Feel its tentacular motion inside your florid gut! Writhe in RAPTURES as your cells are subjected to that peculiar rummaging! [...] The twisting, groping shoots of that Triffid word, GRISTLE, spreading out, easing into your desperate openings. Rimming them with its Stratopharia Cubencil-blue tongue, quivering, blind – a fractal degenerate of only a few of the darker colours, though each one as rich as Guatemalan chocolate – or cacao nibs, even, bitter stimulant halved like a capsule of cyanide disguised as a tooth (the initiation rite involved the dashing out of a full four teeth with a tiny geological hammer wielded by someone’s mum – the gang whooping) and swallowed as if a spot of bile: with a wince. This fractal disappointment spreads out, a patch of time-lapse mould in a forgotten petri-dish, and infects, infests your entire body, in a flash – blooming (tired) then receding, until finally coming to rest, to harden into that clot, into that ball-bearing tumour in your IN. In the meanwhile, upstairs in your brain, VISIONS! (accompaniment by Josef Van Wissem or Carl Stalling or Smegma or Evangelista or Kim Doo Soo – any or all of these rendered unrecognisable by your tuneless hum (I strike up an accompaniment on my teeth, striking them like a marimba with my thumbnail – the temptation always to go for the William Tell overture, only as rendered by Spike Jones – all belches, thigh-slaps and glottal tics).)
– Ed Atkins, A Tumour (In English), to be published on the event of Atkins's Art Now solo show at Tate Britain, London, October 2011.
Ed Atkins lives and works in London. Recent group exhibitions include Time Again at SculptureCenter, New York and Notes And Projects at Hollybush Gardens, London. He also co-organised A Dying Artist at the ICA, London and had a solo show at Cabinet Gallery, London. In October he will present a new commission for Frieze Film, which will be shown on Channel 4, and a solo presentation for Art Now at Tate Britain. In November he will collaborate on a new live event with Haroon Mirza and James Richards in Times Square, New York as part of Performa 11.
"Radio Spot For Death Mask 3" was made in January 2011 and has only been 'aired' once, at Mark Leckey's Brüderkrieg Soundsystem event at the ICA, London.
Ed Atkins