01:13:19
There is a moment in the ambulance game where, so maybe I
01:13:26
should just briefly explain. Toby Jones is lying on the floor
01:13:29
saying what's wrong with him? He has got a problem and, and
01:13:33
Saskia Reeves, the ambulance driver, stroke medic, stroke
01:13:37
nurse, stroke doctor, surgeon, physician, whatever, is looking
01:13:41
for all these various cures for all these things that are wrong
01:13:45
with him. There is a moment where she
01:13:48
covers him because she realizes this is bleak and there's only
01:13:52
one treatment left for you. And she covers him with these
01:13:55
paper towels almost like he is deceased, He's dead.
01:14:00
In that moment when she's doing that, as the camera kind of pans
01:14:03
out, you realize the room is now empty and the younger audience
01:14:08
are no longer in their chairs. And I'm thinking, has he died?
01:14:12
Is this, is this, is this a preparation for someone for
01:14:15
burial or whatever? And she does that, all of that.
01:14:19
And then as the camera then pans back out to another view, you
01:14:22
see everyone's back in the room again.
01:14:24
So for that brief moment the room was empty and I don't know
01:14:27
why. I think it's about this missed
01:14:29
encounters in presence. You're with the person and then
01:14:35
that moment when they're not there is a moment where it's the
01:14:39
sinkhole moment, isn't it? Is that singularity where as as,
01:14:44
as because those Diaries, mind you, were read to the family.
01:14:50
So the family would read them or he would read them to the
01:14:52
family. So it wasn't like a private
01:14:54
diary. They, they were an incredible
01:14:57
family. They, they kind of could connect
01:14:59
like that. And then it's also the portrait
01:15:03
of this intergenerational impossibility of ever really
01:15:08
being on the same level. So I don't know, there's this
01:15:11
kind of disconnect and the singularity, the moment of death
01:15:14
where it's it happens to you, it's not going to happen to
01:15:16
anyone else. But it's also absurd.
01:15:18
The thing in the exhibition and, and we talked a little bit about
01:15:21
it before, but to make it quick, is that you didn't know, you
01:15:27
were a bit befuddled by people's behavior in relation to moving
01:15:32
image and the exhibition. So it's a, it's a, it's a
01:15:36
problem, I would say, where it's an issue in exhibitions because
01:15:40
when you go to the Tate, you kind of feel like, OK, I'll be
01:15:43
there one hour tops. You kind of go through the
01:15:45
rooms. Poor people, you went there and
01:15:48
then decided to have lunch together.
01:15:50
They will not because they won't, they won't have time, you
01:15:52
know. And The thing is that in
01:15:54
contemporary art, and you asked me the question, and I was
01:15:57
really surprised about that because I thought it was a given
01:16:00
you're not supposed to watch from beginning to end.
01:16:02
And it was so cute when you said, like, I was so lucky I got
01:16:05
there in the beginning of the video, which for me is not an
01:16:08
issue at all because there's this kind of tacit rule of this
01:16:12
is for you to experience, go through, come back if you want,
01:16:15
stay if you want, watch the whole thing.
01:16:17
But then I got to piano work too.
01:16:19
And I thought, this is a performance.
01:16:20
You have to watch it from beginning to end.
01:16:22
Makes no sense. So there's the intersection of
01:16:24
cinema and performance through theatre and I, I was a bit
01:16:29
annoyed when I got to the end and I was like, I don't have
01:16:32
time to watch the whole of it. And I really want to watch it
01:16:35
whole because being bored is part of it.
01:16:37
It's part of a performative piece.
01:16:39
That moment where you're kind of like and you're almost falling
01:16:42
asleep and then something wakes you up, you feel real time.
01:16:46
That's the purpose of it. And in that way, it's a very
01:16:49
traditional piece of avant-garde, you know, theatre,
01:16:55
film, Warholian, if you will, whatever.
01:16:58
And it's the second time that I'm kind of led to say in the
01:17:02
podcast, like this ticket. The same with Marina Abramovic
01:17:05
to the Royal Academy. Should be valid for three visits
01:17:10
because then you have one and then you have Sky News Life with
01:17:16
no, without sound and with no. I thought there was sound,
01:17:22
subtitles. Was there sound?
01:17:24
There was sound. Oh, there's sound, but there's
01:17:26
no subtitles. Yeah, I think that's the thing.
01:17:28
I I thought the Sky News thing was really interesting in the
01:17:33
context of you seeing it before you go into the the film about
01:17:40
the dad, the two hour film and then seeing it.
01:17:42
You have to see it again when you come out.
01:17:45
Yeah, because the very thing, the very the very thing about
01:17:49
this rolling news that never sleeps, it never stops.
01:17:53
It just goes round and round and round is this monster that will
01:17:58
never sleep. And then you go into watch this
01:18:01
film where someone dies and then you come out and the monster is
01:18:06
still there. And this idea for me, I always
01:18:09
feel that when you die, the world should stop.
01:18:13
The world should at least pause, but it never does.
01:18:16
You know, the day after you die, everything carries on as if you
01:18:19
were never here. And and that that idea for me
01:18:24
of, you know, when someone dies, for the people connected, it can
01:18:27
be the most either horrific or seismic thing in someone's life.
01:18:32
It could be a marker in, in their, in their life.
01:18:37
But for the world, it's just another day.
01:18:40
There's no, there's no mention of it.
01:18:42
There's no, it doesn't change anything.
01:18:45
And so that for me, that Sky News being where it was and the
01:18:49
way you experienced it before and after, was it just it, it
01:18:54
highlighted the things you that you already know that this thing
01:18:57
is this thing is relentless. And also the Sky News or any
01:19:04
like news channel glitches because there's a moment where
01:19:10
it either repeats, but also there's moments where you need
01:19:13
image. And that really annoys me.
01:19:15
And that's why I don't watch news.
01:19:18
Most of that I read it's you have to fill in the holes like
01:19:23
you have either to produce a completely absurd image that has
01:19:26
nothing to do with what you're talking about.
01:19:28
And then you have the the scrolling text it's underneath
01:19:31
that has nothing to do with the news.
01:19:34
And there's this glitchy body of news and that takes me to
01:19:40
something that I didn't say about Ed Atkins, which is that a
01:19:43
lot of the things that you see, he doesn't do him.
01:19:46
He's not a geek. He has people do the stuff for
01:19:49
him. So he's not committed to this
01:19:52
technology. For him, the technology is like
01:19:55
the body because the body of his dad was glitching like it was
01:19:59
all so dysfunctioning and it and and he talks about a problem he
01:20:04
has on his right hand where. He it, it spasms and so many
01:20:09
times he's like in a restaurant carrying something and the hand
01:20:12
spasms and he spills his drink all over himself.
01:20:16
And again, it's interesting that he's because it really looks
01:20:21
like something that might happen when you're playing a game,
01:20:24
those old games where suddenly a wall is no longer there or
01:20:28
suddenly you can go through the door, but you shouldn't be able
01:20:30
to or. And for him, he really talks
01:20:34
about these technologies as the interesting sort of delirium of
01:20:41
what the body can be and do, and also the and, and carrying the
01:20:45
same flaws and the same defects that you will find in a body,
01:20:50
but in a completely different context.
01:20:51
That then kind of creates a critical distance or as an
01:20:55
emotional distance or a sentimental distance.
01:20:58
But then that distance is filled with melancholia.
01:21:01
Was it a tell me? Was the exhibition an enjoyable
01:21:04
experience? Was the podcast an X-ray?
01:21:06
Will you be back? I loved it.
01:21:09
I've loved every element of that.
01:21:10
I, I think that it was a very enjoyable experience because
01:21:18
when is it not enjoyable to go to an art gallery?
01:21:21
Even the ones that you don't connect with, the whole thing is
01:21:24
still enjoyable. Surely that's why you go because
01:21:27
it's not guaranteed every time you go that you're going to love
01:21:29
what you see. So you're not going there, from
01:21:32
my experience, you're not going there to love something or to
01:21:36
you're going there to ask yourself questions.
01:21:40
So even the fact maybe the question was it enjoyable is
01:21:45
irrelevant because it's always enjoyable, I think.
01:21:49
And As for talking with you, it's a delight.
01:21:51
Always a delight. Ah, there I was fishing for that
01:21:55
one. You have to say that.
01:21:58
And while you're being recorded, I don't have the the true talk
01:22:01
behind it. But anyway, thank you so much,
01:22:03
Nick. Thank you for doing this with
01:22:05
me. It was a real pleasure.
01:22:07
And thank you, listeners, for being out there and sticking to
01:22:12
the very end. This was a very long episode and
01:22:16
yeah, well thank you. Thank you all.
01:22:18
This episode was recorded on the 12th of May of 2025.
01:22:23
My Co host was a lovely Nick Taylor and we talked about Ed
01:22:28
Atkins's exhibition which has No title, it's just his name, Ed
01:22:33
Atkins. It takes place at Pay Britain
01:22:36
and it's on until the 25th of August, so we have plenty of
01:22:41
time to visit it. The research assistant for this
01:22:45
episode was Sahej Malik, and the music is by Satan.
01:22:50
As ever, thank you so much for sticking with us.
01:22:54
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01:23:38
Bye bye.