E.T. Phone Home Front
Summer exhibitions are usually dull, low effort offerings. The recent fortnight-long exhibition of Terry Atkinson's Artists' Books at Schiefe Zähne in Berlin was a welcome exception to the rule—a summer show that was phoned-in and not-at-all dull. In this review, I will discuss what was interesting about the show, what the books reveal about the English artist's broader practice, and how that practice relates to an idea of realism.
First, a note on the informality of the display. It featured eighteen unique books spanning 1989 to 2020, alongside a couple of paintings from 1983 and 1993. There was no strict thematic correlation between the books (which, incidentally, weren't for sale) and the paintings (which were)—the link was practical, the show an opportunity that arose from the gallery's storage of stuff from three past exhibitions: (1) The books were included in a survey of Atkinson's 'American Civil War' works at Stadtgalerie Bern in 2023, similarly set up on a tabletop for perusal by white gloved readers. (2) The smaller of the two paintings was Informer-directed Helicopter Hunt on a Starry Night—Near Belfast (1983), a close-up of a pointing hand from the arm down, spotlit, with three more helicoptic beams scattered amongst darkened fields in the background. This acrylic work was brought to Berlin by Schiefe Zähne for their Atkinson survey last year, but ultimately not hung. (3) The other wall work was a monumental brownish polystyrene slab with a single word, 'Signature,' in white enamel cursive on its face—or in its face, since the paint had corroded the foam. Whiteline Signature on Dark Red Polystyrene (1993) was left out of the April exhibition of Atkinson's Signature Works at rubbish bin (the space I run with artist Alex Vivian) on Warschauer Strasse, because it didn't fit through the door.
The Schiefe show was thus less a curated show than a partial re-curation of three former shows. This was no problem; the pictures seemed current, even urgent, and most of the books hadn't been seen outside the Bern survey. The show was well-attended, moreover, by a Berlin audience grateful for the opportunity to pore over more than 700 pages of Atkinson. The now-86-year-old artist's fanbase has mushroomed during the last decade. Since a 2014 survey at Yale Union in Portland, Oregon, his first institutional exhibition in the U.S., Atkinson has had a slew of exhibitions and publications with spaces including Galleria Six (Milan) and Josey (Cologne, formerly Norwich). Artists' Books was part of this general upsurge.
Sans narrative or explanation, the show prioritised individual pieces over the cohesiveness of their grouping. The eponymous objects were filled store-bought books—most with black or clear covers, some stapled, some ring-, others glue-bound, ranging in size between A3 and A5. All covers were decorated with text, some with images. The books were usually treated as akin to scrapbooks, with drawings in pencil, pen, crayon, marker, as well as photocopies. Their contents varied wildly; consider for example the second of the History Books (1989):
'Cézanne's apple in a bunker in Baghdad' (glove, bunker, ball within rectangular border); 'I wish for red!' (sickly man, face half-covered in spots, peering to his left at a red square); 'Triumph of spots' (pencil spots and marker stains); numerous 'Homages' and 'Anti-homages to Warhol' (degraded copies of the electric chair and dollar bill screenprints); 'Nest' (two diagrams of a 3D structure with planks crisscrossing an open box, one surrounded by a fence); ideas for Greasers, Atkinson's sculptures that use semi-solid lubricant, including a 'Grease-plaque' diagram with 'STAIN' written in grease on a rectangular tablet, arrows indicating the direction of staining towards all edges; one 'Grease-sculpture,' 1987, is annotated 'semantic engine (Dennett)'; another has the dedication 'maybe for Denny,' possibly another reference to the American philosopher Daniel Dennett; snippets of historical images of an 'Arm,' 'Tyre,' and 'Tibbets' (pilot of the Enola Gay aeroplane that dropped the Little Boy atomic bomb on Hiroshima), 'Tinian' (B29 bomber plane at airfield); 'Goya's black' (silhouette of helicopter); duplicated textbook page 'Atypical cells in the white pulp of spleen from a fifteen-year-old boy exposes to the atomic bomb 1,000 meters from the hypocenter; he died on 1l August 1945' with corresponding photograph; 'No. 1751374006234' (grey, pink, yellow, and green spots); 'Reading the Nazi hangman' (holiday snap of Amber, the artist's young daughter standing at gallows of Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp); cropped redux of 'The noose and Amber'; 'Shadowland' (noose-daughter motif redrawn in silhouette); nightmarish portrait of man 'Eating soft paper'; portraits of 'E.T.'s cousins'; tiny 'gold flag' in gold; 'Bonnie in gold biro' written in said biro; 'Speak' (close-up of nose and open mouth); 'Listen' (an ear); 'Special effects by the homunculus in the photocopier' (darkened copy of a tree partially obscured by a liqueous substance); 'Two piles of Semtex in Northumberland' (bare landscape with two forms resembling haystacks); 'The crew of Enola Gay' and 'Chaplain William Downey, who composed a special prayer for the atomic mission'; Goya-inspired pages: 'Mr Goya-Hat,' 'Fragment from some dead Goya,' 'Is it Goya?,' 'Which culture?' (a Caprichos-like head); 'Back of head of girl looking left'; streak of 'Red'; titled 'illuminated manuscript—goodbye!,' the last page festively greets the reader: 'Hello Motherfucker' (a riff on the line 'Goodbye motherfuckers!' from the 1986 Vietnam War movie Platoon?).
Hollywood and Spanish Romanticism, special effects and real violence, tourist snaps and Semtex, Baghdad and Cézanne—History Book B was a schizophrenic mix, but one with flows and repetitions typical of Atkinson: Enola Gay, World War II, E.T., his family, Warhol's chair, grease, and Goya (a lot of Goya). These motifs ran throughout an exhibition flooded above all with images of modern warfare. Most books agglomerated multiple wars—the aforementioned History Book for instance alluded to Iraq, Hiroshima, Natzweiler-Struthof, and Vietnam. Others focused monographically on a single conflict—the room sheet referenced two consequential battles of WWII (Stalingrad, Berlin), the Korean War, Spanish Civil War, and the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Of these monographs the most straightforwardly structured was Figures from a consuming event of my early childhood (2) (2006–07), a modest volume of graphite sketches, put down with minimal fuss, of WWII.
The looseness of certain 'semi-thematic' books was seen in Goddammerung and Berlin (2015–16). The last half portrayed the Battle of Berlin of 1945—preceding that section, though, was a semiotic mishmash that began with the first word of the title, seemingly a portmanteau of Wagner's Götterdämmerung (1876) and the English curse 'God damn,' and continued into the amateurish studies 'sorta Michelangelo' and 'Not even sorta Cranach?,' Drew Gilpin Faust (historian of American Civil War), the Epimenides paradox, some Bertrand Russell, lo-res repros of the artist's Trotsky Postcards paintings, more on the Civil War, E.T. with three Caprichos, Mark Mazower on Nazi looting, T.J. Clark on art and the afterlife, and so on.[1] The chaos bled into the subsequent twenty-eight Berlin pencil drawings (the so-called Führerdammerung) of, among other things, a relieved Soviet tanker, a flat tyre, a trench, a blizzard, an SS helmet pierced by a bayonet, a blackbird gliding near aircraft, and Keitel signing the surrender. Even within that section, a gang of 'Goyaesques' compromised the historical veracity of other representations. More outrageous yet were two drawings of E.T. in front of the Siegessäule of Tierpark: 'E.T. and its identical twin at the Soviet Victory in Berlin 1945,' the other featuring a lone E.T. against the same backdrop, 'April 2045 at the Centenary of the Soviet Victory.'
Atkinson captioned the twin E.T.s as 'time travellers,' a term that he has subsequently elaborated elsewhere. In the 2019 essay 'From One Civil War to Another—Time Travellers to the Cold War,' the artist discusses his integration of figures such as E.T., Yoda, and Caprichos into historical scenarios, a tactic he initially tried in History Book A (1988) then revived in more complex, multi-figure ensembles in the American Civil War works of the mid-2010s. He gives a multipronged justification for the device. By sourcing figures both from the history of fine art (Goya, David) and sci-fi blockbusters (Lucas, Spielberg), Atkinson argues, his work (1) underscores the historical continuousness of the practice of art itself, and (2) registers the impact of celluloid and digital technologies upon how we 're-read our past(s) and imagine our futures' (the latter, paradoxically, through the ancient mediums of drawing and painting).[2] (3) The deployment of time travellers is also, he explains, meant to complicate 'the excessive claims of progress now uncritically inscribed into the concept of the avant-garde.' Rather than revelling in progressivist optimism, the works are tinged with the melancholia of fragments and ruins—'these are works that dwell in retrospect,' he writes. Not in the sense of nostalgic longing for the good old days, because he isn't usually eyewitness to the events he portrays, many of which in any case unfolded before his birth—Atkinson's visions are typically (mal-)formations of images culled from books, magazines, newspapers, television, and films. His retrospective mode is thus detached, akin to an historian or archivist sorting through the stuff of recent history, or an anthropologist seeking to crack the codes of a lifeworld that appears familiar and alien in equal measure.
A couple more remarks on the time traveller. Its artificial imposition underscores the artificiality of the whole. Commingling things of disparate origins, the pictures are temporally scrambled, anachronic; they resist linear historicism and historical spectacularisation. Atkinson's mode of artistic remembrance generates dissonances unamenable to grand monument-building. Insofar as the extraterrestrial spoils the documentary plausibility of historical scenes, it elicits a second take, a shudder of misrecognition that precedes a suspicious kind of looking.
E.T., in the final instance, stands in for Atkinson himself—a visitor to the worlds he reports on—metonymising the artist's alienesque subjectivity within the pictorial field. This subjectivity (back to past tense) suffused the weird mix of collages, history drawings, ads, cartoons, visual essays, theories, realisms, pointillisms, studies, plans, landscapes, homemade info graphics, and sketchpad doodles accumulated in the books at Schiefe. A full gamut of representational forms and techniques were let loose on a similarly heterogenous array of subjects. Corpses were scribbled, trenches modelled, Hendrix diagrammed, pilots bordered, Velázquez shaded, nightmares crayoned, heads stippled. Gore rendered. Family snapshots doubled as death camp records. Nursery school letters spelt treatise on atomic theory. E.T.'s cousin was exhumed as a Capricho with radiation sickness.
In lieu of a consistent style was a steady deployment of the caption. But again, how Atkinson utilised writing was far from consistent—in terms of both style and text-image relation. The captions described and contextualised, as in 'Soviet Trooper, Near Rostov, Ukraine, November 1941' or 'Head of Panzer Grenadier 1943.' Yet instances such as these, in which factual text was subservient to image, were rare. There was a deluge of tensions, contradictions, and discontinuities between vision and language, knowledge and perception, what we see and what we know. Through a Blakean interplay of image and text, text and image, Atkinson's work presented itself to the reader-viewer as both an interpretation and as something that needs to be interpreted.
Oftentimes the captions went beyond the image. They enacted inverted anthropomorphisms (surnames of modern artists and physicists labelled as regions of the human heart, flesh made proper name), alluded to non- or invisible properties of a depicted object ('A Soviet tanker realises he's survived!'), and scripted uncanny juxtapositions ('Why? A Goya goblin pleads for a reason as to why a giant E.T. has been beheaded'). Atkinson's probing of the limits of representation was tinged with bleak comedy. 'Unidentified flying object with protruding identifiable intestine,' went the line beneath a picture of a semi-abstract lump. A person with a bag on their head was captioned '"I can't see a thing!"' Was the line uttered by the bag-headed person? Or did it reflect the frustrated observation of a virtual spectator, whose view of the man's face was obfuscated by the bag? The illusionism of a picture titled 'Look at me Eye-Tassel face!' was deliberately ambiguous: either blood was gushing out of the man's eye onto his chest, or the crimson liquid was a hanging piece of material. It was Atkinson's grisly redux of the duck-rabbit illusion. Visual paradoxes and double entendres piled up like shell casings. 'Scarred clubber,' a head-and-shoulders portrait of a pockmarked, hatted man, was at once a hardened soldier and a fiend outside a Leeds nightclub. Meanwhile, the multicoloured letters of Visualising Zilch (2009) spelt a text about the science behind the atomic bomb and the limits of language, image, and representation—the childish illustration at odds with the black box quality of war technology.
A few books followed makeshift naming systems. In Stalingrad: An aide-memoire almost entirely before memory (2014–15), the tags 'Sovietnik,' 'Aryan,' 'Passage,' and 'Trophy' accompanied depictions of Soviets, Germans, passageways, and miscellaneous goods. Images were at times generated by linguistic or numerical inputs ('45 Caprichosheads'; the numeral '0' alongside 'nothing, nought, zero'). Visual tautologies abounded. 'NET' pencilled over a strip of mesh tape, 'Flag' on a red flag; coloured drawings of signatures were precursors to the 1992–93 Signature paintings, a gloriously beaten-up representative of which loomed over the tabletop display. (A satisfying aspect of paging through the books was noticing motifs that Atkinson later worked up into larger drawings and paintings.) In cursive script Atkinson contrived a host of aliases. Terry Enola Gay looped across the cover of Distorted Protocols of Reading (1993) and reappeared twice within its pages; Distorted Protocols of Reading 2 (1994) had two autographs by 'Teresa Dog,' a 'View drawn by Teresa Dog,' and a fold-out page of three signatures: Terry Agent, Terry Actor, Terry Dog.
A painter's signature typically serves the sub-aesthetic functions of identifying the painter, and boosts the value of their work. Atkinson's signatures are fake and therefore verify nothing; they are marks of inauthenticity. In another sense, they are authentic pseudonymous constructions. Codes were common in Art & Language, the Coventry conceptual art group that Atkinson co-founded in 1968 and exclusively worked with until 1974. Terry A&L was his appointed name in the group's Index projects of the early '70s. Around that time, a hierarchy was solidifying within A&L: once a semi-organised art-theory collective, it became a 'Caucus' led by Michael Baldwin. Atkinson has compared this emergent dynamic to a warehouse in which a 'foreman' issues instructions to the 'entranced shopfloor.' This changed situation resulted in Atkinson's exclusion from core group decision-making and increasing social isolation, a situation that worsened due to his personal differences with art historian and in-house editor Charles Harrison. Atkinson's calls to terminate the group were repeatedly ignored. He eventually quit. 'The juridical and legal status of who was and who wasn't entitled to use the name A&L provided some doleful ironies for me to ponder,' he later observed.[3]
The naming of A&L members mandated their allegiance to the group and its organisational structure. It is understandable then that Atkinson, as part of his efforts to gain social and artistic independence from A&L around 1974, invented an alter-ego: 'Rimbaud-me.' Although he never published or signed any works by that name, he assumed the character as he worked in the studio, keeping himself company, as it were, and finding encouragement in the young man's hallucinatory poetics, which must have seemed worlds away from so-called Analytic Art. The name permitted the internal projection of a decentred individualism—'Je est un autre,' the poet famously claimed. If Rimbaldian self-talk was Atkinson's way of deprogramming the toxic communalism of A&L, in his signed paintings of the early '90s, signed tautologies ('Signature,' 'Signed') and pseudonyms ('Terry Dog' et al.) probed the art market's fetishisation of the autographic trace of the painter. Fake signatures theatricalised the category of authenticity itself.
More than one third of the books at Schiefe—the four History Books (1988–9) and Gazette trilogy (2009–20)—were undisguised compilations of preparatory studies, without narrative or theme. These books stood out as sites of archival organisation and presentation, oeuvre construction. While not strictly diaristic, they were nevertheless intimate documents that offered a candid view of Atkinson's forms and processes. Connectedly, many of the books were autobiographically inflected. In the preface to Korea: an aide-memoire to early teenage (2011), Atkinson observed the chronological overlap between his coal miner father's workplace injury, illness, and death in 1950–51, and the onset of the Korean War. The book collated drawings, collages, photocopies, and graphics, along with three texts variously dealing with Varga's opinion of the Marshall Plan, the U.S.'s 1953 plans to bomb Korea, and the inseparability in the artist's mind of the war and the traumatic loss of his father. The sequence of pages immediately following the last text epitomised Atkinson's comingling of autobiography and history: a mind-map that interspersed names and places related to the war with those personally significant to the adolescent artist in South Yorkshire, then printouts of 'Frank Roosevelt, a full blooded Navajo Indian. Killed in action, 1952'; 'A view of Chinese held positions in the Khumwa Valley front line'; two images of 'B29s unloading'; 'The Jack Benny Show in Korea, 1953'; and the 'Tsar Bomba.'
The Spanish Civil War (2) (2009) featured studies of Velázquez, Goya, Picasso, and Miró, and cheap copies of propaganda posters and black-and-white photographs, bookended by two longish commentaries, inkjet-printed in 8-point Times New Roman. In the first, Atkinson explained why the Spanish Civil War—a watershed for English left-wing politics and for artists in particular—has remained an 'ebullient motif in [his] historical and political imagination.' He recalled conversations with his father in the late 1940s, and his subsequent discovery of Noam Chomsky's writing, on that topic and others, in 1968. The second commentary opened with a discussion of the politics of Picasso's Guernica and war art. Atkinson went on to speculate that war art has mainly been produced by artists with no military affiliation, then finally probed his involvement in two wars of his lifetime:
In this passage Atkinson locates himself in proximity to two of the military conflicts depicted in his work. The problem of his ambient involvement in such events is intriguing; but what about the relation of the art to the worlds that it represents? On one hand, Atkinson's work evinces a commitment to the realist idea that the artist ought to represent or respond to their conditions; on the other, his work seems utterly remote from its objects. The seeming contradiction cannot only be explained by the biographical fact that Atkinson is, contra his statement above, historically and geographically removed from much of what he depicts—it's an aesthetic effect of the work. It comes through the books' gallows humour, as well as Atkinson's fixation on soldiers, combat, and weaponry, the drawing and labelling of which proceeds impervious to the horror of war. As indexes of their maker's unusual tastes and habits, the books at times bear a resemblance to outsider art or bedroom art. Star Wars fan art? The books' detachment from the worlds they represent owes most of all to Atkinson's extensive pictorial and literary estrangement of his sources, the estranged bits and pieces then compiled in a method akin to bricolage. Walter Benjamin wrote extensively, if elliptically, about this method as it pertains to the materialist historian, likening their treatment of the leftovers of the past to the nineteenth-century ragpicker scavenging the landscapes of industrial modernity. In this way, Benjamin argues in a well-picked-over passage of his unfinished Arcades Project (1927–1940), the historian's aim is to construct a so-called 'dialectical image':
The dialectical image's collision of past and present, according to Benjamin, momentarily stalls the linear unfolding of History, thereby making room for historical fragments and temporalities that permit a counterview of modernity. The concept is apt for understanding the rattling-together of traces and illustrations and symbols of disparate events and geographies in Atkinson's books, which, moreover, refuse chronological structuring for an esoteric, non-linear portrayal of their objects. Given this, it is unsurprising that Atkinson, who was among the first generation of Anglophone artists to read the German critic in translation, once claimed to have a 'close interest' in Benjamin and has referenced him regularly in his own writings.[5] That said, elements of his thought are ostensibly at odds with Benjamin's messianism—his interest in avowed atheist Dennett, for example, or his debt to logical empiricism. Goddammerung had several excerpts of Russell, with whose work he has engaged repeatedly throughout his long career.[6] The dry reasoning and high academic style of Visualising Zilch, meanwhile, revealed a broad debt to analytic philosophy. Atkinson's work tends to avoid religion and mysticism, but his espousal of Marxism since the mid-1970s implies a commitment to an emancipatory ideal of art, which implies, in turn, that his restless reworking of what-has-been harbours (like Benjamin) a circuitous futurity.
One wonders, however, whether Benjamin's dialectical image is still even conceivable in the wake of postmodernity. With the perceived dispersal of World History into a plurality of local temporalities, minor histories, and ancient ways of being, the ideology of progress fundamental to the Western Enlightenment has slowed or broken down. If the teleological unfolding of History has indeed ceased, it follows that the notion of 'dialectics at a standstill' has expired with it—for there would be no forward movement to arrest. Meanwhile, the postmodernist theory of simulation—images without referents proliferating as pure surface—has concretised in digital information networks awash with 24/7 news, fake news, deep fakes, clickbait, AI models, conspiracy theories, industry plants, etc. There is no truth, only versions of it groomed to whatever user's agenda (in Trump's Department of Defense War, Enola Gay no longer exists, because the aeroplane's name contains the word 'Gay').[7] Presumably, the omnipresence of simulacra further endangers the apparition of the dialectical image.
These doubts about the dialectical image bear on the show under review. Eclectic and unreliable, Atkinson's bookwork refracts the temporal and visual profusion of present-day culture. This could mean that the work is more symptomatic than truly critical. Inescapably, his books are products of their age. But he's not making throwaway memes. To read the books as dumbly compliant with the culture industry is to fail to perceive the ways that, just as Atkinson's work distances itself from the worlds it represents, it also pulls away from our own world, our own time. This is realised in the events illustrated, most fading or faded from living memory, and the humble scrapbook itself, a form that eschews the precision, instantaneity, and automation of cutting-edge image technologies. Computers were used by Atkinson, but mainly for composing and printing text—limitedly, in other words, and in an analogue fashion (the printouts cut and pasted into the books by hand). The unpretentiousness of the process was apparent to the reader scanning through the rippled, sometimes loose pages (the books exuded old-fashioned materiality). The last prong of Atkinson's critical untimeliness, the basis of his anti-spectacular, anti-conspiratorial treatment of History, is his commitment to fact, logic, and evidence-based research. History is a sci-fi dystopia that uncannily resembles our own world. But the Gulf War did take place. The Holocaust did take place. E.T. did not...
Atkinson's work thus turns endlessly on the problem of its own veracity. His objects shift and mutate into warped versions of objects, the what-has-been reclothed. One page features a customised line from Russell's 1905 essay 'On Denoting': 'All thinking starts with acquaintance; but it succeeds in thinking ABOUT many things with which we have no acquaintance.' 'Does the same hold for representing and depicting?,' asked Atkinson beneath it. The question is mined intensively in his long-term inquiry into the epistemological basis of art. Atkinson's mission isn't to kill all certainty in representation, but to test its attachment to reality, or lack thereof. How secluded is his art from reality, in the end? One thinks of Courbet's refusal to paint angels and goddesses, because he'd never seen them. Atkinson too only paints from reality: the aliens are real, his visions forms of scepticism.
David Homewood, 2025
[1] The book seems to be misdated; it is tagged 2015–16, but contains a reference to T.J. Clark's 2018 book Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come.↩
[2] Terry Atkinson, 'From One Civil War to Another—Time Travellers to the Cold War,' (Milan: Galleria Six, 2019), https://www.galleriasix.it/terryatkinson-galleriasix-sebastianodellarte.↩
[3] Terry Atkinson, The Indexing, The World War I Moves, and the Ruins of Conceptualism (Belfast: Circa; Manchester: Cornerhouse; Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 1992), pp. 13, 40.↩
[4] Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project [1927 –1940], ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Eiland and McLaughlin (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1999), p. 462.↩
[5] Terry Atkinson, Brit Art (Gimpel Fils: London, 1987), p. 3. Atkinson likely first encountered Benjamin's writing in Illuminations, a 1968 collection of his essays edited by Hannah Arendt. The Arcades Project wasn't available in English until 1999.↩
[6] See Terry Atkinson, 'The English Verb "To Russell,"' Terry Atkinson, Fragments of a Career: Selected Retrospective Work 1966—1999 (Silkeborg Kunstmuseum, 2000), pp. 1–20.↩
[7] Austin Williams, 'Pentagon orders removal of 26,000+ military images under Trump's DEI ban,' Live Fox Now, 6 March 2025.↩
