Charles Atlas dyes his sideburns carrot-orange and has the slender physique of a club kid. He lives in the mess of a loft-ish little apartment near the Meatpacking District in Manhattan. He spends his time looking at screens and playing with what he sees there.
He’s one of New York’s classic emerging artists.
Only thing is, he’s 75 years old, and for decades has been a player in the world of experimental dance, theater and filmmaking. “About Time,” a major retrospective of his work, opens on Oct. 10 at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, as its first exhibition in almost three decades devoted to someone working with moving images.
Still, by his own telling, Atlas is just coming of age as an artist, and he’s not wrong about that.
Since the 1970s, Atlas has been immersed in what he calls “the performance world.” He first made his mark with the great Merce Cunningham and his dance company. Their collaborations, dubbed “media dance,” in which Atlas’s camera moved with the dancing body, melded choreography and filmmaking into a new hybrid. Like the other films that Atlas went on to make, post-Cunningham — the total runs to more than 100 pieces — his works could often run a half-hour or even an hour long; they’ve been commissioned by national film boards and public television. They were suited only, Atlas told me, to “a theater or viewing room or somewhere where you’re comfortable.”
But then, only a decade or so ago, Atlas began moving into a world that doesn’t much favor sit-down, beginning-to-end viewing: He was asked to show in museums and to join Luhring Augustine, one of New York’s most notable commercial galleries. “I think of my work now as visual art,” he said — meaning he counts as someone only recently established in the field.
Lately, his income comes almost entirely from selling and showing his art, he said, and that has required a rethink of what he does: “Changing your brand — ouch — it’s really tough.”
In his studio, on the big screen on his desk, he showed me the major new piece — “very colorful and kind of weird” — that he was working on for his retrospective. It consists of a dozen videos, each 10 minutes long, with no comfy chair now required for viewing. Atlas had the videos gridded up on his computer — it looked like the Zoom meeting for a start-up — but in Boston at the ICA the videos will spread across a single big gallery, each one running on its own boxy, old-school monitor. Those will sit on 10 pedestals at different heights, arranged in a loose spiral in the center of the space. (His other two videos will play on flat screens on the gallery walls.) Viewers are meant to take in the new piece by wandering around and through it.
It is called “Personalities,” and each of its parts acts as a video portrait of one person, or of a pair or small handful of people. There are well-known figures from the worlds of performance and pop culture: Cunningham himself; the performance artist Marina Abramović; John Zorn, the radical jazzman, in a video shared with the No Wave group Sonic Youth. There’s also at least one utter unknown: Atlas’s own father, Dave, whom he caught on tape in 1981, and who died in 2005.
All the footage in this brand-new work of art is cannibalized from full-length works made by the pre-artist Atlas. Jeffrey De Blois, who curated the ICA survey, says he was particularly attracted to Atlas because he works in the great tradition of creators who recast found footage, but is unique in “finding” footage that is in fact his own. “In the really careful kind of recalibrating that he does of existing footage, something new is born,” De Blois said.
Atlas talks about how, in “Personalities,” his earlier works have been “exploded into a walk-through experience,” with a “physicality” they didn’t have when they were meant for passive viewing on a screen, at full length. The new installation gives us, and him, new perspective on what he has done before.
“At a certain point in your life, you’re looking backward,” Atlas told me. He recently spent months preparing his vast archive — including 100 terabytes worth of video — for acquisition by the research institute at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. An ongoing battle with prostate cancer naturally has him thinking about the life he has led.
Yet even though “Personalities” looks back at past work, it’s also a departure from anything Atlas has done before.
His uncut films tended to communicate clearly about their subjects, if through a creative lens — the way Atlas communicated so well and so creatively about Cunningham’s dance — but in “Personalities” that has given way to something more disjointed. Where there used to be “a beginning, middle and end,” Atlas said, the new work encourages an undirected ramble among its various videos, with viewers expected to puzzle through the fragments they encounter: footage of someone (in fact the performer Leigh Bowery) walking the streets of New York as Mr. Peanut in a flowered gown; a close-up on feet (in fact Abramović’s) being scrubbed; another close-up on feet (Merce Cunningham’s) tapping out a rhythm.
The experience is made all the more cryptic since the words spoken by Atlas’s sitters in the original videos have now been reduced to 30-second fragments, which will ring out in random order across the gallery space. There might be moments where a lucky visitor happens to be in front of a screen that’s in sync with the sounds heard in the room, but mostly, they’ll be more at sea.
Atlas is interested in “the kind of disjointed experience that people will have,” De Blois said. The curator imagines a “cat and mouse” game as viewers explore the room, trying to match each snippet of sound to the video it comes from.
That may seem classically avant-garde — Cubism’s fractures for the screen generation — but De Blois feels that, in “Personalities,” Atlas is connecting to a more traditional notion of portraiture that’s also on view in the art market’s current hunger for paintings. “Personalities,” said De Blois, “has to do with narrative, and it has to do with pictures of people who haven’t been seen in museums and stories that haven’t been told in museums, just as much as it has to do with painting.”
Or maybe Atlas is connecting to an even older, broader tradition that makes Western fine art stand apart from the performance world he used to move in. Wandering among the portraits in “Personalities,” with their cryptic content and the disjointed whole they represent, may be like a stroll among a wall full of old masters in a great museum: Each demands its own kind of attention, its own deciphering, even as you try to make out some larger story the wall tells about its moment in culture.
Atlas might not be keen to dwell on that pedigree, however grand. “I’m hoping that once this Boston show opens, that will free me to have some forward-looking ideas,” he said, “because for 30 years, I never looked back. Whatever was in the past, I just went on to do something new.”
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