Welcome to 1 wonderful present, the place Observer highlights a not too long ago opened exhibition at a museum exterior New York Metropolis, a spot we all know and love that already receives loads of consideration.
The transition from an Instagram world to a planet dominated by TikTok has been a tough one for a lot of who care about such issues. One main stumbling block: the latter calls for that its topics be capable to minimize a rug. Those that are merely wealthy and unable to bop now danger going the best way of the dodo on social media. It’s price noting how even the dominant medium of the twentieth Century now bends the knee to the dominant one of many twenty first: motion pictures like The Substance, M3gan, Barbie and Saltburn all generated word-of-mouth hype by way of discussions of their chewy choreography.
Charles Atlas was far forward of all of this, as demonstrated by his newly opened retrospective at Boston’s Institute of Modern Artwork, “Charles Atlas: About Time,” the primary U.S. museum survey of one in every of video’s most influential artists. The exhibition collects greater than 125 movies and movies in monumental and immersive multichannel installations the artist describes as “walk-through experiences,” showcasing work from throughout 5 many years.
Atlas made his identify as filmmaker-in-residence on the Merce Cunningham Dance Firm in New York within the Seventies and early 80s. There he pioneered the idea of “media-dance”—dance made for a lens slightly than an in-person viewers—and collaborated with John Cage, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, all of whom, like Cunningham, had equally radical concepts about how previous types ought to be tailored to the trendy period. His tribute to Cunningham, MC⁹ (2012), following his loss of life in 2009, seems on this present in all its nine-channel glory, one of many screens capturing Atlas’s closing filmed dance piece that includes Cunningham, who dances to accommodate music at a ballet barre.
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The anachronism isn’t cheeky however philosophical. Displaying Merce as a younger man and an previous man on the identical time performed with concepts that Atlas would proceed to discover from that time on, which frequently interact with the false linearity of time. The seeds for these emerge, in fact, from the very idea of media-dance. A efficiency is interpersonal and occurs simply as soon as, whereas recorded dance exists endlessly and implies the potential for perfection for eternity. Particularly in the event you’re on TikTok, the place it loops.
These concepts are seen in The Years (2018), a mini-retrospective set up that options gravestone-like displays exhibiting excerpts of seventy-seven Atlas movies organized into 4 intervals, and is very efficient in a correct retrospective. However the one I actually love is The Tyranny of Consciousness (2017), which captures the sundown off the Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva Island. With its countdown clock, it’s barely in regards to the finish of the world, however then once we attain the tip, the well-known drag queen Woman Bunny does a disco dance, her bouffant shaking just like the rays of a brand new star being born.
“Charles Atlas: About Time” is on view at The Institute of Modern Artwork in Boston by way of March 16, 2025.
