Charles Atlas
A monitor in Atlas’s studio shows a view of “Atlas/Fennesz” (2007), which did not make it into the retrospective. Credit - Graham Dickie/The New York Times
“About Time,” a retrospective opening in Boston, comes at a time of radical change for a pioneer of media dance.
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.”
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