Ed Atkins: “I Am Not an Authority on Who I Am”

I hope to make work that does not necessarily know what it is. At a certain point I became less and less interested in producing meaning—but instead a kind of uncertainty. I was always more interested in how something feels, rather than what it means.

It’s very cowardly. I think about it all the time. Why am I doing this? I really like moving people. A lot. I totally want people to be impressed. I am a big believer in style, I suppose. Stylishness, rather than an inimitable style. And manner, and eloquence. I love words, I love images—I believe in that as some kind of fact. And I guess working on my own makes my work peculiar and unjustifiable. Though I feel alone, I work very closely—if remotely—with one animator, Adam Sinclair, who deals with so much of the technical stuff. I get to “find” the animation like that. Still, it’s deeply solitary in practice.

The genius animator and filmmaker Jan Švankmajer made a very big impression on me very early on. But generally speaking I tend to look up to people who have somehow done lots of different things. Polymathic people. I adore and admire people like David Bowie or Jim O’Rourke, for example.

But I don’t want that! What I actually want is to be unrecognisable, if profoundly styled.

The lost. Something you don’t know and so its retrieval is, at least temporarily, impossible. Thinking of art as something that’s ideally not solvable, that has no end, in terms of knowledge production. The loss of this enigmatic object, which remains unknown to me, is maybe the ground on which all art is made.

Artificial intelligence strikes me as the most threatening in its profound banality. If you think of the decisions happening in the movement of capital and the movement of power and the giving over of agency slowly to the computer… It’s not Terminator, but more a slow, aimless, effortless process. The fact that I do not have to memorize information anymore, that we do not have to know what time it is because the thing knows, my phone knows. This is maybe less artificial intelligence but rather artificial agency. I would dearly love to not have to be online at all times, but it’s just a ridiculous idea, isn’t it? Why even make artificial intelligence at all? Why make life when life already exists? The crux of that desire.

There is also a destructive desire in it—a bit of a death drive. Elon Musk doesn’t talk about these things because he is genuinely concerned—he is fucking excited about it and he lies in bed like, “Yeah, the robots are coming and it’s my fault!” It’s a bit like speculating on Mary Shelley losing pregnancies and writing about a monster that’s made of dead bodies. You never know the wellspring and it has no rational, commercial, or capital reason. I can say that technology has served me very well in my work but in a really straightforwardly literal way I mistrust this whole thing.

Rich, not particularly, but successful, yes.

No. I hate nostalgia far more than I hate the idea of technology. I am completely ambivalent about what the internet, the digital, or computers really are. But I am sure it’s just about people, really. People using them badly, or whatever. I mean, I sort of marvel at my videos as well, because I don’t really know what’s going on in there, practically speaking. I think it’s probably important to find them faintly miraculous. For the animations I buy a digital “model” and customize it a bit and pose it and it looks right. Maybe it looks like me, in motion. It’s more of a discovery than it is a creation; more editing than generating.

Because I am a man and I am white and middle-class and Western. The category that need not be named. I am privilege. But I also want to be able to speak, I suppose. But being all these categories, I want to speak negatively— to undo speech as well. A gesture that sucks it back—though of course that’s impossible. I don’t want to speak for anyone else. My work should have as much emotional autobiographical feeling as I can put into it without being explicitly about me in any way. But it’s a complicated thing. I remember this first meeting I had with a museum director. She had been watching my videos, we talked and she said, “Maybe you should just shut the fuck up for 2000 years.” And I was like, “Yeah, maybe, yeah,” I mean, it’s not a bad idea at all, I kind of agree!

I hope there is a way of speaking but not affirming these categorical, hegemonic totalities. I try to make work that has a relationship to these constructions of identity and that, then, is uncomfortable. For me, at least. Even to be in a position where voice is a question of a place of authority, that’s already huge. It’s not a matter of protecting oneself or being careful or correct—it’s precisely the opposite. What is the right configuration of speech, of productivity, that is reflexive enough to break itself down. I don’t want to stop. Her question was good. What the fuck is my voice for?

Yes. I don’t like to look at myself. Because I am an ugly and fat piece of shit. I hate my body and I hate the way I look. The idea of doing these videos and animations is that you can control everything; it’s a kind of megalomania, and a corrective.

I like the idea of allowing other people to be incoherent. To not be understood. Like, that’s a right. Because in a way and so often, understanding is a kind of violence inflicted by the coherer. What does it mean if you allow yourself to not “get it”? Because often this is a point of frustration that triggers a violent response. But the frustration can also be an exquisite state, a great gift. For me, it is some kind of ultimate way to think about otherness: to first and foremost, allow the other to not cohere. People ask me questions about my work, which is great, but in the end I don’t know either. I am not an authority on why I am making the work, nor on who I am. I am seriously as incoherent to myself.

No! Naive people are. Happy people—that’s amazing. If it’s ever a pain in the ass it’s because I am not, because my sharing in that is foreclosed somehow. You can be happy sitting at home with your child playing, or drinking and chatting with someone you like, but the idea of being generally positive in the world is ridiculous. I guess I think life is very hard. More hard for some. Relatively easy for others—but still, hard. I think it’s hard to have a good time. But that’s okay, it should be.