CABINET MATTER: Food. Jones reads Atkins' Old Food
Scorched by senility and nostalgia, and wracked by all kinds of hunger, Ed Atkins’ Old Food lurches from allegory to listicle, from lyric to menu, fetching up a plummeting, idiomatic and crabbed tableau from the cannibalised remains of each form in turn. ‘Old Food’ is a hard Brexit, wadded with historicity, melancholy and a bravura kind of stupidity. | Presented by Cabinet Gallery and Fitzcarraldo Editions, ‘Jones reads Atkins Old Food’ is a live, performative reading of Ed Atkins’ book, ‘Old Food’, by the actor, Toby Jones. It was recorded on December 17, 2019 at Conway Hall in London, on the occassion of the publication of the book, ‘Old Food’, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.
ISBN 978-0-9928355-6-9 Photographs by Mark Blower. Cover illustration and design by Ed Atkins. © 2020 CABINET
Forthcoming 12” double vinyl
Total duration: 1 hour 52 minutes
Voice Toby Jones.
Recorded London 17 September 2019
© Cabinet London
ISBN 978-0-9928355-6-9
Release date to be announced
An extract of Old Food by Ed Atkins
It was ever easier to simply remove
the breasts with an knife and ditch
the remainder, rather than commit to
the arduous plucking, but they’d take
your hand if the birds weren’t wholly
bald and otherwise unscathed, tho,
so. An informal lunch of pot-roast
pheasant, swum over with loaded,
swarthy prunes and a plausible
Armagnac; dry mash, weak cabbage.
Sirs got racy in the dining room.
Urns of mulled wine kept wassailers
blasted and tuneless till red bowls
of bread pudding calmed with a
thin Dairylea weep, surrendered
sultanas and frangible moments of
crystallised sugar roofing. We’d load
long white clay pipes with thatches
of a dark shag threaded with Mike’s
lenient hash dispensed from a panel
of vinyl’d chipboard, cheap jigsawed
heraldry, and a smouldering hemp
cord, wearing flat, white, charmless
masks made of I think hide. Ducked
out through an open sash on the
south side and sprinting out across
the dewed lawn. We’d exit civility
and re-enter the feral and humid
and tidal-smoothed, crudded with
red earth, blue woad, lucked toad
backs and whole praffed adder peel,
shrilling in a blackened pan of raw
butter, sod fire puked acrid plumes
attacked the bridge between the nasal
bit and the throat. Then the smell of
reptile beef and Hannah’d think of all
the kitchens in the world and describe
them in exquisite detail.
Fleurie? Drinking used to be as
basic as upending an animal’s open
neck into your mouth. We used to
open an animal and simply tip what
come slipping out into shot glasses,
drinking until nothing more came
out or what was coming out was cool
and grey and made you down, washed
away with a smaller animal’s openup
or some oat milk.
Custard tarts hot from the oven were
welcomed by sundry cousins down
for the weekends of Augusts. They
were wiry, angry types in sacking
and had broken skin. They would
bring scarcely edible shite from their
homeland and recipes to follow writ
on curling velour in a language we
couldn’t look at nor, then, follow.
Foreign muck that howled in the
pot, our cousins nodding, wounded
fled to be sent back for seconds,
gorgeous and us full of their dread,
their astonishing solids, fibrous rent
bum heat and panicked tongues to say
what?
Death?
Miracle
death? I didn’t know.
September, news reached us of their
entire craven system just not. We’d
mourn them traditionally: without
a second thought. There was feasts
of filled bread, though. Bananas
weren’t available. Burgers were quite
something, sat happy in a celeriac
remoulade. The webbed cream guts
of vast marrows would turn out to
show succinct okay tomorrows and
yield silver seeds that subsequently
grewed more of them, twice as nice
roasted with lemon thyme and garlic
and more obscure, wild alliums, the
tomorrows, blitzed to a silky soup
for poor camping in the graveyard
under the shade of the willow when
the graveyard had no dead in it yet,
none of the interred being dead,
simply the poor, sharing the soup and
waiting to basically fill the graveyard
up with themselves. The last would
bury the second to last then clamber
on top and sort of draw up the soil
duvet over themselves, starting at the
boots and eventually into the mouth,
the eyes and the ears packed to never
again hear dinner called clear and
mellifluous on the still air from the
beautiful houses beside the graveyard
that were made of imported stone.
There wasn’t a graveyard before that
there was just a funny feeling. We did
all we could, I suppose. We gripped
them in our um prayers. We charged
small glasses with a nondescript froth
and raised them to them. We planted
a series of pear trees somewhere,
espaliered like Jesus was, south-
facing in a walled garden crowded
with wild roses in tea-stained, nuptial
ivory, gaoled. Monastic silence, save
for a distant peal and a hot cricket
concert; the gorgeous flat spuff and
tiny metallic report when folding soft
metal caps off of thin glass bottles of
scrumptious, souring perry Hannah
made from the memorial fruit.
Conversations were had between
suppressed belches and quick dogtrot
behind a big bay for hot long release.
So the frying pan sizzle of piss on
sun-dried forage would stir our
appetite for whole sardines, wazzed
with a little lime, skilletted almond
whittles, and more perry for a bonus
voof. We’d in fact eat adult sardines
and we’d dronk a brilliant pale amber
perry Hannah made from pears in
an enchanted walled garden choked
with an astonishing amount of wild
roses in off-white, somewhere easterly
& old. A miraculous hold-out owned
by a family of big evil spiders who
bound the mouldering brickwork as
the strangler’s driving gloves they
were like classic masonry wounds
with polished black knees and The
Shakes, debossed in an whole life
of night and the town’s gone eyes
gathered in hand-tied bouquets of
cueballs and very rich
desserts.
Lots of unseen movement on the wall
at nighttime. Sounds like the wet pop
of a bakelite mandible or a porcelain
Newton’s Cradle coming to rest. The
sounds of nature
were reminiscent; everything
sounded,
to the pit of your stomach. Horrors
fairly trod the undergrowth audibly,
scorned milk in the churn, froze
grapes, turned fruit, ate kiddies, split
mirrors. In the mornings maybe a
dark wet scalp or an undone pink
blouse snagged on pointy teeth.
Perry and sardines used to be taken
beside a heavily spidered wall abutted
by tracts of barren zilch. Barren zilch
were silted and jeweled in the gullies
with a gravel of pink cochineal husks.
Edible looking fish squirmed out their
last, pouted we thought auguries?
and meanwhile their eyes’d clouded,
as with the hot skillet on the fire,
surrounded by its juices, some butter
and oil bubbling. Hissing noised as
the fish’s skin got rusted panoply.
Where we’d slashed at it with a long
knife we could make out pale food
peeking through. Wounds would
widen with heat in time and in a field,
in a ditch, we’d cringe beside that
dying fish. Writhing very desperate,
presumably not wanting to die it was
looking at the sky. I put my ear to its
strange mouth to listen to what it had
to say but
it said nothing. Not that there was no
sound at all coming out of its mouth
but that it didn’t say
a thing. Whatever it had inside of it
went unsaid
forever.
A gloom descended for a bit and we
just stared at the big
cobalt lobsters
pick
ponderous
paths while um opaline dragonflies
darted above, ideally. We ate all the
animals in any old order, without
cooking them and then we looked at
each other.
* * *
* * *
Toby Jones is a BAFTA Award Winning British actor renowned for his roles both on screen and on stage. Recent screen performances include the BBC’s in Don’t Forget The Driver, a series he co-wrote with Tim Crouch and Netflix’s The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance. Upcoming film credits for 2020 include; Louis Wain, Toby will star alongside Benedict Cumberbatch and Claire Foy, The Last Thing He Wanted, written and directed for Netflix by Oscar nominated Dee Rees and as Reverend Chasuble in an animated adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost.
Ed Atkins is an artist who makes all kinds of convolutions of self-portraiture. He writes uncomfortably intimate, debunked prophesies; paints travesties; and makes realistic computer generated videos that often feature figures that resemble the artist in the throes of unaccountable psychical crises. Atkins’ artificial realism, whether written or animated, pastiches romanticism to get rendered down to a sentimental blubber – all the better to model those bleak feelings often so inexpressible in real life. In recent years he has presented solo shows at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, Castello di Rivoli in Turin, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and Serpentine Gallery in London, among others. His artwork is the subject of several monographs, and his writing has appeared in October, Texte zur Kunst, frieze, The White Review, Hi Zero and EROS Journal. A Primer for Cadavers, his first collection, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2016. Ed Atkins is represented by the Cabinet Gallery in London.