A century after Freud gave us his account of the uncanny and Dada presented the figure of the “traumatic mime,” the British artist Ed Atkins recuperates these themes on the stage of contemporary art. His is a remedial (and re-mediated) reckoning with the subjective abjection produced by capitalism, circumscribed by language and — here’s the putative new — impoverished by the polygonal prisons of figurative computer rendering. Seen in this light, the artist’s meteoric rise is not surprising. The work is superficially engrossing and critically open-ended, crowd-pleasing in its engagement with the curatorial hobbyhorse that is digital representation. It also helps that Atkins is an adept and eloquent discussant of his work. Speaking to Artforum about his widely exhibited three-channel video “Ribbons,” 2014, Atkins remarked, “And of course, the protagonist would have to be Dave, a white, straight, Western man: the protagonist of capitalism. Dave is pathetic and repulsive but also deeply, wrenchingly empathetic. He should be recognizable to most people who’ll see the show.”This kind of late-capitalist sob story has its limits, and Atkins’s current project, at the Kitchen in Manhattan, “Performance Capture,” seeks to expand his monologic routine. Originally commissioned for the 2015 Manchester International Festival, the work is an exercise in iterative digital recording: The titular technology, borrowed from Hollywood and video games, is used to record and incorporate repeated live performances of a poetic script, authored by Atkins, into single-channel computer-generated video. Readers of the script are transformed into digital avatars, which are combined in various configurations to depict the artist’s familiar white male avatar against a gray background, ruddy-skinned head and gesticulating arms moving with the benefit of real-life inputs. The work’s analog avatars (readers) thus speak through and animate a newly prismatic “protagonist of capitalism.” Although the script acknowledges the logistical heft of this conceit (“This shit costs an absolute fortune / And we are merely sponsees. / Usually this shit is the sole prevail of Hollywood”), the premise of “Performance Capture” struggles to exceed its weight.In other words, Atkins’s feel-good punchline for this project, “that there is an irrecuperable aspect to mortal, incorporated life — things about us that cannot be reproduced, used, essentialized,” is more than obvious, an old modernist saw. It is also superseded by the ways in which power operates on top of and in concert with this layer of digital mediation, a violence about which Atkins’s avatars, however reanimated, have little to say. Compare the monolithic existentialism that emerges in “Performance Capture” with, for example, the fractured communality expressed by the YAMS Collective’s “The Wayblack Machine,” 2014. What for Atkins still feels like a formal problem, and a relatively uninteresting one at that, is examined more comprehensively, and with greater urgency, by the YAMS. The regular performances of Atkins’s work scheduled throughout the exhibition’s run at the Kitchen may collapse the literal and conceptual distance of pure computer-generated video and even extract a kind of sentimental humanism from the endeavor, but the result does little to advance all but the most simplistic critique of contemporary conditions of figuration.“Performance Capture” is at the Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, New York, from April 13 through May 14. For information: thekitchen.org
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