Charles Atlas, Champ Lacombe London
1 Woburn Walk, WC1H 0JJ
Opening October 12, 6-8pm
One of the most influential figures in video and media art, Charles Atlas (b.1949) came to prominence as a filmmaker embedded in the world of dance. A close collaborator of Merce Cunningham and later Michael Clark, Leigh Bowery and ANOHNI, he has treated the camera as a choreographic partner rather than a neutral witness. This exhibition looks to the beginnings of that approach, bringing together fifteen single-channel works made between 1970 and 2010.
Together these extraordinary works trace an artistic language that is both playful and intimate, with boundless complexity, that has remained ahead of its time for half a century.
The exhibition continues beyond the gallery, into the city, whereby one can trace film stills from Atlas' work Mayonnaise Number One (1973) across multiple billboards, 9 in total.
Inside the gallery, the earliest works on view date from 1970. Doves (Cartridge Lengths 1) and Ride (Cartridge Lengths 3) show Atlas testing the limits of the medium through duration, repetition and the physical constraints of the film cartridge. Water Reels (1971) and Vegetable Show (1971) turn everyday matter into moving abstraction. In Vegetable Show we see with absolute clarity the artist’s attention to gesture, a sublime and poetic reduction. Some TV Rerun Movies (1972) shows Atlas moving between the language of broadcast television and that of dance documentation, with a sensibility that is at once rigorous and mischievous.
Floor (1974), one of the most formally austere works in the exhibition was shot on Super 8 one afternoon in 1974. Arriving at the loft of the dancer Douglas Dunn on lower Broadway with a camera, a light and a tripod, and proposing that they make something together. Interested in working around the edges of the frame, he fixed the camera in a single static shot and let Dunn move mostly around its periphery, leaving the centre empty. Strips of tape on the floor helped Dunn orient himself within the frame, and the two rehearsed the sequence a few times. Atlas regards his performance as virtuosic: Dunn grasped the space and the limits of the frame and found his own solution. Atlas shot it twice, and that was all. The footage lay unseen for decades.
Portraiture, and the performance of identity, runs through the exhibition. Self-Portrait (1972) - his only direct self portrait - sets the artist face to face with himself in a work of quiet, doubled intensity. Mayonnaise Number One (1973), a silent work first shot on 16mm film, is among the longest works on view. Conceived as the first of a planned series of filmic portraits after Édouard Manet, it restages The Boy with Cherries (1858) as a tableau vivant. Douglas Dunn, with whom Atlas has worked consistently throughout his career, sits before a burgundy velvet backdrop beside a sawhorse piled with red fruit. Atlas gave him a single rule: he could move as he pleased, so long as one elbow stayed on the sawhorse. He switched on the camera and left the room. His exit is visible just ten seconds in. Dunn begins with blinks, shifts of weight and what Atlas calls “face dance”, then abandons the rule altogether. He crushes the cherries under his body, or retreats beneath the sawhorse. Throughout, his gaze holds the lens, breaking the fourth wall - he insists individual agency, not merely a subject.
The Grand Dance of the Jolly Three (1973/2010) takes its title from a show advertisement within D.W. Griffith’s The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912), which Atlas plays on one side of a vertically split frame, in sync with his own footage of a woman shot in colour and a couple in black-and-white. They mimic the movements, gestures and gazes of the actors in Griffith’s film. The film’s studious focus on the actions of early cinema creates a dialogue across history.
From the 1980s onward, sound, music and costume enter the work in force. From an Island Summer (1983–1984), and Butchers’ Vogue (1990) mark this turn. Mirror and Hapi Phace (both 1991), and Aria (1999) show Atlas’ continuing fascination with transformation, whether through makeup, gesture, voice or a mirrored surface.
Aria (1999), isolates a single complete take from Son of Sam and Delilah, for which Atlas filmed each of John Kelly’s performances as one continuous shot: the final aria, Samson and Delilah’s bedroom scene. Kelly’s Delilah plays against a sunset backdrop painted by the art director Scott Lifshutz, who copied the image from a box of Trojan condoms; as the camera moves in on the kiss, a flicker of simulated lightning reveals a condom box on the bedside table. The title answers the feature anthology Aria, in which ten directors, among them Godard and Altman, each responded to an aria.
Butchers’ Vogue (1990), with choreography by Richard Move, began as a protest. Atlas was incensed by Madonna’s video for «Vogue», which he felt took gay, underground ballroom culture and reduced it to style, and he made his own version for MTV’s make-your-own-video contest for the song. He did not win.
Shot in the middle of the night at Florent, the 24-hour French restaurant in the Meatpacking District, with friends from the club world, it follows a pair of prostitutes, played by Gina Vetro and Connie Fleming, who are trailed by a cop (DJ Keoki), while the waiters dance on the counter. One of the women lures a man into the basement and the other follows; together they beat him up, all intercut with them lip-synching the lyrics. Shut out of MTV, the video found its audience in clubs.
The most recent work on view, DANCENOISE Scraps (2010), is a tribute to the performance duo Anne Iobst and Lucy Sexton. Atlas first saw them perform in the 1980s and became close friends, following them from show to show and casting them in his own work, including Son of Sam and Delilah and As Seen on TV.
Presented together here in London, these works show Atlas’ early seminal experiments and his later engagement with performance belong to a single, consistent and entirely singular practice. Throughout, he uses the video image as something to be shaped, layered and choreographed.
The exhibition continues beyond the gallery, into the city, tracing Mayonnaise Number One (1973) across multiple billboards, 9 in total. Encountered in passing, Douglas Dunn’s unwavering gaze meets the public directly, and the film’s intimacy, staged as a private moment, is offered to the street. Seen one by one as the viewer moves through the city, the frames echo the film’s own sequence of shifting poses and turns London into a stage for Atlas’ choreographic camera.
