Charles Atlas
Charles Atlas and Merce Cunningham, Channels/Inserts (Still), 1981. Image courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, and the Merce Cunningham Trust.
“About Time,” the title of Charles Atlas’s first career retrospective, now on view at the ICA Boston, is both a joke and completely serious.
On the one hand, Atlas’s work has always had a temporal focus, capturing the fleeting feeling of viewing live performance, the immediacy of personal interactions, the perma-scroll of TikTok, and the free association of thought. On the other, it is long overdue for a media artist of Atlas’s caliber—one who has been working for over five decades, basically invented the translation of contemporary performance onto screen, and has collaborated with the likes of Merce Cunningham and Marina Abramović—to finally get the retrospective treatment.
“He's been in three Whitney Biennials, he's received a special mention award at the Venice Biennale, his work is in the collections of so many major museums,” says the show’s curator, Jeffrey De Blois. “Yet he hasn't had this more concentrated celebration of his work and legacy.”
And that’s not because Atlas hasn’t been open to the prospect. For the past 10 years, he has been working closely with his gallery, Luhring Augustine, to find a museum that would be able to take on a retrospective of his work and the technical challenges it involves. This is especially complicated because his practice has evolved since the 1970s—from creating small-scale videos meant to be viewed on television monitors, to producing room-sized immersive installations that visitors can walk into and around. “This is really a huge order, there’s not many museums that could do it,” Atlas says, adding that the exhibition at the ICA Boston involves 31 channels of video, spread across four gallery-filling installations. These in turn draw on clips from some 125 works Atlas has created over his career, which he has digitized and remixed.
Read full article at culturedmag.com