Marc Atkins's Interstices by Rod Mengham
It is five o'clock in the afternoon, about 20 degrees east of the Greenwich meridian. The artist has used a nine inch nail to secure a photograph to the wall. Underneath this arrangement is a small metal plaque, defaced by rust. It bears an inscription ending in '--niak': almost certainly Slavonic. The sun is high in the sky, it casts a long shadow, which is paradoxically the most incised and definite element in the composition. This tendentious sundial is the archetypal photograph--a writing with light. Not by light, but by the artist, although the photograph replaces what the artist saw. His vision is always a fraction of a second out of date, does not coincide with the descent of the shutter and is never actually recorded. The shadow has moved around the nail infinitesimally. The artist has chosen the setting, has placed the elements around one photograph and within another. And the setting forms a commentary, acts as a caption to the idea behind the shot. But just as the inscription is about to name something, to capture what is always on the move, its physical obsolescence suggests the degree to which it is always a misreading. Or rather, this and every photograph is a misinterpretation, since its relationship to the artist's vision is anachronistic. The eye cannot see the difference, cannot measure the sundial's tread, cannot keep pace with the growth of rust. Photography often seems to an interrogation of space, when it is really asking questions about time.
Marc Atkins
The individual photograph I am describing works with several different temporal scales at once. It also refers to an installation of images at the Poznanski Factory in Lodz, Poland in 2001, which required the viewer to walk across a semi-derelict site, following a trail, experiencing the artworks as a sequence of events in a given period of time. The viewer was to pause wherever a nail had been driven home, in a secular version of the Stations of the Cross. The repetition of the artist's itinerary was both a convergence and a divergence, spatially and temporally, tracing the walk of a forgotten textile worker, recalling a route followed thousands of times. The artist's intervention in this scenario was a redemption of the mechanical repetitiveness embodied by the factory and its routines; and yet the gesture of redemption was incomplete, fragmentary, subject to interpretation, requiring a supplementary gesture from the viewer. This act of completion, always provisional, always superseded, would take the measure of time elapsing between the different kinds of enactment, worker's, artist's, viewer's, none of which would take priority.
Marc Atkins, Poznanski Factory
Atkins's current projects are centred on the experience of reenactment. Finished photographs are taken up and inserted into a new composition, but not in a way that restricts their effects to those of spatial arrangements. A completed artistic gesture is rendered incomplete, its meanings given a new fluidity not simply by being staged, located in new surroundings, but also by being included in a process of re-reading, instigated by the artist and modified indefinitely by a succession of viewers coming to the artwork at different moments of time. The fundamental temporal dislocation that this involves is accentuated in frame after frame. The downward glance of a nude model in a photograph whose vertical axis is made horizontal suggests a missed encounter with the initial gaze of the artist. The portrait sits in the corner of a rectangle of sunlight that has already shifted by the time it is incorporated in the new design. At the centre of the composition is an electric cable and a series of power points to be used as darkness falls, the cable leading off to a source of energy and epitomizing the act of syncopation that is at the heart of this work. Its energy derives from a moment that pre-dates the photograph, thought of as an incident in the gallery, and which post-dates its meanings, the author putting his signature to a transaction whose value will be realised arbitrarily at any given moment, depending on current rates of exchange.
Atkins is drawn especially to arteries of communication, rivers, railways, roads, paths, which vary the pace of our engagement with our surroundings. He juxtaposes the accelerations of urban life with the decelerations of its changing fabric, unavoidably subject to processes of decay and deterioration, and to a changing ratio of mutual antagonism between the inorganic and the organic: the flaking of paint and rotting of wood interacting with the spread of mould and the sprouting of weeds. Atkins pushes hard at the limits of the photograph, bringing out the enormous paradox that is represented by the notion of the cinematic 'still'. His photograph are 'stills' in the sense that they are excerpts from a larger project that is always under construction, always being remounted. They do not relate to one tempo of participation, but to several; interstitial in their reconfiguring of the place of art in the urban environment, but also, and most importantly, in the way they occupy the intervals between moments of recognition and reimagining. It is on that temporal horizon, where imagine overtakes understanding, that art discovers its true longitude, that measure of difference in which place corresponds to time.
Rod Mengham
)
)
)