Highlights 2014 – Ed Atkins
As ever, I listened to Graham Lambkin more than anything else. In particular, an album with Jason Lescalleet called Photographs (2013). The domestic field recording/improv thing Lambkin's been honing for years, reaches an incredible pitch of intimacy and reverie here. Landmass-scaled tones arrive abruptly, simply, at a kitchen table in Folkestone at teatime; a Church of England hymn folds back and drifts off in the back of a taxi, the indicator segueing into a pensioner’s carriage clock. Loss is it’s great subject and also its material, in that the scale of the thing – temporally, sonically – encounters experience and its vital irrecuperability, celebrating the vicissitudes of memory through a kind of emphatic now that cannot be retrieved, and is all the more extraordinary because of it. That, and an insistence on the public quotidian mapped through personal document – something that Richard Dawson’s album Nothing Important (2014) shares. In fact, the two sets of musicians (Lambkin/Lescalleet and Dawson) are in many ways twinned, not least in how they stir up a profoundly political sense of British life, written into its relations, cultures and aesthetics. Both albums are so, so moving, perhaps because they’re so totally, radically apart from the rhetoric of contemporary British politics. Theirs is an affective politics that intones the pain of the government's systematic destruction of the very structures their music is formed of and through. Which, of course, is precisely the thing which provides hope, even as it eulogises its passing. Drunk on a flight back to London, I listened to the titular song from Nothing Important, and cried.
As ever, I listened to Graham Lambkin more than anything else. In particular, an album with Jason Lescalleet called Photographs (2013). The domestic field recording/improv thing Lambkin's been honing for years, reaches an incredible pitch of intimacy and reverie here. Landmass-scaled tones arrive abruptly, simply, at a kitchen table in Folkestone at teatime; a Church of England hymn folds back and drifts off in the back of a taxi, the indicator segueing into a pensioner’s carriage clock. Loss is it’s great subject and also its material, in that the scale of the thing – temporally, sonically – encounters experience and its vital irrecuperability, celebrating the vicissitudes of memory through a kind of emphatic now that cannot be retrieved, and is all the more extraordinary because of it. That, and an insistence on the public quotidian mapped through personal document – something that Richard Dawson’s album Nothing Important (2014) shares. In fact, the two sets of musicians (Lambkin/Lescalleet and Dawson) are in many ways twinned, not least in how they stir up a profoundly political sense of British life, written into its relations, cultures and aesthetics. Both albums are so, so moving, perhaps because they’re so totally, radically apart from the rhetoric of contemporary British politics. Theirs is an affective politics that intones the pain of the government's systematic destruction of the very structures their music is formed of and through. Which, of course, is precisely the thing which provides hope, even as it eulogises its passing. Drunk on a flight back to London, I listened to the titular song from Nothing Important, and cried.
Leslie Jamison’s Empathy Exams (2014) is an amazing collection of essays. It presents empathy in so many expository modes, that the book feels pretty much allegorical as a whole. Certainly its ethical demands are essential, and the life it seeks via encounter after encounter with lives on various precipices – not least the author’s own – is utterly worth following and empathising with. In a similar vein (to Jamison, but also Lambkin/Lescalleet and Dawson), I had lots of conversations with people about earnestness, autobiography and style in literary writing. I suppose loads of people did, beginning with all that fizz around Karl Ove Knausgaard, then back to Tao Lin et al. Benji by Mark Kozelek in his Sun Kil Moon guise transcended banality with the same sort of de-stylings, if made fantastically bathetic by being sung. Ben Lerner seemed part of it, though his askance realities are riddled with change, with an attention to the utopian, that makes them hopeful, even as they convincingly document a world scabbing over entirely. His most recent novel, 10.04 (2014), is wonderful. Still, those men telling the truth, albeit thinly veiled in fiction, hunting for a reset button to render all those apparently pompous excesses – style, narrative, etc. – redundant, and return us to a place before such moves seemed like demonstrations of privilege. I exaggerate. But there is something about men telling the truth that feels like a desperate attempt at re-establishing lost ground: trying to re-colonise the episteme, truth via different means. It feels suspiciously like a way to get back to something we might have been trying very hard to be rid of.
I watched lots of movies, but I want to say something about the one I particularly disliked, Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2014), because it relates to thoughts above on white men and truth, and because almost everyone else seems to think it’s some fucking amazing, groundbreaking conceptual artwork. It’s not. The fact that it was filmed over years, and that the boy grows, is held up as some extraordinary and extraordinarily serious, worthy bedrock of inexhaustible critical, structural validity; something to excuse, apparently, its defeated banality: its boring, whimsical meh. In reality, Boyhood appears to be the work of a rambling but immovable ideologue who requires stolid, structural concepts to mirror his politics, wedded as they are to unreconstructed ideas of what’s normal, how self-centred we are, how that’s basically ok, and how we might erase history and shrug at the sun. Boyhood’s lives are homogeneous in their emotional incapacity and, at most every turn, their untruth, their fiction.
Elsewhere, Jana Euler’s exhibition ‘Where the Energy Comes From’ (2014) at Kunsthalle Zürich was pretty incredible. What the paintings managed to straddle, so did the show: literal schema of a social or political concept; ingenuousness regarding the performance of that schema (the paintings performed – they are discrete protagonists); a beautiful sense of humour; and radically, totally explicit, explication, through a kind of blunt pedagogy that completely retards certain critical gropings.
