↳ Exhibitions

Terry Atkinson at Stadtgalerie Bern

September 15, 2022

Artist: Terry Atkinson

Exhibition title: Roll Over Chuck Berry

Venue: Stadtgalerie Bern, Bern, Switzerland

Date: August 19 – September 10, 2022

Photography: Studio Mussano / all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Stadtgalerie, Bern

Study 35 (2018), a work by Terry Atkinson from his American Civil War series (2018–), depicts military headgear from various American Civil War units. These are collaged onto a pixelated, inkjet background of Jackson Pollock’s Full Fathom Five (1947): the canvas as territory. A dot labeled “Cody” marks the American painter’s birthplace in the town named after William Frederick Cody (Buffalo Bill). Caps on top of this represent each troop’s affiliation.

Terry Atkinson could be called a meta-historical painter. Since 1975 he has drawn and painted images of past wars—“cold” and “hot”. He is concerned with the question of how history is transmitted and constructed: as a means of reflecting on his specific standpoint as an artist who works with history and on the artist-subject in general. In Atkinson’s practice, a critical examination of how the artist’s identity and art production and distribution are absorbed into corporate culture—as the artist calls it—is re-informed by its geopolitical dimension: he investigates the relationship between fronts of culture and war that is historically intertwined with the concept of the avantgarde.

For Terry Atkinson’s solo exhibition ROLL OVER CHUCK BERRY, the exhibition space has been divided into five rooms to reduce the distance between viewer and work and reconcile looking with reading. The artist often works with long titles. These take the form of texts or even diagrams that apply pressure to hierarchical relationships of image and title, viewing and reading. The division of the exhibition rooms also alludes to the American Civil War series, which Terry Atkinson began working on in 2018 and which makes up the main part of the exhibition. These images are often configured into grids, suggesting order and organization. As a point of departure, the artist searches for images online and then integrates elements of these into his pictures as drawings or collaged photocopies. His image production appears almost automated, and even if preceded by extensive research and a degree of organization is maintained, these at times difficult-to-penetrate juxtapositions have an intrinsic, machine-like, generative quality.

The first work in the exhibition, the sculpture Slat Greaser 4 (1990/2022), takes up this aspect of automation on a material and conceptual level: “The analogy that I adopted when conceiving the Grease Works was the hardware/software distinction in computer science. I wanted to make a series of works in which the works would continue to produce themselves (or at least aspects of themselves) after they had left my (the artist’s) relations of production.”[1] Greaser’s architectural qualities as a sculpture, whose crevices dictate the ambit of the oily “software”, are echoed formally in the exhibition architecture: successively configured corridors determine the layout of the rooms and also form an escape, making it difficult to get an overview. They also take up the aspect of repetition running through Terry Atkinson’s practice. In the last room are two Irish Works pictures from 1985 depicting phantasmagorias of bomb-making Republican paramilitaries in bunkers in Armagh. The narrow slit of the bunker architecture directs the eye towards the external threat while the dark interior expands, creating a sense of haunting and paranoia. The corridors of the exhibition architecture find a formal parallel in the warlike bunker architecture of the Irish Works.

Terry Atkinson’s paintings about history are shaped by his experiences of a conflict whose events still reverberate today—the Cold War. “Time-travelling postcard from one civil war to another and vice-versa: ACW <- RCW, into the future and back – endlessly” (Study 59 from the American Civil War series): Terry Atkinson draws lines of connection between the American Civil War (1861–65) and the Russian Civil War (1918–21), which fundamentally shaped both superpowers that faced off during the Cold War. “This conflict”, Atkinson writes, “permeated every aspect of the lives of my generation, not least the art world in which my own art practice was imbedded from 1958 onwards. The Cold War was fought and marshalled through many proxies and conveyed into every cultural aspect of the so-called West and East.”[2] His exit from the conceptual art group Art & Language in 1974, which he co-founded in 1966, and his turning to a form of meta-historical painting informed by conceptual art can also be viewed against the backdrop of this experience.

Heroes of the Civil Rights movement, Black Lives Matter, and post-war African American popular culture appear in grided configurations in the pictures from his American Civil War series. Seen in Study 81 are Proud Boy white supremacists along with one of Goya’s figures. These time-traveling figures of a non-linear history run throughout the artist’s entire practice. Other time travelers include Picasso’s bulls or figures such as Bart Simpson, E.T., or Yoda from Hollywood’s history-reinterpreting entertainment industry. The series spans a period extending beyond the immediate events of the Civil War and draws historical links to other conflicts and events: “Seventeenth-century English suprematism, aligned with the holy values of rationalism, industry and liberty, as well as moral justifications for slavery, created the battlegrounds of this ‘New World’.”[3]

The second-to-last room features Terry Atkinson’s artist books, made available to audiences for the first time on this scale. The one-off works offer a glimpse into the various fields of the artist’s practice and his exploration of the relationship between image and language. They also reveal the diversity of the artist as a painter dealing with history, whose work “exposes the complacent and sanctified clichés of World War amnesic celebration: the rituals of myth, national self-consciousness, ethno- centrism, and imagined pasts and presents.”[4]

ROLL OVER CHUCK BERRY follows up on the exhibition Greaser sculptures and drawings from the series ‘Berlin, East Prussia and the Desert’ and ‘American Civil War’ (November 27, 2021–February 27, 2022) at Josey gallery in Norwich. The Stadtgalerie would like to thank Terry Atkinson, Benjamin Brett, and Jonathan P. Watts.

[1] Atkinson, Terry (2011), A note on the Grease Works to Primitive robots series of Works 1986 to 2000, unpublished documents of the artist, Leamington Spa.

[2] Atkinson, Terry (2019), ‘I’, ed. by SIX di Sebastiano dell’Arte, Monghidoro: con-fine art&culture publishing, p. 23.

[3] Josey (2021), Terry Atkinson – ‹Greaser› sculptures and drawings from the series ‘Berlin, East Prussia and the Desert’ and ‘American Civil War’ [Press Release], Norwich, URL: https://www.josey.co/.

[4] Ibid.

Terry Atkinson, Slat Greaser 4, 1990/2022

Terry Atkinson, Roll Over Chuck Berry, 2022, exhibition view, Stadtgalerie Bern

Terry Atkinson, American Civil War: Study 41 Their time-travelling capacity mal- functioning during their attempt to return to the Quinta del Sordo from Stalingrad in 1943, five Goyaesque ghosts are consequently debouched at the Petersburg trenches in Virginia in September 1864. (1) Burraghost (2) Senor Mane Grando (3) Senor Pequeno Chillida (4) Goya flier (5) Goya flier, 2019

Terry Atkinson, Roll Over Chuck Berry, 2022, exhibition view, Stadtgalerie Bern

Terry Atkinson, American Civil War: Study 73 Study for a painting: American Civil War Mosaic Reading left to right, top to bottom. (1) Postcard from Trotsky Head (2) Hailing Poussin (3) Postcard from Trotsky Head (4) Camp Wife, 31st Pennsylvanian Infantry, camped near Washington. (5) Forage cap (6) Prosthetic (7) Warrior bust (8) West Tennessee hog (9) Confederate Five Dollar Bill (10) Colfax 1873 (11) Powder black infantryman (12) H T (13) Striving Union infantryman, 2019

Terry Atkinson, Roll Over Chuck Berry, 2022, exhibition view, Stadtgalerie Bern

Terry Atkinson, American Civil War: Study 35 Hat-map 1: Civil War hats on a ground of Full Fathom Five with Cody marked. Wyoming achieved statehood in 1890. (1) Confederate Forage cap (2) New York Hawkins Zouave fez (3) Union Cavalry Hat (4) Confederate homespun forage cap (5) Union officer hat (6) Union Iron Brigade hat (7) Union forage cap (8) Plain Union officer forage cap (9) Customised blue forage cap (Iowa?), 2018

Terry Atkinson, Roll Over Chuck Berry, 2022, exhibition view, Stadtgalerie Bern

Terry Atkinson, American Civil War: Study 31 A two-part drawing of (1) a black and white tableau of three Union soldiers of Meade’s Army of the Potomac, carefully posed by one of Brady’s photographers (left to right: drummer boy, corporal fresh from skirmishing, young infantry- man) is intruded upon by (2) the swish of an overflying and time travelling giant cousin of Yoda (transmitted from coloured Holly- wood digital material from 2004). All this during the rain-sodden pur- suit of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia by Meade’s Army of the Potomac, July 1863., 2018

Terry Atkinson, Roll Over Chuck Berry, 2022, exhibition view, Stadtgalerie Bern

Terry Atkinson, American Civil War: Study 76 American patterns of consumer- ship, 1860-1960. Reading left to right, top to bottom (1)Trepanning Instruments (2) Union Officer (3) Trotsky Postcard Ghost at Antietam (4) HT (5) Trotsky Postcard Bandaged Head 1 (6) Trepanning Instrument (7) Trotsky Postcard Bandaged Head (8) Prosthetic Arm (9) Intrusive Quatttrocento Image (10) Andersonville (Trotsky Postcard) (11) Trepanning Instrument (12) Trepanning Instrument (13) The Shirelles (14) Hollywood 1 (15) Everly Brothers (16) Skull (17) Holly- wood 2 (Yoda) (18) Will You Love Me Tomorrow (19) Holly- wood 3, Distant Cousin of ET (20) Cathy’s Clown (21) Chuck Berry (22) School Day, 2020

Terry Atkinson, Roll Over Chuck Berry, 2022, exhibition view, Stadtgalerie Bern

Terry Atkinson, American Civil War: Study 85 Americana III Reading left to right, top to bottom. (1) Sherman watches the 107th New York storm through Columbia, South Carolina, February 1865 (2) Bart turns green – whether the approach of the Jedi was the cause of this remains an open question (3) CB (4) Fallen Statue (5) Ghost ironclad on the Mississippi outside Vicksburg, 1863 (6) Dancing in the Street and Baby It’s You (7) S C sings into the microphone, 1964 (8) R P (9) Grey Massachusetts mourn- ing bodice, 1864, 2021

Terry Atkinson, Roll Over Chuck Berry, 2022, exhibition view, Stadtgalerie Bern

Terry Atkinson, American Civil War: Study 59 Time-travelling postcard from one civil war to another and vice-versa: ACW <- RCW, into the future and back – endlessly., 2019

Terry Atkinson, Roll Over Chuck Berry, 2022, exhibition view, Stadtgalerie Bern

Terry Atkinson, Big split brain under a light in a bunker in Armagh, a figure looks on – outside three British Army helicopters on a history search., 1985