Ed Atkins
Auteur de A Primer for Cadavers
Œuvres de Ed Atkins
A Tumour (In English) 1 exemplaire
Sorcerer 1 exemplaire
Étiqueté
Partage des connaissances
Membres
Critiques
A quote from Georges Bataille on the first page sets a tone and expectation for this work that frames Atkins' perspective and establishes his attitude. Now, I'm willing to take an artistic vision on its own terms but here, what I thought was a run up to Bataille's charge at establishment values was maybe just excusing the absence of narrative as "the accursed share." Perhaps this is what Atkins was alluding to in an interview at Berliner Festspiel when he says, describing Old Food, "...and I suppose, as ever, with so much of my work, it's kind of about what's not there - is never there - in these digital videos: is real people and real bodies."
So much for literature, the preeminent lens...
While Atkins suggests he is interested in figurations of lyrical grammar what resulted in Old Food are more like the words of insubstantial nutritional value described at the back end of the poem - near meaningless utterances without a congruent trajectory. It sounds pretty aloud but Bruno Schulz this is not. There is no warmth. No life. No generosity. No hope. There are no people.
So while this piece might be intellectually provocative it didn't strike me as very profound. Sure, riffing on the abstract outlines of sentence structure and Lacanian signifiers using a title as an origin and organizing motif is sort of cool... but why though? The Aristocrats joke does a similar thing with its title and content and I have to say it is more effectively meaningful than this. Our preeminent lens, in case he hasn't noticed, tends to ask AND answer questions. So as far as depositing a work of art into a context that might act as a unifying springboard, I think Old Food needed more rigor.
In his own words:
"Like so much of it, it has that kind of - that thrill of a kind of unpacking something into a metaphoric, you know, meaning."
No, Ed, I don't know, but it's good to hear you enjoyed yourself.
Here's my hot take: scrap this printing and reissue the piece as a full color oversized cookbook. Hannah's Recipes. Charge $5,000 per copy.… (plus d'informations)
So much for literature, the preeminent lens...
While Atkins suggests he is interested in figurations of lyrical grammar what resulted in Old Food are more like the words of insubstantial nutritional value described at the back end of the poem - near meaningless utterances without a congruent trajectory. It sounds pretty aloud but Bruno Schulz this is not. There is no warmth. No life. No generosity. No hope. There are no people.
So while this piece might be intellectually provocative it didn't strike me as very profound. Sure, riffing on the abstract outlines of sentence structure and Lacanian signifiers using a title as an origin and organizing motif is sort of cool... but why though? The Aristocrats joke does a similar thing with its title and content and I have to say it is more effectively meaningful than this. Our preeminent lens, in case he hasn't noticed, tends to ask AND answer questions. So as far as depositing a work of art into a context that might act as a unifying springboard, I think Old Food needed more rigor.
In his own words:
"Like so much of it, it has that kind of - that thrill of a kind of unpacking something into a metaphoric, you know, meaning."
No, Ed, I don't know, but it's good to hear you enjoyed yourself.
Here's my hot take: scrap this printing and reissue the piece as a full color oversized cookbook. Hannah's Recipes. Charge $5,000 per copy.… (plus d'informations)
A quote from Georges Bataille on the first page sets a tone and expectation for this work that frames Atkins' perspective and establishes his attitude. Now, I'm willing to take an artistic vision on its own terms but here, what I thought was a run up to Bataille's charge at establishment values was maybe just excusing the absence of narrative as "the accursed share." Perhaps this is what Atkins was alluding to in an interview at Berliner Festspiel when he says, describing Old Food, "...and I suppose, as ever, with so much of my work, it's kind of about what's not there - is never there - in these digital videos: is real people and real bodies."
So much for literature, the preeminent lens...
While Atkins suggests he is interested in figurations of lyrical grammar what resulted in Old Food are more like the words of insubstantial nutritional value described at the back end of the poem - near meaningless utterances without a congruent trajectory. It sounds pretty aloud but Bruno Schulz this is not. There is no warmth. No life. No generosity. No hope. There are no people.
So while this piece might be intellectually provocative it didn't strike me as very profound. Sure, riffing on the abstract outlines of sentence structure and Lacanian signifiers using a title as an origin and organizing motif is sort of cool... but why though? The Aristocrats joke does a similar thing with its title and content and I have to say it is more effectively meaningful than this. Our preeminent lens, in case he hasn't noticed, tends to ask AND answer questions. So as far as depositing a work of art into a context that might act as a unifying springboard, I think Old Food needed more rigor.
In his own words:
"Like so much of it, it has that kind of - that thrill of a kind of unpacking something into a metaphoric, you know, meaning."
No, Ed, I don't know, but it's good to hear you enjoyed yourself.
Here's my hot take: scrap this printing and reissue the piece as a full color oversized cookbook. Hannah's Recipes. Charge $5,000 per copy.… (plus d'informations)
So much for literature, the preeminent lens...
While Atkins suggests he is interested in figurations of lyrical grammar what resulted in Old Food are more like the words of insubstantial nutritional value described at the back end of the poem - near meaningless utterances without a congruent trajectory. It sounds pretty aloud but Bruno Schulz this is not. There is no warmth. No life. No generosity. No hope. There are no people.
So while this piece might be intellectually provocative it didn't strike me as very profound. Sure, riffing on the abstract outlines of sentence structure and Lacanian signifiers using a title as an origin and organizing motif is sort of cool... but why though? The Aristocrats joke does a similar thing with its title and content and I have to say it is more effectively meaningful than this. Our preeminent lens, in case he hasn't noticed, tends to ask AND answer questions. So as far as depositing a work of art into a context that might act as a unifying springboard, I think Old Food needed more rigor.
In his own words:
"Like so much of it, it has that kind of - that thrill of a kind of unpacking something into a metaphoric, you know, meaning."
No, Ed, I don't know, but it's good to hear you enjoyed yourself.
Here's my hot take: scrap this printing and reissue the piece as a full color oversized cookbook. Hannah's Recipes. Charge $5,000 per copy.… (plus d'informations)
Atkins’s name means much more to me now than it did this time last year, since I saw one of his video installations, ‘Ribbons’, at Kiasma in Helsinki, when I was in Finland for the Worldcon last August. I’m a big fan of video installations, and Atkins’s was one of the two in the museum I thought really good. So I was quite pleased to have a copy of his book. It’s a collection of… I’m not entirely sure what they are. Stream-of-consciousness pieces, I suppose. Neither poetry nor prose, but having some characteristics of both. One or two, I think, maybe the scripts from his video installations – they certainly share titles, such as ‘Warm, Warm, Warm Spring Mouths’. Much of the writing is visceral, as in, er, about viscera, detailed narratives about parts of the body – one is more or less an annotated list of parts of the brain as mapped by Korbinian Brodmann (isn’t that a great first name?). Most of the pieces are peppered with cultural references – there’s a plot summary of the film Sphere in one of them. I’m not sure if I liked or enjoyed A Primer for Cadavers, as it’s not the sort of book you can like or enjoy. Bits of it are extremely well-done, and a good deal of the writing is very clever. I guess that, like video installations cross over that line between cinema and art into art, so this book crosses over a similar line between literature and art into art. I’d already planned to keep an eye open for Atkins’s work when I visit modern art museums in the future, and after reading A Primer for Cadavers I’m even more keen to do so.… (plus d'informations)
Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 7
- Membres
- 50
- Popularité
- #316,248
- Évaluation
- 2.9
- Critiques
- 4
- ISBN
- 13
- Langues
- 2
My Review: Listen, from *ME*, three and a half stars is like a goddam rave review. I really, really dislike being condescended to; poets are, of necessity, self-referential and therefore can't avoid a certain amount of "what do you mean, what do I mean by that?" It's irritating as all get-out to me. I feel about it the way I suspect not-very-bright people feel about being forced to read The Classics. THEN there's the unrelenting Englishness of the poem! I mean, don't read a tree book of this, my fellow Murrikinz, you gonna NEED that Wikipedia/dictionary function A LOT.
Not so much, then, on the pleasure reading scale. "Druft" and "galantines" and so on and so forth, well, yes it's titled "Old Food" but good lord! Brand-name junk foods, exotic to Colonials preparations of things we don't eat that much of, and just flat gross mental pictures you can't unsee:
But sticking with it, keeping the pace of reading, pays off in a very strange way for the uncultured oafs like me: Bend your brain a little. Crank the handle again, spread the jalousie just a fraction more than before, and the weird, unlyrical pleasure of the writing will catch you.
Might catch you. Could catch you. Let it catch you.
And did anyone who's read a significant portion of my over seven hundred forty blogged reviews, over eighteen hundred total reviews, ever expect to hear me say that?… (plus d'informations)