It was a perfect spring day. The sky was blue; the air was crisp. In the gardens the magnolias and cherry trees had sprung into uplifting blossom. It felt good to be alive. Until I reached Tate Britain.
Among our important public galleries, none today feels as unwelcoming, unhappy, mistargeted and badly run as the home of British art. It isn’t just me who feels this. The visitor numbers released two weeks ago were disastrous for both the London Tates, but especially for Tate Britain. While the British Museum was once again attracting record crowds, the mausoleum on Millbank was attracting telling absences. No one wants to go there. Why?
Because being hit by a bin lorry is more fun, frankly. Pretty much every museum decision made here in recent years has been unhelpful. Identity politics have run amok. The Turner prize, once such a reliable source of action and amusement, has been ruined by directorial tinkering. Instead of being proud to be British, the Millbank Tate appears ashamed. Above all, the art here feels cajoled and directed rather than hopeful and free. And no one goes to a gallery to be lectured.
Back at my spring morning, I managed quickly to add a couple of fresh negatives to the list. The Duveen Galleries, the looming canyon of stone that runs down the centre of the building, was scarily empty. They may be between displays, I get that, but to leave the central space feeling this unwanted and bare is bad management. The Tate’s stores are packed with exciting sculpture that would look marvellous here. Or build a temporary wall and hang Stanley Spencer’s huge Cookham masterpiece The Resurrection. Before it was removed for reasons of political identity, it was a big draw. So much potential. So little imagination.
As if all that were not bad enough already, the event that has now arrived in the Tate’s airiest exhibition space is soul-stompingly, hope-crushingly bleak. Forget waterboarding or removing fingernails: if you really want to torture an enemy send them to the Ed Atkins show.
Atkins was a computer and video nerd who was the subject of big gallery attention in the 2010s. Since then he has slipped largely from sight and moved, I read, to Copenhagen, where some sort of debilitating attack of Scandinavian anxiety has left him immune to happiness.
His show begins and ends with cancer. The first thing we see is a blank white quilt on which have been transferred the final thoughts of the artist’s father, a cancer sufferer who died in 2009. The dad left a diary and some of its words have apparently been appended to the white quilt, although I poked my nose as close as I could and discerned nothing. Emptiness is one of Atkins’s aims. With the blank white quilt he achieves it.
The next big piece in this grim journey is a computer-generated mock-up of a bedroom in Florida inhabited by a sweaty avatar of Atkins himself. The captions tell us that the room is based on somewhere real that fell into a sinkhole in the middle of the night. The body of its inhabitant was never found. “I wanted him to apologise and to be punished, to suffer,” Atkins explains in the accompanying wall text. “It was around this time that I started calling the characters in my videos ‘surrogates’ or ‘emotional crash-test dummies’.”
Before he falls down the sudden sinkhole, the sweaty computer-generated Atkins surrogate has time to tell us he is sad and wants to cry, and to masturbate furtively by the side of his bed. And then, bang.
The most ambitious of the bleakeries that follow features a set of towering clothes racks packed with crudely sewn costumes from a Berlin theatre — hundreds and hundreds of them, hanging in the dark, moth-eaten and unwanted. Squeezed between the costumes, different versions of the computer-generated Atkins surrogate, including a sobbing baby, gather by a piano to play tedious single-note harmonies or sit in a field while it rains.
To be fair, just about discernible in this fog of negativity is the glimmer of something that might be nihilistic humour: the final screeches of a happy skeleton. You see it most clearly in a video piece in which a crowd of Mr and Mrs Ordinaries, and their offspring, gather in the centre of a white emptiness only to be blown up by a random explosion and fall down another sudden sinkhole. The seemingly endless cast list that rolls across the film — it says it stars Mark Wahlberg and Stanley Tucci! — takes the mickey out of disaster-movie cast lists and their spectacularly long pointlessness.
The show’s finale is a two-hour “drama” in which Toby Jones (Mr Bates vs the Post Office) and Saskia Reeves (Slow Horses) act out the cancer diary of Atkins’s dad in minute detail in front of a glum cast of Goggleboxers. I can see why the artist wanted to make it: it’s a tribute to his dad. What’s missing is any convincing aesthetic reason why the rest of us should sit there in the dark for two hours watching it.
As a final insult, there’s also a selection of Post-it Notes made by the artist for his daughter during Covid. Every day he would draw her a new one. In the explanatory texts Atkins calls it “the best thing I’ve ever made”.
Hand-drawn. From the heart. Inventive. Full of love. It’s completely different from everything else in the show.
Ed Atkins is at Tate Britain, London, to Aug 25