Welcome to one fine show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum outside New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.
The transition from an Instagram world to a planet dominated by TikTok has been a difficult one for many who care about such matters. One major stumbling block: the latter demands that its subjects be able to cut a rug. Those who are merely rich and unable to dance now risk going the way of the dodo on social media. It’s worth noting how even the dominant medium of the 20th Century now bends the knee to the dominant one of the 21st: movies like The Substance, M3gan, Barbie and Saltburn all generated word-of-mouth hype through discussions of their chewy choreography.
Charles Atlas was far ahead of all of this, as demonstrated by his newly opened retrospective at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, “Charles Atlas: About Time,” the first U.S. museum survey of one of video’s most influential artists. The exhibition collects more than 125 films and videos in monumental and immersive multichannel installations the artist describes as “walk-through experiences,” showcasing work from across five decades.
Atlas made his name as filmmaker-in-residence at the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in New York in the 1970s and early 80s. There he pioneered the concept of “media-dance”—dance made for a lens rather than an in-person audience—and collaborated with John Cage, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, all of whom, like Cunningham, had similarly radical ideas about how old forms should be adapted to the modern era. His tribute to Cunningham, MC⁹ (2012), following his death in 2009, appears in this show in all its nine-channel glory, one of the screens capturing Atlas’s final filmed dance piece featuring Cunningham, who dances to house music at a ballet barre.
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The anachronism isn’t cheeky but philosophical. Showing Merce as a young man and an old man at the same time played with ideas that Atlas would continue to explore from that point on, which often engage with the false linearity of time. The seeds for these emerge, of course, from the very concept of media-dance. A performance is interpersonal and happens just once, while recorded dance exists forever and implies the possibility of perfection for eternity. Especially if you’re on TikTok, where it loops.
These ideas are seen in The Years (2018), a mini-retrospective installation that features gravestone-like monitors showing excerpts of seventy-seven Atlas films organized into four periods, and is especially effective in a proper retrospective. But the one I really love is The Tyranny of Consciousness (2017), which captures the sunset off the Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva Island. With its countdown clock, it’s slightly about the end of the world, but then when we reach the end, the famous drag queen Lady Bunny does a disco dance, her bouffant shaking like the rays of a new star being born.
“Charles Atlas: About Time” is on view at The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston through March 16, 2025.
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