Ed Atkins

Published for British artist Ed Atkins’ (born 1982) major video/installation art commission at the New Museum in New York, this book features a selection of the artist’s critical writings and recent works. Atkins' project at the New Museum was produced in partnership with the newly reinstated Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), a series of exhibitions, residencies and programs developed by the New Museum and Nokia Bell Labs in order to foster collaborations between artists, scientists, technologists and engineers. This new incarnation of the legendary Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T) reconnects to the projects initiated in the 1960s by Bell Labs engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer, who collaborated with artists such as John Cage, Marta Minujin, Robert Rauschenberg, Stan VanDerBeek, Robert Whitman and others.

This volume assembles 200 drawings made by Berlin-based Ed Atkins (born 1982), internationally known for his video art. Drawn on Post-it notes during weekday mornings over breakfast and slipped into his daughter’s lunchbox before school, these delightful and colorful illustrations are reproduced here in their original formats.

Ranging from the playful to the graphic and even sometimes grotesque, they mirror both the absurdity and mundanity of everyday love. Some contain, simply, the words “I love you” or a quick sketch of a sunset, while others seem to treat the format as a sort of canvas, with vividly surreal scenes filling the Post-it note from corner to corner. A true artist's book, this charming volume acts as a playful testament to, and a tender snapshot of, fatherly love.

Conceived by Atkins as an artist’s book, the main body is a collage of imagery, text, and graphical elements. Ed Atkins makes videos, draws, and writes, reflexively performing the ways in which contemporary modes of representation attempt to do justice to powerfully emotional experience. Atkins’ work is at once a disturbing diagnosis of a digitally mediated present day and an absurd prophecy of things to come. It is skeptical of the promises of technology yet suggests that it is possible to salvage subjectivity, suspending a hysterical sentimentality within the desperate lives of the surrogates he creates.

This catalog accompanies the exhibition that is developed as a collaboration between Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. With new essays by the editors and by Irene Calderoni and Chiara Vecchiarelli, the book is accompanied by a scholarly timeline and an anthology that includes a selection of the artist’s unpublished writings, plus critical writings by Kirsty Bell, Melissa Gronlund, Martin Herbert, Leslie Jamison, Joe Luna, Jeff Nagy, Mike Sperlinger, and Patrick Ward, together with interviews by Katie Guggenheim, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Beatrix Ruf, and Richard Whitby.

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev is an American writer, art historian and curator. Marianna Vecellio is an art historian and curator.