Charles Atlas
Still from Because We Must, by Charles Atlas. Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine
Jan. 28-Mar. 11
Luhring Augustine. 531 W. 24th St. Chelsea
The best artists do more than reflect their own time—they are also attuned to the future. Take Charles Atlas, a New York-based maverick who has been working at the crossroads of moving images and moving bodies for fifty years. In the seventies, as the filmmaker-in-residence for Merce Cunningham’s company, Atlas helped pioneer a proto-TikTok genre known as “media dance,” with choreography conceived for the camera rather than for the stage.
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In Atlas’s enthralling video installation “A Prune Twin” (an anagram of “New Puritan”), from 2020, on view at the Luhring Augustine gallery through March 11, the artist excerpts footage from that groundbreaking film, and from a related 1989 project, “Because We Must” (pictured above). The result is a media dance in its own right, as scenes formerly confined to a single channel traverse eight screens in two rooms—and invite you to move with them—for twenty exquisite, outrageous, time-bending minutes.
Read full article at newyorker.com
