"Charles Atlas" by Jennifer Krasinski

Charles Atlas: About Time, curated by Jeffrey De Blois with Max Gruber, the Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston, 25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, through March 16, 2025

Walking into Charles Atlas’s retrospective, About Time, you’re first met by footage of four adolescents standing still and staring straight at you. Like the stone guardians that protect ancient temples, they give all ye who enter here that withering feeling of being simultaneously watched and ignored. To be fair, that feeling is possibly a projection. The artwork certainly is. The Years (2018) opens this dynamite (and long overdue) exhibition celebrating over fifty years of Atlas’s extraordinary moving-image work, a milestone that the artist, at seventy-six, seems to have met with a healthy dose of dark humor. The image of those teens looms large behind four flat-screens resting vertically, like headstones, on short plinths. The installation would look merely funerary if it weren’t such a tour de life force. Each tombscreen flickers and glows with clips from the films and videos that Atlas has made about, and in collaboration with, some of the most vital, powerful avant-gardians in the fields of dance, drag, performance, music, art, and more.

Raised in St. Louis, Missouri, Atlas came to New York City in 1968 at the age of nineteen. By 1970, he was making Super 8 shorts while earning money as an assistant stage manager for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Shortly after Atlas independently shot a film of the choreographer’s Walkaround Time (1973), the two began making media-dances, a new genre that conceptualized the movements of the camera as part of the movements of the dance. Although they continued working together until Cunningham died in 2009, Atlas’s circle, always impeccable, widened over the decades. His taste ran toward the visionaries, the iconoclasts, and the self-created. A tiny but mighty sampling: ballet’s premier punk, Michael Clark; living work of performance art Leigh Bowery; singer-songwriter Anohni; choreographer Yvonne Rainer; performers Johanna Constantine and DANCENOISE; composer John Zorn; the band Sonic Youth.

About Time wastes none. It’s a tight exhibition of nine pieces that represent the full range of Atlas’s career from the early ’70s up to now. He composed four of them using selections from his own films, videos, and the countless hours of footage he amassed as the raw materials; five of the works on view are large-scale, each receiving a room of their own. Immersive is a word that’s regrettably fallen to cheese, though it does precisely convey that totalizing effect of Atlas’s installations, that thrilling overwhelm and momentary dissolve of time and place. But the Charles Atlas Experience doesn’t obliterate—it choreographs, includes. In the spirit of his media-dances, his installations rope viewers into the fun.

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