Ed Atkins, Ribbons, 2014 @ Palais de Tokyo

Ed Atkins, Ribbons, 2014

British wonderboy Ed Atkins has an installation at the Palais de Tokyo that anyone who claims to keep up with the art world will need to see. At 32, Atkins has made quite an impression on those who matter with exhibitions at MoMA, a single artist show at the Serpentine’s Sackler Gallery, a solo exhibit at the Tate Modern, the ICA, Venice, and the list goes on. The impressive CV was enough to entice Irina and I to see Bastards following our visit next door to what was, by comparison, the genteel Fontana exhibition.

Ed Atkins, Ribbons, 2014

Ribbons (2014), adapted for the Palais de Tokyo, is a three channel, high definition video installation in which Atkins explores the latest language in image production. Morphing between filmed footage and digital imagery, Atkins uses everything from traditional video and cinematic strategies —blurring, lens-flares, scratches, sound and image editing — to the latest computer graphics for which he apparently does all his own coding. There’s no doubt that the technical dimension of Atkins work is inspiring. His command of the image and its multi-form production is impressive, speaking to the agility of image integration and technical literacy of his generation. Likewise the form is exciting in its reflection of the way that we receive and process visual information.

Ed Atkins, Ribbons, 2014

Irina and I, two women of a different generation, may not have been able to identify with or in the images, but both of us were convinced that Atkins’ Ribbons was more relevant and more interesting than Godard’s latest film, Adieu au Language (2014), a film we had seen the week before. Atkins, unlike Godard who claims to converse with the latest image technology, actually uses the most contemporary visual and sonic language as he moves in and out of as well as along a spectrum of digital possibilities. Atkins creates a more convincing adieu to language than Godard’s soporific dabble with 3D imaging. Words for Atkins are text messages, made visual before disappearing to be replaced by the next words or image, they are reduced to marginalia, scribbles on a body, snatches of poetry, quotations emptied of meaning, unfinished.

Ed Atkins, Ribbons, 2014

The protagonist — who seems to shift in and out of identification with Atkins is a troll, apparently. But mostly, he is obsessed with his sexuality, distractedly getting involved with those great British pastimes — getting drunk and falling over—until he is deflated, literally, through computer generated animation. The Palais de Tokyo identified the character in the three narratives, on three large discrete screens, his voice resonating through the space, as Atkins. But it isn’t, it’s an actor. Admittedly though, the identity of the actor is not important, in fact, the confusion of identity reinforces the anonymity of the artist. It might as well be Atkins, his alter ego, bellowing with pride and then deflated, defaced or effaced. He is often surrounded by pint glasses, pouring drinks, being drunk, getting high, sticking his tongue, his nose, then later, his penis through a hole, wedging himself under the table. It is all about Atkins even if he is not in the videos.

Ed Atkins, Ribbons, 2014

The sound for the exhibition was brilliant. When Bach’s St Matthew’s Passion was sung, the three voices resonated and intertwined through the sound of the three different screens. And then, at other times, we are completely surrounded by the sound when standing before the screen to which it relates, and there is no interruption of the sound from the other screens. Bach mutates into burps and farts and then Randy Newman who is, in turn, interrupted by email alerts.

If technically Atkins’ installation is brilliant, even mesmerizing, conceptually it lacks maturity. We also become aware of Atkins’ identity through the musings and convolutions of sound and image. With his obsessions of drinking, speaking, fucking, with an occasional search for reality, Ribbons comes across as the work of a young, ego-centric heterosexual artist who does not yet have the depth to allow for the resonance and profundity of those he quotes, such as Blanchot and Lacan. As captivating as it was, the irony wasn’t strong enough to convince me that this is anything but a straight boy’s glib view of the world. Atkins could develop his work in a number of different directions, and his success as an artist will depend on which of these he chooses. But for the moment, to me, he’s still a 32 year old young man with work to do. 

All Images Courtesy of the Artist

Harun Farocki, Parallel I-IV @ Thaddaeus Ropac

Harun Farocki, Parallel I-IV, 2012
Photo: Philippe Servent
Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Paris-Salzburg

In familiar Farocki fashion, Parallel I-IV exposes the mechanisms and the ideology that motivates computer-animated images, specifically those used in video games and war reconnaissance. And in typical Farocki style, a voiceover narration describes what we see in the image, telling us what we see, but more likely, what to look at. The merging of text, image, and voiceover is, consistent with his oeuvre since its beginnings in the 1970s, all about the control and manipulation of images, and as a result, how this leads to the control and manipulation of the way we think about reality.

Harun Farocki, Parallel I, 2012
Copyright Harun Farocki
Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Paris-Salzburg

When we walk into the downstairs gallery at Thadaeus Ropac, we enter a world in which we are surrounded by the four installations of Parallel. Each installation comprises two screens and before the coupled images, a bench. A speaker above each bench offers a narration of what we see in the image. While for the most part the narration —a familiar device in Farocki’s essay films — tells us what we are looking at, it is also a performance of the kind of manipulation that is discoursed about in the narration. As a virtual figure attempts and fails repeatedly to break through a road block, apparently an innocent attempt to escape the police, the narration explains that even though the road block is non-existent, being no more than an (invisible) surface appearance, its intransigence defies forward motion. Of course, the “explanation” is also a metaphorical warning. The focus on borders in Parallel II is perhaps the strongest of the four pieces. In addition to the animated figures attempting to break through barriers, we see a man on a horse in a recreated Western attempting to scale a cliff. In Parallel III nothing is a barrier: men walk through hedges and behind them no leaf is out of place. The borders are both invisible and virtual, and yet, they are always impenetrable.

Harun Farocki, Parallel II, 2012
Copyright Harun Farocki
Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Paris-Salzburg

The series also muses on —predictably—the disillusion of reality into an extreme illusion in the video images. In contrast to the virtual world, photographs are real, they are objects in the world and the voiceover convinces us that they are also representing something. Even if there is nothing behind the image, at least in the photograph, there is a piece of paper. Farocki reveals what we already know: that the virtual image is one step further away from reality because underneath the surface of water in the virtual world, there is a computer screen, which is itself an illusion. 

Harun Farocki, Parallel IV, 2012
Copyright Harun Farocki
Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Paris-Salzburg

Typical Farocki, there is not a lot to see on the four double screens, the image is cheap, not aestheticized. Because these are thinking images, they are images that ask us to think about what we see, rather than to be caught up in what we see. And yet, again characteristically Farocki, the content of what we see is vitally important, even though he exposes the manipulation that enables the images. The screens, especially Parallel III and Parallel IV are overwhelmed by fighting, confrontation, and devastation. Video games are one with representations of war, where the goal of both is to destroy the enemy which is usually a person.

Harun Farocki, Parallel II, 2012
Copyright Harun Farocki
Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Paris-Salzburg

I also enjoyed the history offered in Parallel I in which Farocki places the computer images in their own history from vertical and horizontal lines in the 1970s onwards to the emergence of the virtual image as it has developed from out of the filmic. In cinema there are two types of wind, the wind that blows and the wind of a wind machine – the real and the filmically manipulated. In the computer images, there is only one type of wind, and its constructed. Water in motion is made from dashes and dots, and it is simply that they are closer resemblances to reality, not that they are any more real. There is no connection beyond the visual resemblance to the original object. As the narration tells us, there is no longer any form of mystery to the image in its virtual manifestation; it, like the body that appears and disappears in the same moment, no longer exists. 

Harun Farocki, Parallel IV, 2012
Copyright Harun Farocki
Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Paris-Salzburg

This exhibition coincides with the single artist exhibition of Farocki’s oeuvre in the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, and is both predictably Farocki and unpredictably new. Perhaps most refreshing about Parallel (2012) is the audience: I sat in the blue chip Thaddaeus Ropac gallery in the Marais, surrounded by freshfaced, bright-eyed young men with backpacks, clutching skateboards. It was lovely to enjoy esoteric art with this audience, but I kept wondering about their responses to Farocki’s installation. Those who stayed longer than ten minutes, that is, to see the narrative of each part of Parellel in its entirety, seemed captivated enough, but did they anticipate an installation on video games would be this discursive? And I wondered if the exhibition showed them anything they didn’t already know, and haven’t already seen in a more sophisticated form in their own video gaming lives?