Supersaturation and Cool Obsolescence: On Warm, Warm, Warm Spring Mouths by Ed Atkins

Sarah Hardie, published in Line Magazine, 2013

I don’t want to hear any news on the radio about the weather on the weekend. Talk about that.

Once upon a time a couple of people were alive who were friends of mine.

The weathers, the weathers they lived in! Christ, the sun on those Saturdays.

Ed Atkins speaks Gilbert Sorrentino’s (1929–2006) lines from The Morning Roundup, 1971, as a spoken chorus in his new film, Warm, Warm, Warm Spring Mouths, 2013 – or rather the computer-generated body/ (non)person/ puppet-protagonist of Atkins’s film speaks Sorrentino’s words. There he sits, alternatively at the bottom of the ocean, in pink non-space, in dark non-space and in torture room white-space surrounded by his incessantly waving hair, which grows on and on despite his ostensible death (his life at the bottom of the sea).

One of the London art-scene’s brightest stars, with a solo exhibition at MOMA PS1 in January of this year, and a highly acclaimed must-see show at Chisenhale Gallery at the end of 2012 Atkins’s Jerwood/Film and Video Umbrella Awards Commission lived up to the excitement and expectation it was met with earlier in 2013. His video work deals with questions of love, life and death and how they are represented, and to a certain extent induced by the digital. His film, Us Dead Talk Love, 2012, was presented as a double-screen video projection, showing a severed head speaking of the retrieval of an eyelash and the loss of love across the darkened gallery at the Chisenhale. This work was made, in Atkins’s words, in ‘an attempt to retrieve a life’. ‘I wanted to ask…’ becomes something of the protagonist-head’s leitmotif – full of remorse at the impossibility of speaking what was once imperative. This now dead imperative, its total haunting irresolution, like the head, survives on and on, speaking of the compulsion to love as a destructive Freudian repetitive compulsion, caught so encompassingly in the dead head’s final lines:

Come-to-bed and fucking die:/Add light to some small pink star// Come-to-bed and fucking die:/ Add light to some small pink star// Come-to-bed and fucking die:/ Add light to some small pink star…

Atkins’s newest work, Warm, Warm, Warm Spring Mouths can be understood like Us Dead Talk Love, to be about ‘intimacy and its melancholic impossibility’, but it goes beyond this theme to explore the fruits of the collapse of the past, present and future which have been enacted upon the subject, effected by and expressed through the digital and language.

Three types of vocalisation of text are at play in this film: the computer-generated subject sitting in a space of ‘total deprivation’ at the bottom of the sea ‘swollen with the same name over and over: the name of the only person that ever really mattered’ speaks a monologue (much like the severed head of Us Dead Talk Love). We also see silent text subtitles and hear a voiceover, which sounds as deep and unfathomable as the ocean in which the lonely character perpetually sits. These latter two forms of vocalisation are ‘thrown’ versions of the protagonist’s monologue, fragmented and ventriloquised on and across the screen. This poetry is the crux of the work, and ventriloquism an important concept explored in a number of ways within it. Much of the writing around Atkins’s work prefers to speak of the medium used to convey his ideas. The content and medium are inextricable, however, and while the former may stray into the ‘taboo’ grounds of affect, it is an integral part of the work and should be acknowledged.

At a talk at the Chisenhale Gallery accompanying Us Dead Talk Love the final question put to Atkins by a member of the audience did just this: ‘Why are you showing us your cadavers?’: an ‘I wanted to ask…’ moment unexpectedly resolved. Using what are clearly personal or vicarious experiences of love and loss, Atkins and many other artists are working within a daring field of extreme personal truth, which was taboo in the field of high art until recently. With the current rise in critical discourse around the themes of love and loss and the increase in the felt freedom of the artist in terms of subject matter and medium (with Tracey Emin’s and Sharron Hayes’s prolific use of the word, ‘I’, for example) the critical possibilities of affect have been opened up.

Atkins’s answer to this imperative question mentioned ‘an approach to an essentializing view’, saying, ‘a lot of it is backwards treading’. He removes the ‘I’, the named lover, and any other particularity, in order to cast his net wide to those who could identify with the work. Beginning in ‘I’, or ‘you’, through language and the digital the work follows a boomerang-like trajectory, going wide from ‘you’, in order to find ‘you’ more successfully in an audience member (allowed to identify through the adopted essentialising view).

The artist, using his own or others’ real experiences of love or loss – which are, of course, also inextricably linked to the digital today, with the likes of Facebook asking its users ‘what’s on your mind’ – furthers a collapse of the past, present, and future in work which is conceived inside a person, a body (which has a history, and a present), tied to an existence in the digital (which sustains the past on a life-support machine). Social media keeps all social interactions alive, particularly those which would have dwindled and died naturally if information which affects the body weren’t so constantly present, more than that, actively impressed upon us, in the digital realm. The digital offers immortality at a cost: an incessant, dry, aging computer-hum of a life is all it can provide. Perhaps this is what Atkins speaks of in his lines on our unreadiness for the world we live in, and its unreadiness for us (in this painful computer-drone life our existence in the digital realm and in searching for an impossible future has brought us to).

‘And no provision has been made for the casual life in casual, freshly-laundered bedclothes; trousers dropped to excessively conceal the ankles.

And pain exists in the concave. And pain exists in the convex.// This one goes out and comes back:// I don’t want to hear any news of the weather on the weekend…’

The boomerang-trajectory is again in play: the life-support machine that is the digital incessantly forcing us to remember those who naturally might have ‘died’ (been forgotten) taking us back to the beginning (on a superficial level). Sorrentino’s words take on new meaning in the digital age where one can only feel the futility of future predictions when one is unable to move beyond the past. Predictions will not change anything: they will not bring ‘the only one who ever really mattered’ back, they will only eliminate them further in actively not-remembering. Atkins using Sorrentino’s poetry voices a particular disappointment in the future in WWWSM: a disappointment that the future will not revive the past, something it might be said the digital leads us to expect.

Like the digital, which has no beginning and no end, the film loops. Working out where it ostensibly might ‘begin’, its first lines are incredibly apt in expressing life-support existence: ‘Experience is both thrust into supersaturation and completely, coolly obsoleted’. In the incessant overload of information, infinitely retained in the digital, which returns us to the beginning, there is resuscitation and simultaneous quiet euthanasia occurring at all times. The sea-dweller, on a constant quest to be ‘HERE’ (neither in the past which lives dead inside him and the digital, nor the future, which his drive to fill with love causes so much anguish in realisation of its impossibility), is not drowning in water as he dreams of life on land, but in memories. Those memories the digital has kept alive:

And I’d lie beneath this erased planetarium – the only celestial body, the sun, appeased, buttered under there – me buzzing from a fill of dry sherry, dry white wine. Pickling in the HERE.

And shooting fiery, Martian scotch poured from crystal decanters into crystal tumblers.

The scrape and fit of sanded glass stoppers; the facets of the crystal throwing slivers of light, ventriloquising the sun’s baritone in an elegant soprano:

I don’t want to hear any news on the radio about the weather on the weekend. Talk about that.

Once upon a time a couple of people were alive who were friends of mine.

The weathers, the weathers they lived in! Christ, the sun on those Saturdays.

The future is irrelevant when one is stuck in the past. The work seems to say - very aptly via the medium of dissemination’s ‘computer-hum’ – that supersaturation (the infinite retention of memory) is coolly drowning him into obsolescence. Activating this moment Atkins’s work dreams of our quest for the here and now, the time when the boomerang does not come back, finally caught by the other: a baritone ventriloquised in an elegant soprano.

Published in Line Magazine, 2013. All rights reserved.

Between 2010 and 2014, Line Magazine was a quarterly international art publication, providing a platform for emerging artists, writers, critics and academics in the visual arts field. It was founded by Rachael Cloughton and Thomas Carlile, edited by Rachael Cloughton, designed by Thomas Carlile, and editorially assisted by Kathryn Lloyd, who was also a contributing writer. Each edition focused on a theme, which was selected by a guest co-editor and discussed throughout the publication. Line also produced an annual 'special edition' for the Edinburgh Art Festival, which Sarah Hardie and Kamila Kocialkowska, also contributing writers, co-edited in 2011. The magazine was supported by a programme of events as well as projects compiled by members of the Line collective.