This post was originally published on artnews.com
Toward the end of the farcical 24-minute video As Seen on TV (1988), a Chaplinesque figure played by the actor Bill Irwin loses his grip on reality. The video starts with Irwin’s bumbling Everyman attending a dance audition. As he waits, he gets sucked into a TV—literally absorbed by the screen and rendered a two-dimensional image. The channel changes and suddenly, he’s an impromptu guest on Sesame Street, then a bystander in the background of a live news report. Ultimately, he winds up in the middle of a dance number, at first comically disoriented as a troupe of ladies shimmies around him. Next, bam! He’s in drag, a bona fide diva leading the entire act.
To enter the world of multimedia artist Charles Atlas feels a bit like this: skipping across multiple dimensions, adapting to the rush by taking on a new form. His first United States museum survey, on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston through March 16, includes more than 125 films and videos, many of them multichannel installations. The cumulative all-encompassing effect is not entirely unlike Bill Irwin’s astral projecting through cable TV.
Born in St. Louis in 1949, Atlas moved to New York City in the early 1970s and immersed himself in its robust avant-garde communities, ultimately falling in with the artistic milieu led by composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham. Cage and Cunningham staged vibrant productions, experimenting with the relationship between sound and dance, in the process bringing together artists of several kinds. Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, for instance, designed sets, costumes, and lighting.
When Atlas came on the scene, he added the camera to the mix. Equipped with Super 8, he began recording the activities of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, beginning with Walkaround Time (1973). Atlas’s study of that piece brings out the choreography’s relationship to the stage space. In an homage to Marcel Duchamp, the dancers are initially spread out in a formation that mirrors the composition of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–23). Atlas’s camera shifts between estrangingclose-ups that underscore the thing-ness of the dancers and distant fixed shots that allow us to perceive how each movement unfolds across the stage and across time, the rectangular frame of the camera mirroring the stage’s border. From here on, Atlas was the company’s resident filmmaker.
Together, Atlas and Cunningham were pioneers of what they called “media-dance,” a term used by some interdisciplinary artists beginning in the ’70s to describe a kind of video art in which choreography and cinematography are developed in tandem, as collaborative responses to one another. Video technology, recorded on magnetic tape rather than to celluloid film, arrived in the ’60s—significantly cheaper, more easily portable and user-friendly than film—allowing consumers and artists greater flexibility in experimenting with the moving image. The first wave of such video art involved documenting performances, dance being after all an ephemeral art form. But Atlas and Cunningham were at the vanguard of something new altogether: the art of dance not for the theater and the fixed gaze of the spectator, but for the camera, which can zoom in and out, see from different angles, alter the dance’s form (in post-production), and upend linearity. It can cut through reality itself.
Throughout the ’70s, Atlas worked with Cunningham in an almost codirectorial capacity, creating works like Squaregame Video (1976) and Fractions I (1978), both of which play with depth of field and have different arrangements of dancers coming into and out of the frame, the rhythms of the editing timed accordingly. Fractions I (featuring “punk-ballerina” Karol Armitage, star and choreographer of several of Atlas’s projects throughout the ’80s) incorporates video monitors that project footage behind the TV set—showing off-screen components of the full dance, as well as zoomed-in views of the dancers—drawing attention to the inadequacies of the human gaze.
Atlas isn’t a trained dancer himself, but he does like to move. “I have a kinesthetic sympathy for dance. I used to be a big club dancer, but not turning and spotting and all of that—no!” he told the New York Times in 2018. For him, movement embodies abstract ideas and emotions, as it had for his mentors.
IT WASN’T UNTIL LOCALE (1978), however, that Cunningham and Atlas began seriously exploring the camera’s kinetic potential, with Atlas following the dancers around a sunlit studio and a windowless black stage using a Steadicam and dolly cameras to create a swerving, supernatural effect. Here, we get a greater sense of the personal aesthetic Atlas built out more forcibly in the coming decade: dancers in monochrome outfits, grouped by color; playful media references (here, the kitschy color bars seen on analog television broadcasts); an attraction to doubles and reflections (a massive mirror duplicates the dancers, some of them work in pairs). Tension (between hard and soft, day and night, order and anarchy) is central to his work.
Cunningham and Cage privileged indirection and obliqueness when it came to thematic expression. They worked alongside Minimalists, sharing the movement’s concern with process, form, and repetition stripped of personality. Atlas, by contrast, is a maximalist at heart. This much is apparent in the collage-like nature of his videos, which often feel like multiple short films stitched together: “I give him three different ideas, thinking he’ll pick out one. But he says, ‘No, let’s do all three of them,’” Marina Abramović, Atlas’s longtime collaborator, said of their first project, SSS (1989).
By the ’80s and ’90s, Atlas was seduced by another kind of dancing—the kind found in the New York nightclubs. He began pursuing collaborations that captured the wild exuberance of the underground, its drag venues and discotheques and sex. His work belongs to an erotically expressive continuum that extends back to Andy Warhol, Jack Smith, and Kenneth Anger, filmmakers fascinated by sexual subcultures, fetishisms, and exhibitionist performance.
His choice of regular collaborators squared with this ethos of eros: there was Michael Clark, a Scottish choreographer and London-based punk who juxtaposed the fluidity and technical rigor of ballet with sharper, more anarchic movements (Hail the New Puritan, 1985–86, a pseudo-biopic of Clark, is perhaps Atlas’s best-known video piece). Leigh Bowery, the fashion icon and transgressive performance artist, designed several costumes (assless slacks; sparkly bondage suits) for Atlas’s video pieces and often appeared on-screen as a kind of spiritual hype man. (The Legend of Leigh Bowery, 2002, is Atlas’s homage to his friend, who died of AIDS-related complications in 1994.) Armitage, like Clark, combined her training in ballet with a nonconformist sensibility characterized by angular, aggressive gestures and spontaneous bursts of speed.
A predilection for jukebox scores—punk rock, classical, pop—evoked this nightlife spirit, while also allowing each video to encompass radical mood shifts. Atlas’s colorful, campy sense of humor relishes in excess: He once described his work as both “an ordered experience and an amusement park ride.” Such rides figure in From an Island Summer (1983–84), which follows three dancers (led by Armitage) as they spring around the Coney Island boardwalk, then the Jumbotron-lit streets of Times Square. Atlas transparently cuts from one dancer to the next, which makes each one seemingly disappear into thin air.
By the ’90s, as the AIDS epidemic devastated precisely the artistic and LGBT+ communities that made up Atlas’s milieu, much of his work became forged by a sense of loss, danger, and violence. Son of Sam and Delilah (1991), a frenetic collection of inner-city scenes united by the presence of a homophobic serial killer, speaks most powerfully to these tragic realities. Early on, a dancing duo, one of whom is slathered in fake blood, has a screaming match over the logistics of an act; later, a party sequence visualizes dancers getting shot one-by-one in front of tinsel curtains.
THERE IS ARGUABLY no greater testament to Atlas’s restless innovation than his embrace of new technologies and his eagerness to absorb them into his practice. In Because We Must (1989), a climactic sequence meant to convey a drug-induced hallucination sees the dancers dressed head-to-toe in sequined costumes designed by Bowery; they’re seemingly floating over a floral backdrop, an illusory layer created by a green screen. Likewise, in What I Did Last Summer (1991), two drag queens are superimposed over chintzy backdrops as they lip-synch, shifting back and forth between the white queen’s Dolly Parton number and the Black queen’s soulful power ballad. Atlas employs slow motion, stuttering effects, and gravelly image distortions to underscore the work’s fictional trappings.
Over the past two decades, Atlas’s work has incorporated everything from motion-capture technology (BIPED, 2005) to 3D video (Tesseract, 2019), with many works remixing and/or resurrecting archival footage, as well as Atlas’s past videos (the installation A Prune Twin, 2020, is a renovated version of Hail the New Puritan).
It should therefore come as no surprise that Atlas is “addicted” to TikTok, as he confessed to ARTnews in 2022. There’s no better evidence of the lasting impact of his “media-dances” than the viral dance trends ubiquitous on the social media platform. Atlas’s feed is filled with these dance clips. In The Mathematics of Consciousness,2022, a sprawling installation that premiered at Pioneer Works and features a multichannel projection across a brick wall, we see TikTok dancers groove to Lizzo’s “About Damn Time.” These images coexist alongside clips of his previous works and abstract, computer-generated images that evoke neurological processes and quantum mechanics. At its core, media-dance is about the re-creation of the dancing body, which becomes limitless through the camera lens, uninhibited by time, gravity, space. Finding other, richer, magnificent, and even quantum ways to exist in time: If anything, this is Atlas’s project.