Ed Atkins, Tate Britain review - hiding behind computer generated doppelgängers

The best way to experience Ed Atkins’ exhibition at Tate Britain is to start at the end by watching Nurses Come and Go, But None For Me, a film he has just completed. It lasts nearly two hours but is worth the investment since it reveals what the rest of the work tries hard to avoid openly confronting – grief.

Actor Toby Jones reads from a diary kept by Atkins’ father, Philip during the months before his death from cancer in 2009. With mordant humour, he titled it Sick Notes and, by turns, the entries are sad, funny, banal or full of pain and fury. Jones’ audience is a group of young people one of whom breaks down in uncontrollable sobbing, and I challenge you to remain dry eyed. Its visceral minimalism reminds me of Derek Jarman’s Blue 1993, in which an actor recites the possible side effects of the drugs Jarman swallows daily in a vain attempt to stave off his death from AIDs. For me, both films rank as all time greats. 

Light relief comes at the end of the film when Jones and Saskia Reeves play doctor and patient (main picture), a game devised by the artist and his young daughter Hollis. The diagnosis is “Dragon Disease” and the absurdist cure involves incantations spoken over post-it note drawings and playing cards.His father’s death coincided with Atkins’ graduation from the Slade and, he says, “suffused my life with loss”. To confront his grief directly seems to have been too painful, so he took refuge in technology – making computer generated animations and videos involving complicated motion capture and other state of the art tech to create imagery that deals only obliquely with disaster. 

Hisser 2015, for example, is a three screen video installation featuring a computer generated avatar whose face resembles the artist’s (pictured above: detail). Based on a news item about a Florida man whose house disappeared into a sink hole, the video shows the generic figure singing “I didn’t know life was so sad” and wanking alone in his bedroom before the bottom drops out of his world – literally and metaphorically. The work reminds me of the empty house in Whitechapel which, in 2005, German artist Gregor Schneider populated with a dysfunctional family; but whereas Schneider’s alienated souls were actors and one’s encounter with them was chilling, the plight of Atkins’ doppelgänger leaves one cold. The piece is emotionally inert – unless, that is, you understand it as a metaphor for the numbness of grief.

Other early pieces seem equally devoid of affect, as if all emotional content had been deliberately drained out of them. But if you have his father’s words fresh in your mind, his gouaches of rumpled sheets and pillows become suffused with the melancholy of absence and the two empty beds wired up to motors which make the duvets writhe and twitch seem wracked with the kind pain described in Sick Notes.

The Worm 2021 (bottom picture) is a video inspired by an interview that playwright Dennis Potter gave shortly before he died of cancer, in 1994, in which he tells Melvyn Bragg how it feels to know you have only weeks to live. Watching The Worm is a creepy experience. A smartly dressed young man sits alone in a television studio listening to his mother Rosemary as, over the phone, she describes the depression that led her mother to weep incessantly for no apparent reason. 

The young man’s response to her deeply personal revelations is limited mainly to “mms” and “aahs”. He is, in fact, a robotic clone, an avatar that mimics a human being while lacking any trace of humanity. In order to create this highly detailed simulacrum, Atkins was wired up during the recording session to motion capture sensors that tracked every move and flicker of his musculature.

“I began to think of high definition digital videos as corpses,” he says.“They pit a weightless digital life against the physical world of heft, craft and touch (with) failing artifice that aims to convince.” With its warmth and sincerity, ironically Rosemary’s disembodied voice represents the world of heft and touch while, despite being physically present, her son’s clone demonstrates the extreme limitations of robotics.

Rosemary’s story throws light on three earlier videos in which a computer generated man, boy and baby each cry in looped continuity while it rains cats and dogs, as though the weather reflected their unending sorrow. 

Pianowork 2 2023 (pictured above, left) makes painfully clear the distinction between the human and the digital. Atkins sits at a piano playing Jurg Frey’s Klavierstück 2. If you listen with eyes closed, the sound is full of what the artist describes as “trembling humanity”; but if you open your eyes, you see his digital double struggling to look convincing while resembling an animated waxwork as he fumbles with the piano keys. To make the recording, Atkins wore a sensor-filled lycra onesie and a head-mounted rig while holding an iphone close to his face to capture his expressions.

This excruciating video highlights another issue with which Atkins is grappling – the loss of agency. Until their role was challenged by the camera, artists had a monopoly on visual recordings of reality. And now the balance of power has shifted even further. Once we relied on the camera to faithfully record a subject in detail, but now stolen details are used by CGI to create fantastical surrogates that have no foothold in reality. 

To illustrate the discrepancy, a drawing of the shoe worn by Atkins while filming The Worm is hung next to a still showing the avatar’s footwear which reveals what the artist describes as the “pointless microscopic detail dreamt up by AI” to appear convincing. “Once the province of artists, now the technologies of realism have been taken over by corporations, dollars, industry,” he says. “Artists were supplanted by a realism (that’s) become a sales pitch of mega pixels… and ever wilder and increasing definitions (as) the quality of videos is controlled by big budgets”, which leaves the artist with what he calls “the flaked skin on top of reality”.

And as if to prove the point, he began making self-portraits from photographs that overwhelm the eye with detail to the point where they become lifeless shells. And of a series of drawings in which his head forms the body of a spider (pictured top right), he writes “Any trace of human psychology is a misrecognition on the part of the viewer.” In other words, the portraits are intentionally devoid of emotional content.But then come hundreds of drawings on post-it notes (pictured above, right) made for his daughter’s lunch box during Covid, when all other projects were on hold. Tight arsed realism is abandoned for a cartoon style reminiscent of late Philip Guston. The results – gloriously free evocations of feet, hands, fingers, faces and teeth, mountains and monsters, ghouls and ghosts and even messages declaring “I love you”. Can they be by the same artist? The constraints of Covid clearly acted as trigger, a liberation. The “deliberate impoverishment” he sought because of “wanting to speak but not knowing what to say” is replaced by an outpouring of creative glee which freed him to the point where, at last, he was able to embrace the subject that, for years, he had been alluding to without being able to face directly. 

Which brings me back to the film Nurses Come and Go, But None For Me in which Atkins finally confronts the grief of his father’s death. The journey took him 15 years, but it feels as if this is just the beginning. 

• Ed Atkins at Tate Britain until 25 August
• More visual arts reviews on theartsdesk