For the happy man! - Collected writings DEPRESSION: Ed Atkins

Watts’ Minotaur is a terrifically ugly painting. The angle, the
cropping, the palette – the poise of the thing – seems to speak
in the brutish vernacular of the monster itself. The painting, like
the monster, feels abortive, inadequate. The allegorical portent
and repugnance is superseded – for me, from here, far away
from the painting’s historical symbolic intelligibility – by its demonstrable,
material unwieldiness. Which might be to say that
it feels close to a contemporary ingenuousness regarding a kind
of performance of painting.
From our perspective, over the Minotaur’s shoulder,
one gets a feeling of the bulk, ignorance and animal impassivity
of the thing. Perhaps we’re meant to find his gaze inscrutable
because of this. Conversely, I can clearly see the same fantasy
on the horizon and certainly feel the same avid anticipation. For
me, where once perhaps to speak of man’s inhumanity was to
speak solely pejoratively – was to speak against God – my empathy
is not with the imminent sacrificial virgins or, culpably, with
the horrible King Minos. My empathy goes out to the monster,
in all its dumbness and moral impunity. I’ve always-already forgotten
the bird I killed so absentmindedly.