Martin Atkins: The Religion of Marketing August 15, 2007

Martin Atkins has spent the last 30 years firmly left of center – as a member of seminal bands Public Image Limited (1979 to 1985) and Killing Joke, performing with Ministry (the legendary Cage Tour), and Nine Inch Nails ("Head Like a Hole" video and the Grammy-award winning "Wish"). He formed the industrial supergroup Pigface, The Damage Manual, Murder Inc. and post-punk Brian Brain and has had his own label, Invisible, for close to 20 years.
Atkins has moved into the world of publishing with a new column for The Suicide Girls, and his book, Tour:Smart , hits the shelves this summer. When not teaching at Columbia College Chicago, Atkins guest lectures throughout the world, most recently taking a trip to China where he signed and recorded several bands, filmed a documentary, and created a traditional instrument and scratch DJ hybrid album that has already been featured on National Public Radio.
It seems a fitting time to assemble some of his more visual work for a retrospective through his gallery exhibit Martin Atkins: The Religion of Marketing.
His first gallery show simply titled Martin Atkins: The Religion of Marketing is very closely tied to his musical output and ranges from the massive to the minutia - the Mickey Mouse watch he used to generate some of the sounds on Public Image Limited's Flowers of Romance album, and his 1980 diary with the matter-of-factly documented appearance on American Bandstand. The 15-foot-high dollar bill backdrops from Killing Joke's 1989 tour, Money Is Not Our God, underpin the memorabilia side and sign post the way forward to larger pieces using repetition of multiple images.
The next several years see him bouncing from small sculptures dealing with addiction to religious iconography. The pieces get larger, less smelly, and easier to cut up as time goes by. The Eye piece is 20 feet high and weirdly also available as limited edition print on perforated blotter acid sheets. A small 12" x 16" sculpture, created during his first weeks sober became part of an extensive work documented in the booklet for Pigface's 1994 album, Notes from thee Underground. This work, in turn, spawned a stage set covered in dot-screened Newcastle Brown Ale bottle caps in front of which Pigface performed with special guest Danny Carey from TOOL.
Throw into this some pieces designed for Test Department's only North American tour, a collection of hand screened Sheep on Drugs posters, a limited edition red vinyl 7" of music from China wrapped in posters from the Cultural Revolution and you almost forget this guy has a collection of post-punk photographs from his time with PiL worthy of a show in their own right. (And yes, some of those will be shown too!)
Some of this is not for sale, some of it is; the entrepreneurial spirit behind everything Atkins has done provides 24" x 17" easy-to-carry portions of these works to take home – "Memorabilia for the Masses."

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