Is Ed Atkins an Artist for Our Time, or a Symptom of It?

Is Ed Atkins an Artist for Our Time, or a Symptom of It?

Atkins’s work is emblematic of a tension in our culture’s current view of what it means to be human Sometimes artists are diagnosticians of their time, sometimes they are symptoms of it. Over 15 years, Ed Atkins’s videos have offered an acute, often painful manifestation of how the human body, and the human subject it contains, has become a site of uncertainty – a question, or a problem. Atkins’s work is emblematic of a tension in our culture’s …