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About Time at the ICA by Charles Atlas activate the visual
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About Time at the ICA by Charles Atlas activate the visual

Cleverness aside, the show has two strikes against it from the hop. Atlas is best known as a collaborator and interlocutor with his much more famous colleagues, mostly generations of the New York avant-garde, from choreographer Merce Cunningham to performance artist Marina Abramovici to post-punk icons Sonic Youth. And video art is an extremely uneven discipline that, despite the number of a few really great workssuffers from an undeserved reputation for boring its viewers into a puddle of indifference with its demands to sit still while esoteric subject matter and muddy, low-quality visuals unfold before them.

Not so here. Sleek, elegant, experiential and wisely concise, About Time, like the work it contains, moves briskly, effortlessly, inviting viewers to walk and linger rather than hold them still. It is spatial, like a sculpture exhibition; narrative, like a picture show; and dynamic, in a way only moving images can be.

An installation view of “Charles Atlas: About Time,” at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, shows “The Years,” 2018. Conceived, ironically, as its own stand-alone retrospective, it includes four video monitors with works by throughout the artist’s career, apparently overseen by a group of teenagers projected on a large screen in the back.
Mel Taing

And, bless him, he has a sense of humor. The show opens with “The Years,” a 2018 installation that presents Atlas’ long career in a tight and morbid way. Four squat towers of video monitors span decades of production: the 1970s, 80s, 90s and aughts; Atlas himself refers to them as tombstones – a nod to his practice on and on, to be sure, but perhaps also a kind shrug at the reputation of his chosen medium in the wider world. As if to punctuate it, a video piece of four bored thugs looms over the space, taking up an entire wall; the TikTok generation is not impressed.

But if we could drag them into the next room, they might be. Here, nine thin screens hang suspended throughout the space at different heights and angles. They put together a piece called ‘MC9’, mostly capturing snippets from rehearsals or dance performances. Unfolding in unconnected harmony, the meaning is of a conversation, linked together in a fluid movement of the body.

As you navigate the loose maze created by the screens, you realize they are translucent; each projection appears as a mirror image on the opposite side. Individual soundtracks gently emanate from each of the nine, be it music, conversation, or both. Up close, you can focus on them individually. On a languid mead, which the installation invites, or even compels, I found the gentle murmur of superimposed sound enveloping, captivating, full of subtle wonder.

Charles Atlas, ‘MC9’, 2012. Installation view, ‘Charles Atlas: About Time’, Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston.Mel Taing

The piece is a tribute to Cunningham, who himself appears on screen in several of them; every dance piece is his work. Atlas owes more or less his career to him, and his many pioneering transformations into the emerging realm of video art in the 1970s have Cunningham at their center. Atlas came to New York in 1970 from St. Louis, just 20 years old, and found work with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company as stage manager, lighting designer and, in 1974, its first director-in-residence.

Cunningham’s genre-defying choreography called for an equally unconventional approach to capturing the film. Atlas came up with the idea of ​​”media dance”, films made not as documents of the performance, but with the camera acting as an interpreter in itself. Moving in and through the dance, Atlas’s camera did not simply record the performance; participated, drawing the viewer in.

He made over 100 such pieces with the company over nearly a decade (he left in 1983). When Cunningham died in 2009, Atlas took stock of his hours and hours of archival footage. 2012’s ‘MC9’ is the result, a simple stroke of brilliance. Released from a fixed point, the piece compels you not just to watch, but to participate, moving the piece from visual to experiential. I liked it.

Charles Atlas, “Personalities,” 2024, a 12-channel video installation. this is part of “Charles Atlas: About Time,” at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston.Mel Taing

No artist working in the early days of video can rightly escape without an homage to another era’s strange apparatus, the black box video tube monitor, but as with everything else here, ICA curator Jeffrey DeBlois handles it with aplomb

To be blunt: watching anachronistic videotape on clunky monitors is how video art got its bad reputation in the first place, but “Personalities,” made for this exhibition, navigates the problem deftly. In a space papered with colorful film stills, pedestals of odd heights unfold video clips of the star-studded Atlas community over the years. We see performance dean Marina Abromovici wearing a slippery helmet of live snakes; Leigh Bowery, the drag performer, parading the streets of New York in a Mr. Peanut costume draped in a sparkly high-cut dress; a very young Sonic Youth (around late 80’s I think) just finds itself. A flat-screen monitor on the wall signals another submission – John Waters, the camp author, situates Atlas in the creative hotbed of New York’s 20th-century gay underground.

Another treat is an installation like “MC9” that keeps the viewer adrift among islands of moving images on screens strung here and there. Something like a cohesive narrative hangs together here; the piece, 2020’s “A Prune Twin,” weaves a pair of older pieces into Atlas’s newer, more immersive practice. Overall, it’s a day (a day) in the life of another long-term collaborator, Scottish choreographer Michael Clark, set against the backdrop of Thatcherism and the 1980s London punk rock revolution.

Installation view of Charles Atlas, ‘A Prune Twin’, 2020 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.Murray Whyte/Globe staff

Captivating explorations of movement – ​​Clark, at times, with a mohawk – collide with the grisly scenes of working-class London: demolition yards, demolition sites, a bleak tube journey. On one screen, Clark narrates his biography as a troubled child who found release in dance, with the gentle hum of urban energy vibrating all around. It’s captivating and at least partly fictional (Bowery designed costumes for Clark and his band specifically for one of the older tracks, 1989’s “Because We Must”). Its raw verve is a rare, unique thrill.

Amidst the heady splendor of Atlas’ experiential wonders, DeBlois keeps it simple in the conclusion. “Tyranny of Consciousness,” 2017, splices together several dozen views of sunsets in tight boxes on an enormous screen, while an agitated voice narrates the anxieties of our times: climate change, the dominance of big money, political unrest (a unique disturbance). thing to experience this week, with those years-old fears resurfacing in the run-up to the election).

It’s all, however, a prelude to a debate show by Lady Bunny, a preeminent drag queen diva of the New York scene. She explodes onto the screen with her huge golden-blonde hairdo, banishing anxiety with an exuberance that feels equal parts desperate and gleeful, which feels about right. Dancing among the ruins? Ask me in a week. For now, just dancing is enough.

CHARLES ATLAS: ABOUT TIME

Until March 16. ICA Boston, 25 Harbor Shore Drive. 617-478-3100, icaboston.org


Murray Whyte can be reached at [email protected]. Follow L @TheMurrayWhyte.