In recent years, contemporary art has achieved a homogeneity of spirit thanks mainly to money and global connectivity—a state of affairs that finds its highest expression in the myriad art fairs wandering the planet, as indistinguishable from each other as airports. Yet paradoxically, artists still fall into the national character of their country of origin, something I’ve noticed of U.K. artists (Damien Hirst, particularly), in ways that are often annoying. Call it rank prejudice if you’d like, but this solo outing of London artist Ed Atkins does nothing to change my mind.
But first, let me contradict myself a bit by allowing that the offerings here—three different video installations on as many floors—are impressive as spectacles. Starring computer-generated avatars voiced by Atkins, they resemble video games and involve the same sort of world-building. But unlike Halo, say, there’s no propelling narrative, just a nightmarish circularity. Disquisitions on a specifically 21st-century nihilism, the works occasionally crackle with dark humor and spooky effects but otherwise left me wanting.
Speaking of airports, their role as alienating way stations provides the metaphorical underpinning for Safe Conduct on the top floor. Three panels, each consisting of four enormous flat screens, are joined into a triangular configuration suspended overhead like an arrival/departure board. Instead of flight numbers, it displays a surreal loop of imagery that includes empty baggage carousels churning endlessly and bins trundling along a security-checkpoint conveyor belt. At a certain point, a character appearing to rot away like a zombie uses them as receptacles to discard various parts of his body. Wall-mounted speakers arrayed around the piece add to its sense of anticipation climaxing to nothingness by blaring Maurice Ravel’s Bolero.
On the level below, Ribbons, takes up the dead-end synergy of cigarettes and alcohol, depicting a skinhead portentously mumbling to himself as he drinks and smokes. One scene shows him face down on the floor as his head suddenly deflates like a punctured balloon. In Hisser, which greets visitors near the first-floor entrance, the occupant of a suffocatingly small apartment takes a long, strange trip through a personal hell: a blindingly white wasteland in which he’s seen roaming naked—one of many tormented pit stops on the way to a final POV plunge into a murky stand of water.
A poet as well as an artist, Atkins employs text in both spoken and written form. But aside from software, what really animates the proceedings is the same smug cynicism found in the work of Brit artists such as Hirst and Martin Creed, among others. Perhaps it’s a function of the vestigial hold that the class system still has over the Scepter’d Isle’s inhabitants, but after a while, self-congratulatory naughtiness and a dim view of humanity taken for dimness’s sake get old. Atkins’s sour reveries proceed from the idea that feelings are mere simulacra—an existential joke. But of course, they’re more than that. Life may be a dream, but it’s no game.