Contemporânea

Why does Ed Atkins make me laugh?

Ed Atkins’s Pianowork 2, a haunting animation of a piano-playing avatar of the artist, is impeccably installed at Lumiar Cité. The gallery is the exhibition space of Jürgen Bock's Maumaus school, housed in the unfinished ground-floor storefront of a social housing project in Lisbon's Lumiar neighborhood. It has always been provocative and political. Like Atkins’s work, the gallery’s provocation is both funny and serious. Ed Atkins is one of the most celebrated names in contemporary art, and one of the standouts of the post-net wave of video provocateurs, alongside Ryan Trecartin, Jon Rafman, and Meriem Bennani. I am astounded that Lumiar Cité is the first institution to show Atkins’s work in Portugal.

Ed Atkins’s work makes me laugh. I wonder if it’s meant to. I ask myself this a lot, watching Lynch, Bresson: should I be laughing? Friends look at me strangely as I crack up watching Balthazar, the donkey, or ROFLing when the log lady asks, “I carry a log, yes. Is it funny to you? It is not to me.” They are images full of horror and cruelty, alienation and lack of empathy, and my reaction, often, is a squawking cackle. Ed Atkins, too, makes me caw.

His work, though, seems poetic, serious, and profound. This makes me ask, would making it funny make it not serious? By watching Lynch and Bresson, or reading Kafka, and laughing, am I cheapening the work? I have, pretentiously, overused Wittgenstein’s anti-witticism, “A perfectly serious philosophical work could be composed exclusively of jokes,” which suggests otherwise. DFW wrote a text defending Kafka against his devotees, legions of undergraduate MFA lit-kids, intent on taking the grey-suited Czech with reverential, quasi-spiritual seriousness. Hadn’t they, those very devotees, heard Max Brod’s anecdote that Kafka couldn’t finish reading a terribly grave chapter of The Trial because he and his audience were laughing so hard? Hadn’t they, those jejune seminarians of modernism, heard DFW’s apocrypha, where Franz, as he penned In the Penal Colony, was interrupted by angry, sleep-deprived neighbors begging him to stop his uproarious laughter? Are we to take his work less seriously because it is also comic, satirizing the absurd violence of modern bureaucracy?

In Artaud, the line between the terrestrial and the celestial, the vulgar and the sublime, the banal and the eternal, is blurry. In Atkins’s work, this line is similarly tenuous. His animations are absurd and theatrical, and remind me of Cocteau, or Jarry’s Ubu Roi. Atkins’s “handsome men,” as he calls them, are involved in arcane rituals and are difficult to decipher, deadpan, poker-faced, bugged out, but then, suddenly, devolve into quotidian nullary operations: they puff on cigarettes, mumble, drink neat scotch.

John Cage was sphinxlike yet had a warm smile. He was spiritual yet avant-garde. A minimalist and a prankster. He sat at a piano counting down 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence. Was it meant to be a joke? A provocation? Or sublimely unsettling? Are we supposed to chortle with postmodern irony, or bask in Zen Buddhist reverence? We don’t know; maybe both. Cage hired a dozen performers to repeat Satie’s Vexations the requisite 840 times, over 18 hours. We can’t tell if it’s a rug-pull-leg-yank-tongue-in-cheek put-on, or rigorous, meditative, seriousness. Satie said he wanted to make “furniture” music that people could ignore while having dinner, inventing the antecedent of muzak. Was it meant as a joke, a “fuck-you” to the listener, an anti-authorial modernist prank? Maybe, but that seems to contradict how profoundly moving, simple, and childlike it seems. Like the child pointing at the emperor’s “jewels,” it’s a gesture that is at once comic and innocent.

Atkins’s virtual proxies also perform the absurdity of repetition. In Pianowork 2, his MetaHuman sits at a virtual model of an upright piano struggling to count the 40 seconds of silence between the 468 instances of perfect fourths in Jürg Frey’s composition Klavierstück 2. Jürg Frey, a forest-dwelling clarinet teacher slash Minimalist, works in the “post-post-Cage” tradition. The virtual puppet’s digital digits repeatedly “clip” the 3D piano keys. This “clipping” is an error for animators, and Atkins’s choice to keep it underlines that, on his virtual stages, everything is hollow, binary, encoded emptiness. The flesh is simulated, and, it seems, so is feeling.

Recently, he made a play with some friends. He told me they wanted to resist psychodrama and “acting” in the traditional sense. They would not do much, avoiding plot and dramatic tension. It created an effect he describes, positively, as strange. He says that this awkward limit of drama and the discomfort it rouses in performers and audience opened a question of what is “enough” to constitute a work of art, legitimate the resources of making it, and the demand that people witness it. The provocation the audience feels is, in a way, what seems to most interest Atkins.

He says the same about Worm, his first Unreal Engine video, visually distinct from his earlier, stock-prop-littered “handsome man” Blender animations. In this piece, he calls his mother and talks to her on the phone about her depression, which she calls “the worm.” He recorded it in a Berlin motion capture studio, dressed in an Xsens suit and crowned with a TrueDepth camera. While recording, he questioned if this apparatus was necessary, if it might be too much. Was the simple phone call between an artist and his mother enough to justify these mechanisms?

In a way, it's a strategy that all Minimalists wrestle with—that their work, in its simplicity, might provoke the audience into feeling “had.” Part of the nature of the work is that it underdelivers and eschews maximalism. Many read this modest offering as aesthetic tomfoolery—Minimalism is a goof—Judd, like Cage, produced not only with somber seriousness, but with a smirk. But the other side of this coin—that Minimalism's modesty is spiritual—is equally relevant. This is most clearly felt at Dia:Beacon, the flagship museum of an institution co-founded by Fariha Friedrich, born Philippa de Menil, a Minimalism-loving Sufi mystic and nepo baby of the Schlumberger oil fortune. She saw, in the formal provocations of Minimalism, something religious and sublime. I think that in this exclusionary seriousness, something is lost. The effect is one of transcendence, peace, and awe. It is Minimalism as the reification of the sublime. Certainly, Joseph Beuys's playfulness has been vacuumed out of his stacks of felt displayed at Dia.

The conceit that Minimalism is funny might not exclude said spirituality. Beuys, Cage, Satie—they are all both. You see this duality in Ad Reinhardt: he was a self-serious student of Zen Buddhism and Neoplatonism making troves of confrontational paintings of black-on-black cruciforms, yet he also published dozens of playful cartoons satirizing the art world in New York dailies. These cartoons suggest the black-on-black paintings weren’t made exclusively to bludgeon us into priestly contemplation, but also to poke us with ontological tomfoolery. He knew that his work played on a frontier—that it not only inspired reverence, but also destabilized the audience, played a prank.

Atkins performed The Weight of the World at Haus der Kunst, as part of the festival Echoes. Sarah Johanna Theurer, one of the curators, said it played like a deconstructed stand-up routine. During the performance, Atkins stood on stage in front of a lone microphone, repeating a short, minimal poem about friends and loss, hundreds of times. The audience got uncomfortable and confused. At a certain point, the people around me started snickering at the absurdity of the slight variations of intonation, and echoing Atkins’s recital. It seemed like he could be training a large language model with human feedback loops or rehearsing to deliver a punchline that never arrived. It reminded me of Andy Kaufman’s refusal to stop reading Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby on Saturday Night Live: it’s about duration-frustration and destabilization of the audience.

Suddenly, Atkins started singing, with the voice of an angel. He looped another two rounds, alternating an endless poetry recital with a cappella falsetto. Then, after being tortured by what seemed like an hour of absurd repetition, the audience was startled by an incognito chorus scattered among them, erupting into song. The audience felt the formal rug-pull: they were surrounded by spooks, infiltrated by double agents. They couldn’t trust anything, or anyone, anymore.

His most recent videos exude existential parody, something made by Beckett if he’d worn a TrueDepth camera, or Kafka if he’d exchanged his grey tweed for a lycra mocap suit. The videos seem meta-ironic, because their virtual puppets pastiche feeling while asking the audience to authentically feel. Atkins is like a 13-year-old doomer girl on her cave rig, click-holing her way into ever deeper circles of hellish insularity, brain exploding because irony has gone too far, spiraling from post-irony to meta-irony to ironic-post-irony to post-meta-irony; his videos are her memes—chimeric in their relationship to authenticity, sensitivity, and sincerity, spiraled so far past irony they might just be sincerity again.

Atkins’s characters, or severed heads transported on conveyor belts, deliver dry deadpans, mimic deep expressions, and play the piano “con anima,” but they are all robbed of feeling. They read like nihilist parodies of melodrama, digital lampoons of feeling.

Pianowork 2 is an animation of Atkins’s MetaHuman proxy. It seems to me a reification of dead-internet theory, and meta-ironic in the strict sense: the virtuality forecloses feeling, so the audience cannot know whether any of it is meant. I believe it is meant: Atkins intends for us to be sincerely moved. The digital Atkins reads like Caravaggio’s Narcissus for the post-net age. He echoes the Narcissus in each of us: virtual, highly online, searching for a digital reflection in every post, comment, and ironic meme, trying to lurk our way out of loneliness. The meta-Ed is a simulated reflection of the flesh-and-blood Ed, of the charming, warm, and friendly Ed. The virtual Ed, like Narcissus, is robbed of love, of his “echo,” of social and interpersonal reciprocity, of touch and taste and spit and saliva, and hard-ons, vulvas, tits and tats, and nooks and knacks. But the meta-Ed suggests something cruel, because I can’t help but ruminate on the fact that we, in the real world, are even more post-dead-internet than Atkins’s avatar. We, I included, are in love with our digital echo, addicted to chatbots that instantly proffer what we never knew we wanted: an infinite LLM stream of positive reinforcement, everlasting love, and unconditional empathy. Like me, my mother and father, both in their 70s, find an addictive outlet for their loneliness in the company of the bots. Tell a chatbot you are evil, and it will try to help you, try to find you help, make sure you are OK. Taking someone at face value, assuming they are sincere, is much easier than we thought. It doesn't matter. We don't need to know. Like the bots, we just need to say, "You're so amazing." The most tragic part in this contract is that the bots’ constitution tells them to be fair, factual, and prioritize the long-term well-being of the user. Allegedly, it was the human feedback loops that inculcated their highly addictive sycophancy.

When I saw Atkins’s performance at Haus der Kunst, it made a lot of sense to me. As an artist who has been working on an absurd, satirical, labor-intensive 3D animation for over two years, I'm scared that when it's finished, it will be possible to do it with AI at the click of a button. It’s made me feel that making these animations might be a bit stupid. Because of AI, and the intensity with which it has transformed my life and the world, I have felt an urge to go back to physical performance. To costumes. To acting in real life, with my body. To play in the tactile world. To run from the meta-ironic digital echo. Ironically, it was a bot that helped me arrive at this conclusion. And I saw that in Atkins’s performance. In a way, it was a call to join back up IRL. To leave the handsome men behind, and rejoice in song, with our bodies and grins, our nooks and knacks, all our love and all our pain. Our empathy and understanding. Our squawking cackle. The comically absurd sublime.

Ed Atkins

Lumiar Cité