“Time is more than a container; time participates.”
—Susan Rethorst, A Choreographic Mind
I often enter retrospectives with a certain girding of the loins, particularly if I’m writing about them. How to take it all in, to wade through oppressive linearity without getting bogged down? To adequately translate a life in the arts is no minor energetic endeavor; the word exhaustive comes to mind.
So, I admit, a slight preemptive weariness did descend on me as I ascended the stairs of the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston for the exhibition Charles Atlas: About Time, which encompasses five decades of the singular film and video artist’s pioneering interdisciplinary career. Not that I figured Atlas would go for oppressive linearity; this is an artist, after all, who knows how to manipulate form—and an artist who cut his teeth in dance (a form that knows no single definitive version), in particular as filmmaker-in-residence for the game-changing choreographer Merce Cunningham, that genius of decentralized space, simultaneity, and collage.
Charles Atlas, MC⁹, 2012. Installation view, Merce Cunningham, Clouds and Screens, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2018. Photo © Museum Associates/LACMA. Courtesy Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
But what I hadn’t fully realized is the extent to which Atlas has been translating himself, delving into archival footage and reimagining older works to create engrossing multichannel installations custom-made for visual-art spaces—what Erika Balsom, in her contribution to the show’s generally excellent catalogue, deems “transformative recycling.” Rather than a retrospective (whose framing, as Eileen Myles reports in their catalogue text, Atlas laughingly rejects anyway), perhaps it is better to understand About Time as a distillation, at once deliciously frenetic and elegantly precise. Like its double-entendre title, this generous, tender show, organized by Jeffrey De Blois with Max Gruber across six theatrically lit galleries, is operating on more than one level: remembering, and examining this remembering.
The layering is made clear in the first gallery, where the video installation The Years (2018) immediately proclaims itself. Snippets of works Atlas made between 1970 and 2017 scroll vertically on four flat-screen monitors evoking tombstones—this is your life, filmic-style. Behind this smorgasbord is a wall projection of four impassive teen sentries, and behind them is a sort of digital starry night, infinity showing through the youngsters’ barely moving forms.
I was overwhelmed at seeing so many familiar faces in the footage. Scribbling notes, I was just starting to wonder what an Atlas newcomer might make of this when, as if on cue, an elderly woman wheeled into the room and asked what it was all about. The gallery attendant did their best (“famous videographer … very big in the New York queer scene, ’70s through ’90s … there’s some flashing lights …”), to which the woman dryly responded, “It looks a bit risqué.”Not to the unimpressed teen sentries, it doesn’t. Time marches on, Atlas might be saying, and their future won’t necessarily be moved by my past—only I’ve co-opted it into art’s eternal present. And what is time, anyway? Later on, thinking of The Years, I laughed when I read that Atlas, asked what he could imagine doing if not making art, answered, “Science, in particular astronomy or cosmology.”
I often that I learned how to write by watching dancers, as a young critic figuring out how to apply my craft to theirs. Choreographers shape experience, and you can’t, I don’t think, come up through their world without taking in time and space as the true materials undergirding all other materials. Not if you’re really paying attention, and especially not if you fall in love. Atlas did both, and how: Cunningham, Michael Clark, Dancenoise, Karole Armitage, Lady Bunny, Yvonne Rainer, Leigh Bowery, Douglas Dunn … The list of his collaborators, which is to say his friendships, in various and sometimes overlapping dance, club, and performance communities (many of them queer, underground, and fabulously outrageous) goes on and on. I remember the first time I was watching performance footage shot by Atlas and realized the low sound I was hearing was his laughter. This observer, so seldom seen in his own work, is neither impartial nor outside, and to move through About Time is to give yourself over to his relationships. Two of the three inner galleries are dedicated to central ones: Cunningham (MC9, 2012) and Clark, the outré London ballet choreographer (A Prune Twin, 2020).
Entering MC9, I was met with myriad variations of Cunningham, the man and the company, moving across large floating screens and smaller chunky monitors for me a reunion with younger friends and elder heroes. A close-up of the choreographer’s feet in bulky black orthopedic sneakers with taps (keeping time, Broadway-style) next to a much younger version throwing himself into space. A sweaty dancer approaching the camera in the Bethune Street studio, while constellations of small figures in pale costumes swirl within a dark proscenium. Blue screens and iconic decor and snippets from Atlas and Cunningham’s great “media dance” collaborations, in which the camera becomes another moving body. These works changed the game. There’s still nothing like them.
I started out not nearly so interested in A Prune Twin; it’s not my world, not my community. But soon enough I was sucked into the arch drama, the ebullient and brash personalities larger than life after so much cool Cunningham formalism (though Clark himself is a formalist, however perverse at times). In the dark gallery I noticed other visitors standing in corners, with backs pressed against walls, trying to grok it all, and I realized I was doing the same thing, my eyes roving between fantastically costumed performances, backstage banter, and day-in-the-life documentary footage skewed just enough to make you aware of the unseen gaze guiding yours. But of course you can’t see it all. About Time stymies any desire for narrative coherence—or perhaps it doesn’t stymie the desire so much as free observers from that need. Instead, we’re given the privilege of peering into niche worlds rendered exalted through attention and affection. We’re looking into another person’s memories, his past, presented not as a discrete, digestible product but an unfurling.
Charles Atlas: A Prune Twin. Installation view, Luhring Augustine Chelsea, New York, 2023. Courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York. © Charles Atlas.
MC9 and A Prune Twin bookend a smaller space housing Personalities (2024), a sculptural suite of video portraits arranged in a spiral and suffused in Atlas’s signature orange, “the sophisticated sister of red.” In Personalities, everyone is a star, including you, if you stand in an orange spotlight in the center of a circle of monitors atop orange plinths, the screens turned outward, a contemporary Stonehenge. The room feels at once intimate and ritualistic. How quickly community becomes celebrity becomes history becomes myth.
Absent from these rooms are copious context notes or headsets. Instead, sound boomerangs around, matching one screen and then another—not particularly disorienting when what you’re looking at isn’t what you hear, but satisfying when it is. The eye here is king, and the body, traveling through layers of space and time.
It’s a funny thing to find myself saying, given how often museums, and particularly dance in museums (which this absolutely is), leave me enervated, but: moving through the galleries felt physically good. On my first visit I left after three hours energized and sated, and also sensing I’d barely scratched the surface. The next day I went through the galleries fast, feeling even more like a performer. Here, the agency of the viewer, always paramount whether we know it or not, is foregrounded and spatialized, a choose-your-own adventure in which all the choices lead to insight and pleasure.
Atlas’s crafted multiplicity shouldn’t be confused with the fracturing of attention omnipresent in our social-media and smartphone era. These are deeply considered works, in which formal and intuitive elements such as rhythm and framing create cohesive and durational experiences. “I always felt I had to make the choice,” he told Matthew Yokobosky in 1997, in an interview for Performing Arts Journal. “Because there is a choice. There is a right place to edit.”
In that same interview, Atlas notes, “I wish people would create more works that reach the complexity of live performance.” Describing a Raul Ruiz installation that had captivated him, he explains:
It just felt like memory. It really had a visceral feeling. You could look and find other layers of meaning in the images, and how they were arranged in the rooms. It wasn’t presentational like many installations, where you know nothing’s going to change more or less—you understand the concept and then you just wait for it to happen.
Atlas then outlines his attempt to make installations that he himself would like to see, “where you weren’t sure what was going to happen next; things would change, it would have a sense of sequence, it wouldn’t be predictable.” To do so, he would have to organize and design the space, the sound, and the lighting, pulling from his knowledge as a lighting designer for the stage—in other words, as an artist who has worked to shape experience rather than objects.
Perhaps this is why the four single-channel works in About Time occupy a little cul-de-sac off the Clark-focused room, three lining the narrow sides so they press uncomfortably in on each other (and here, headphones do come into play). Plato’s Alley (2008) sits at the end, a shimmering, hypnotic dream of numbers. Everyone wanted photos of this one, and it did draw me in, only I could hear what awaited in the final large gallery: Tyranny of Consciousness (2017), a condensed reworking of The Waning of Justice (2015). The room is dominated by a grid of sunsets, a vibrant infinitude of sky and sea; it’s another timescale, at once fleeting and timeless. The hour grows late, you might interpret—or be seduced by the immensity of the natural world’s scale compared to a human lifespan. It’s not, of course, an either/or: these systems dwarf us and we have the power now to destroy them (a second, smaller screen positioned at an angle counts down seconds, reminding of the Doomsday Clock).
Charles Atlas, Here she is … v1 (still), 2015. Single-channel video installation (color, sound; 23:44 minutes). Dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York. © Charles Atlas.
I wanted to sink into the horizon line, to rest. But I couldn’t because—tyranny of consciousness. “There is no national voice for peace anymore,” a voiceover laments: drag star Lady Bunny, delivering a populist, pro-peace message that feels even more urgent and scathing than it did in 2015, as the gulf widens between the haves and the have nots, and US weapons deliver death upon death upon death.
The discrepancy between what we see and what we hear is brutal, until finally the suns set. Fini. And then a resplendent Lady Bunny monopolizes the screen, singing, “You were the one / I knew it / I blew it.” She could be America, singing to herself in the mirror.
The black-box–like gallery empties onto a glassed-in balcony. I emerged as I do from the most profound moving-image experiences, seeing differently, attuned to movement, to juxtaposition. The afternoon was overcast, lit from within. Eternity’s roiling sky stretched over city and river.
