‘Either People Get It, Or They Don’t’: Inside the Mind of Trailblazing Filmic Artist Charles Atlas
As an exhibition of the artist’s single‑channel works opens in London, he talks to Amie Corry about the importance of irony, his love of numbers and his ambivalence about contemporary video culture.Save to My Ocula
‘Either People Get It, Or They Don’t’: Inside the Mind of Trailblazing Filmic Artist Charles AtlasSave to My Ocula
In 1974, Charles Atlas had only just become choreographer Merce Cunningham’s filmmaker-in-residence when he visited dancer Douglas Dunn in his Broadway loft. Atlas set his Super 8 on a tripod, trained it on the floor, and marked out its frame of reference. Dunn’s feet appear at the very edges of the frame while the centre remains empty. He ends the film—the nearly four-minute-long Floor—sprawled face down across the frame’s centre. While the film’s interest in fragmentation is an expression of Cunningham’s radical approach to dance, Floor also speaks to Atlas’ mischievous brilliance.
A movie obsessive with no formal training, Atlas was working as Cunningham’s assistant stage manager when he showed the choreographer his filmic experiments. These films—among 15 works dating from 1970–2010 currently showing at Champ Lacombe, London—signal the beginning of more than 50 years of radical innovation at the intersection of film, performance and media.
Atlas’ subjects are drawn from the fabric of his life: dance, music, queerness and collaboration. Alongside the Cunningham Company, where he was in residence on and off until 2009, he formed creative relationships with Leigh Bowery, Michael Clark, Hapi Phace, Yvonne Rainer, Anohni and many others. His output is propelled by a restless creativity and technological mastery, coupled with a self-professed workaholism learned from Cunningham.
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Atlas’ dance films extend the possibilities of performance, the camera often moving with the body, a technique he christened “media dance”. His docu-fantasy Hail the New Puritan (1986) follows a day in the life of a more famous version of choreographer Michael Clark and his friends, ahead of a performance of Clark’s 1984 work New Puritans. Produced for British broadcaster Channel 4, the film was shown alongside a series of straight dance documentaries. Informed by Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls (1966) and The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night (1964), it is funny, biting and aesthetically magnificent, situating dance, fashion and music as co-drivers of an anarchic, transcendent force. While Atlas’ films revel in their performers’ talents, the artist remains that oft-referenced, rarely encountered thing: a pioneer.
Charles Atlas. Photo: Lori E Seid.
I talked to Atlas about how the early films feel now, the importance of irony and his love of numbers (though not contemporary video culture.)
Amie Corry: How much, if any, of Hail the New Puritan was scripted?
Charles Atlas: I just told everyone to be exaggerated versions of themselves. For the scene in Leigh [Bowery]’s apartment, I just gave them the first line and they went from there. My only other instruction, because I knew them, was: “You’re not to be so nice to each other.” I think that was the key.
AC: That film is such a wild, beautiful ride. Do you think about the viewer when you’re filmmaking?
CA: I only think about the performer, and a bit about my own reaction. Either people get it, or they don’t.
AC: You’re showing your earliest films at Champ Lacombe, some for the first time. I’m interested in their strange, dreamlike quality.
CA: I was experimenting with the camera. I’ve been self-taught all along. All the things I’ve learned, I’ve learned from instruction manuals and tutorials.
AC: The exhibition features Self-Portrait (1972), in which you become the subject of the film. We see you in a mirror, shifting, glancing out of the window, eventually moving to the camera. How does that film feel to you now?
CA: I like Self-Portrait because it somehow feels like my way of thinking—trying this and trying that. Most people who were making videos back then were making videos of themselves, and I was shooting other people, so it wasn’t considered art in the same way. But that’s what I did.
AC: In Mayonnaise Number One (1973), showing across nine London billboards during the exhibition’s opening week, you restaged Édouard Manet’s The Boy with Cherries (1858) with Douglas Dunn. You gave Dunn one instruction: to keep his elbow always in contact with the workbench in front of him. The result is a twitchy, cheeky battle of minds. But why did you leave the set while Dunn was performing?
CA: I wanted him to do things that he’d be embarrassed to do in front of me, and that’s exactly what I got. Some of the things he did felt very private.
AC: Tell me about your approach to sound. Your films for Merce Cunningham presumably reflect some of Cunningham and his partner John Cage’s relationships to silence.
CA: With Merce [Cunningham], I concentrated on the visuals. Music was whatever; it didn’t go with the dance. With Michael [Clark] it was the opposite, it’s so music-derivative. Michael has great musical taste. When I make my own work I think mainly of abstract rather than pop music.
“I really objected to Madonna’s Vogue because it took all of the queerness out of it. I just wanted to put it back in”
AC: What about Butchers’ Vogue (1990), which is set to Madonna’s hit and stars Connie Fleming and Gina Vetro as lip-syncing, voguing sex workers evading or screwing over idiotic men?
CA: I’ve never made a video with less money and less time! I had one night in Florent, a [now closed] 24-hour-restaurant in the Meatpacking District. MTV had a “make-your-own Vogue” contest. I used to go to house balls a lot, and I really objected to Madonna’s Vogue because it took all of the queerness out of it. I just wanted to put it back in.
AC: Irony feels like a driving force in much of your work.
CA: Irony is my middle name, and that’s why I get along so well with Michael. It was a real shock working with Anonhi [on the 2012 film Turning] because I had to take a really serious approach. It worked out, though.
CA: When I looked back at my old notes, I found that they’re all just numbers—timecodes for editing. It reflects the preciseness of my work, in both timing and execution. Numbers are my friends.
AC: At Charles Atlas: About Time, your ICA Boston retrospective in 2024, your 48-year oeuvre played out on phone-shaped screens alongside footage of four deadpan young people, facing outwards. Did you enjoy working with larger, complex installations?
CA: I’d really love to do that Boston show again. It didn’t travel, because it’s expensive to work with that much film. I have Parkinson’s, so I don’t know what that portends.
AC: There’s a melancholic tone to your later films, particularly The Years (2018) and The Waning of Justice (2015). We live in apocalyptic times, not least because of the horrific abuse of queer and trans people’s rights. Do you feel pessimistic?
CA: When I made The Waning of Justice, I felt there was something in the air: the [first] Trump era. So I made a piece about the end of the world, but it ends with a disco song. It was originally a two-room piece, with the film of [drag performer] Lady Bunny in the backroom, but you could hear Bunny’s voice throughout both spaces. Towards the end, the rest of the sound falls away and you just hear Bunny in the backroom. I was afraid of what was coming, ahead of time.
AC: Which technological development has had the biggest impact on your work?
CA: The big change was when I got a computer and editing software in the early 1990s, because otherwise I had to rent a place to do the editing. The computer made it possible for me to do things that weren’t connected to a project. Suddenly, I could just have fun.
AC: Do you have thoughts on the consumption and production of contemporary video culture?
