Jennifer Krasinski
A kaleidoscope of media-dances and moving-image installations capture over fifty years of radiant, immersive, and collaborative works.
Charles Atlas: About Time, installation view. Courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine. Photo: Mel Taing. Pictured: The Years, 2018.
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.
Charles Atlas: About Time, installation view. Courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine. Photo: Mel Taing. Pictured: Personalities, 2024.
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.
Charles Atlas: About Time, installation view. Courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine. Photo: Mel Taing. Pictured: MC9, 2012.
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. Works like MC9 (2012) and A Prune Twin (2020)—labyrinthian arrangements of white screens at varying angles, heights, and distances, his moving images projected on both sides—handle us like gracious dance partners, drawing us into the gallery, offering multiple paths through it, even prompting a few moves. To see MC9, I did a little side step to the right around a screen placed very near the entryway, then a slight shimmy to the left to avoid bumping into a security guard—then spun in place for a bit, taking in Atlas’s homage to Cunningham (the titular MC), watching the astonishing geometries of his dancers’ gestures, the meticulous placements of their bodies in space.
Charles Atlas: About Time, installation view. Courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine. Photo: Mel Taing. Pictured: MC9, 2012.
Like the performances they’re built on, Atlas’s installations are also living artworks. With fifty-plus years of footage to see, and every screen a near kaleidoscope of brilliant, fantastical people, there’s no chance of stepping into the same river twice. Attention gets pulled here, then snagged over there. Details are what stick in memory: the fake blood gushing from the heads and necks of Lucy Sexton and Anne Iobst; the oversize safety pins piercing either side of Bowery’s mouth; the vacuum-black Martha Graham wig on Richard Move; the too-cute dimples that punctuate Clark’s smile. I was entranced for a few minutes by a close-up shot of a pair of black shoes tapping and shuffling in place, then realized the feet belonged to an elderly Cunningham, performing while seated in a chair.
Charles Atlas: About Time, installation view. Courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine. Photo: Mel Taing. Pictured: MC9, 2012.
Time is merciless, and to dancers in particular; as bodies lose strength, fluidity, and balance, virtuosity can seem like it’s only available to the young. But Atlas’s clips from his last collaboration with the choreographer, also featured in MC9, call attention to the way virtuosity migrates, over time, from a performer’s muscle to their marrow. Merce dances while holding a barre in the middle of the studio, his hands fluttering and limbs waving, chasing the beat of Barbara Tucker’s house-music classic “Beautiful People.” He’s goofy, wild, glorious—and utterly riveting, a maestro rewarding his audience with the lush presence that comes of well over half a century spent onstage.
Charles Atlas: About Time, installation view. Courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine. Photo: Mel Taing. Pictured: Personalities, 2024.
It must also be said that Atlas is one of our great portrait artists. A selection of his beloved friends and collaborators are celebrated in Personalities (2024)—featuring the likes of John Kelly, Yvonne Rainer, and Marina Abramović, as well as Atlas’s partner, writer Joe Westmoreland, and the artist’s father, Dave—installed here in a gallery painted a sizzling orange (the same color Atlas famously dyes his sideburns). His subjects play and dance and pose, displayed on monitors atop pedestals of ascending heights arranged in a spiral. They radiate outward from the center of the room—and are as radiant as any saint in a work of devotional art. (No halos here—the snakes slithering on Abramović’s head come closest—but auras abound.)
Charles Atlas: About Time, installation view. Courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine. Photo: Mel Taing. Pictured: The Tyranny of Consciousness, 2017.
In another gallery, Lady Bunny takes front and center in The Tyranny of Consciousness, Atlas’s magnum opus from 2017. Comprising thirty-six different shots of the sun setting, with a countdown clock ticking off the seconds nearby, the piece feels even more ominous at this moment in time. Bagpipes—traditionally used both to rouse the troops to battle and to honor the dead—play while Bunny, in voice-over, delivers a breathless monologue about the toxic mess of American politics.
Charles Atlas: About Time, installation view. Courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine. Photo: Mel Taing. Pictured: The Tyranny of Consciousness, 2017.
Though Atlas is not strictly speaking a documentarian, his work is also an archive from times of great cultural courage. Memory is short for most things, but I remember the year Giuliani became mayor of New York in 1994. One of his first orders of business: dust off an old law that made dancing illegal in venues that didn’t hold a cabaret license. You couldn’t even wiggle your ass in front of a dive-bar jukebox without getting shouted at by the bartender. Though that time has now passed, a part of me has held on to the belief that public expressions of joy are inherently acts of insurrection. This may explain why I felt a rush of hope for the future—the first I’d felt in some time—when, in Atlas’s video, the sun set and the lights came up on a shot of Bunny in an off-the-shoulder evening gown, her wig cascading like a champagne fountain. A beat with a brass section kicked in, and, as she began to strut and sing, two visitors sitting on a bench in the gallery got up and started dancing.
Jennifer Krasinski is a writer, critic, and editor.