The Atkins we meet in Flower is ready to turn himself inside out: to parade his appetites, innermost thoughts, unchecked unhealthy tendencies
Language is at the heart of Ed Atkins’s CGI-powered videos, performances and occasional plays, so it’s not surprising that he’s also produced three books of his writing in the last nine years, switching format each time. Following A Primer for Cadavers (2016), which collected various writings from 2010 onwards, and Old Food (2019), a hypertactile fictional grande bouffe centred on grotesque bodily gratifications, Flower is billed by its publisher as ‘his first work of non-fiction’. The same blurb, though, also describes the 96-page book as ‘treating personal truth as unavailable’, and ‘taking cues from confessional literature, his daughter’s improvised games, poor internet writing and shitty AI’. Its innards are subject to corruption, which seems appropriate given that this is how Atkins, at length here, purports to describe his own.
Like his films’ garrulous digital avatars, the Ed Atkins we meet in Flower is ready to turn himself inside out: to parade his appetites, innermost thoughts, unchecked unhealthy tendencies. The book begins, as if following on from Old Food, with a connoisseurly paean to substandard wraps sold in pharmacies, which ‘look like these spent prophylactic alien larvae props… the damp folded ends are hidden in the cardboard bottom like its genitals’. With the insalubrious tone set, Atkins (or ‘Atkins’) decants other downmarket likes: premixed cans of hooch, relentless vaping or else smoking Silk Cuts, ultra-processed meats (‘indexed human technology’), certain painkiller brands. He gives in to his corporeal wants, rationalising that ‘I’m trapped in my body’, and his impulses rush him past self-control and punctuation: ‘I caught myself at the fridge with a mouthful of bright yellow leftover curry, fake beer and vape at 11am I’m a maniac [sic].’ He has twitches
and (self-diagnosed) ADHD, which he combats by using several screens at once while drinking and vaping. He has a skin condition, says he’s fat, cultivates his cough; healthwise, he crosses his fingers, avoiding doctors or dentists. ‘I hope I look unwell and sound unwell but am not unwell… I don’t want to die but I won’t do anything ordinary about slowing it.’
Elsewhere, Atkins checks off other character flaws: his manipulativeness, wonky charisma and inability to finish sentences, his refusal to help himself or answer his phone, his scattershot reading and petty thieving from supermarkets. If you’re familiar with Atkins’s art practice, you might be at least halfway persuaded of the narrator’s sincerity by how he talks about, say, wearing motion-capture apparatus, and by more confessional-feeling declarations: ‘Most of the time I hide how important the things I make are to me’; ‘I don’t like collaborations between science and art though I have benefited from the sham of it’. He writes persuasively about how making ‘dead men’ – nonliving, computer-generated figures – might allow for a proxied confrontation with death. That’s using technology against itself, since the great foil of Atkins’s art is digitality and its remove from the texture of real life; this book, dankly glorying in the inescapable bodies we steer roughly around while not being in control of our consciousnesses either, is another reaffirmation of physicality, however terrorising, in a long line of them.
At the same time, Flower, whose unparagraphed outpouring makes one, after a point, begin to read the title as ‘Flow-er’, is punctuated by moments of its narrator tabulating quiet domestic details with his partner and children, and continually suggests a life actually lived rather than numbly drifted through, with an albeit perilous acceptance of one’s many blemishes. ‘I am often full of joy,’ the author writes on the last page, before returning to the body one more time, trying to remember the cause of a scar and remembering his mother (presumably accidentally) stabbing him with a garden fork. ‘It was hard’, he concludes – as if already beyond the veil, beyond mind and body – ‘but I had an amazing time.’ Whoever said that, you’re briefly happy for him.
Flower by Ed Atkins. Fitzcarraldo Editions, £12.99 (softcover)
From the April 2025 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
