Terry Atkinson: Work 1977-83

by Terry Atkinson

63 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1983

Reviews

[Sean Tatol · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great document of Atkinson's early post Art & Language work. The paintings/drawings are spectacular, though, as the other reviewer noted, the amount of color reproductions is lacking. A fair amount are in pencil anyways. The essays are great fun, for me anyways, an early sketching out of his theory of the artist as the prime bourgeois subject grounded in a reading of Hobbes, a short note on Trotsky vs. Wittgenstein, and a takedown of (then) contemporary art education. The last essay in particular is interesting as a historical document of the cultural currents at art schools. He advocates for the integration of art education with theory and the importance of novelty in contradistinction to traditional education that favored technique, history, and intuitive emotion untainted by thoughts. This is rather funny because in 2020 I see contemporary art as being weighed down by the overemphasis of theory-art and novelty as compulsory, tired ideas that have ceased to be productive and exhausted the arts into dissolution. Moreover, I think a return to learning from the history of art, a reinstatement of a new sense of a canon, is the way forward. Fundamentally we're in agreement though, because our positions are in reaction to our contemporary situation and are both, at root, concerned with a resistance to individualist subjectivism.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the catalogue from a show of Terry Atkinson's work, a founding member of Art and Language, that I saw as an impressionable teenager at Birmingham's Ikon Gallery. Twenty-five years later I still find myself returning to the work from that show so I finally bought myself a copy of the catalogue that the Whitechapel (which also had the show) produced. The work's as good if not better than I remember it, the jokes funnier and Atkinson just as underrated now as he was then. My only disappointment is that there's very little colour reproduction in the book.

My campaign for a retrospective for Atkinson starts now.