"Charles Atlas’s Multimedia Mission to Bend the Space-Time Continuum" by Beatrice Loayza

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.

Read full article at artinamerica.com