Cleverness aside, the show has two strikes against it from the hop. Atlas is best known as a collaborator and interlocutor to his much more famous peers, largely generations of the New York avant garde from the choreographer Merce Cunningham to performance artist Marina Abramovich to post-punk icons Sonic Youth. And video art is a wildly uneven discipline that, despite counting a handful of truly great works, suffers from a not-undeserved reputation of boring its viewers into a puddle of indifference with its demands to sit still while esoteric subject matter and muddy, low-quality visuals unspool in front of them.
Not so here. Sleek, elegant, experiential, and wisely concise, “About Time,” like the work it contains, moves briskly, effortlessly, inviting viewers to meander and linger, rather than pinning them in place. It’s spatial, like an exhibition of sculpture; narrative, like a show of paintings; and dynamic, in a way only moving images can be.
of Contemporary Art/Boston, shows “The Years,” 2018. Conceived, tongue-in-cheek, as his own stand-alone retrospective, it includes four video monitors with works across the artist’s career, apparently overseen by a group of tweens projected on a large screen behind.
Mel Taing
And, bless it, it has a sense of humor. The show opens with “The Years,” a 2018 installation that surveys Atlas’s long career in tight, morbid fashion. Four squat towers of video monitors scroll through decades of his output: the 1970s, ‘80s, ‘90s, and aughts; Atlas himself refers to them as gravestones — a nod to his always-and-ever-forward practice, surely, but maybe also a good-natured shrug at the reputation of his chosen medium in the wider world. As though to put a fine point on it, a video piece of four bored-looking tweens looms over the space, occupying an entire wall; the TikTok generation is not impressed.
But if we could drag them into the next room, they might be. Here, nine slim screens hang suspended throughout the space at varying heights and angles. They make up a piece called “MC9,” most of them capturing snippets of dance rehearsals or performances. Unfurling in unrelated harmony, the sense is of a conversation, bound together in fluid bodily movement.
As you navigate the loose maze the screens create, you realize they’re translucent; each projection appears as a mirror image on the opposite side. Individual soundtracks softly emanate from each of the nine, whether music, conversation or both. Up close, you can focus on them individually. On a languorous meander, which the installation invites, or even compels, I found the soft murmur of overlapping sound to be enveloping, captivating, full of subtle wonder.
The piece is a tribute to Cunningham, who appears onscreen himself in a few of them; each dance piece is his work. Atlas more or less owes his career to him, and his many pioneering turns in the nascent realm of video art in the 1970s have Cunningham at their center. Atlas came to New York in 1970 from St. Louis, just 20 years old, and found work with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company as a stage manager, lighting designer, and in 1974, its first filmmaker in residence.
Cunningham’s genre-defying choreography demanded an equally unconventional approach to capturing it on film. Atlas came up with the idea of “media dance,” films made not as documents of the performance, but with the camera acting as a performer itself. Moving in and through the dance, Atlas’s camera didn’t simply record the performance; it participated, drawing the viewer inside.
He made more than 100 such pieces with the company over almost a decade (he left in 1983). When Cunningham died in 2009, Atlas took stock of his hours upon hours of archival footage. “MC9,″ from 2012, is the result, a simple stroke of brilliance. Liberated from a fixed point, the piece compels you not simply to watch but to participate, shifting the piece from visual to experiential. I loved it.
No artist working in the early days of video can rightly slip away without some homage to another era’s clunky apparatus, the black-box video tube monitor, but, as with everything else here, ICA curator Jeffrey DeBlois manages it with aplomb.
To be blunt: Watching anachronistic videotape on clunky monitors is how video art got a bad rap in the first place, but “Personalities,” made for this exhibition, navigates the issue deftly. In a space wallpapered with colorful film stills, odd-height pedestals unfurl video snippets of Atlas’s star-studded community over the years. We see the performance doyenne Marina Abromovich, sporting a slithering headdress of live snakes; Leigh Bowery, the drag performer, parading the streets of New York in a Mr. Peanut suit draped in a glittering gown slit hip high; a very young Sonic Youth (circa, I’d guess, late ‘80s) just loafing around. A flat-screen monitor on the wall signals another allegiance — John Waters, the camp auteur, situating Atlas in the creative hotbed of New York’s 20th-century gay underground.
Another treat is an installation like “MC9” that cuts the viewer adrift amid islands of moving images, on screens strung hither and yon. Something like a cohesive narrative hangs together here; the piece, “A Prune Twin,” from 2020, knits a pair of older pieces into Atlas’s newer, immersive practice. Loosely, it’s a day(ish) in the life of another long-term collaborator, the Scottish choreographer Michael Clark, set against the backdrop of Thatcherism and punk rock revolution in 1980s London.
Enthralling bursts of movement — Clark, at times, with a mohawk — scrape up against dour scenes of working-class London: wrecking yards, demolition sites, a bleak journey on the Tube. On one screen, Clark narrates his biography as a problem child who found liberation in dance, with the soft thrum of urban energy vibrating all around. It’s captivating and at least partly fictional (Bowery designed costumes for Clark and his troupe specifically for one of the older pieces, “Because We Must,” from 1989). Its raw verve is a rare, unique thrill.
Amid the dizzying splendor of Atlas’s experiential wonders, DeBlois keeps it simple in closing. “Tyranny of Consciousness,” 2017, tiles together a few dozen views of sunsets into tight little boxes across an enormous screen while a fretful voice narrates the anxieties of our times: climate change, the dominance of big money, political unrest (a uniquely jarring thing to experience this week, with those years-old fears resurging in the run-up to the election).
It’s all prelude, though, to a knockdown performance by Lady Bunny, a preeminent drag queen diva of the New York scene. She explodes onto the screen with her outsize golden-blond halo coiffure, obliterating anxiety with an exuberance that feels equal parts desperate and joyful, which seems about right. Dancing amid the ruins? Ask me in a week. For now, it’s enough just to dance.
CHARLES ATLAS: ABOUT TIME
Through March 16. ICA Boston, 25 Harbor Shore Drive. 617-478-3100, icaboston.org
Murray Whyte can be reached at murray.whyte@globe.com. Follow him @TheMurrayWhyte.
