Ed Atkins @ The Encyclopedic Palace, Venice Biennale
The Trick Brain takes as its starting point a section of archival footage filmed in Andre Breton's Parisian home following his death in 1966. Cluttered with Oceanic sculptures and African masks, co-mingling with early 20th century paintings the footage becomes a filmic grave; a final glimpse of Breton's eclectic trove before it becomes scattered amongst the global art market. Ed Atkins' film muses on this loss, describing simultaneously the symbolic death of art objects via commodification and the actual, physical death of human subjects, expiring as mere rotting cadavers. With comically gory intent, he describes with detail the weight and feel of flesh and presumes a recurring interest with the human digestive system and its stinking conclusion of human excrement.
The strength of The Trick Brain relies on Atkins' vivid script. Its narrator flips erratically between arcane, esoteric speech, and moments of nauseating crudeness, at one point comparing the brain's neural-network to an arrangement of convoluting sausages, or imagining it glimpsed, “through a gaping trepanation of amniotic marmalade.” Refusing to commit to a single historical moment, the narrator subverts sections of dense, archaic language through violent 21st century ruptures, “as a gorgeous portentous burlesque of your fucking desktop,” while lines such as “you are standing in a fucking bedroom” mark a darkly humorous note through their vernacular British delivery.
Within the context of Massimiliano Gioni's The Encyclopedic Palace exhibition in the Arsenale, The Trick Brain is a well chosen work. In line with with Gioni's curatorial statement, it reflects on the symbolic representation of knowledge embodied physically through Breton's collection and its eventual compression and dispersion digitally via CD-ROM. If other works in the Biennale could be seen to address similar issues (Duncan Campbell's It for Others comes to mind), The Trick Brain stands out for its impressive audacity and cruel humour.