Charles Atlas

Charles Atlas, pioneer of video and performance and doyen of Manhattan’s downtown scene, spent time in London in the 1980s as New York was changing. “Everyone I knew [in London],” he told Stuart Comer in 2011, “was on the dole, spent all their money on costuming themselves, were shoplifting, and there was nothing to gain and everyone was really friendly. It wasn’t like New York at all… it was about subculture.”1 Forty years later, an exhibition at Champ Lacombe celebrates his enduring subcultural instincts while insisting, too, upon his place in the canon.

In this bijou Bloomsbury space, fifteen works are screened in three looped projections divided between its two floors. Some have sound, others do not. At ground level are nine films and videos, dating from his earliest works in 1970 to the most recent in 2010. I enter at Self-Portrait (1972), a short silent work in which the artist regards himself before a hinged vanity mirror, before turning to readjust the camera on the tripod behind him. If a face can come to express the personality beneath it over time, then, aged twenty-three, Atlas looked easygoing, curious, and playful. These seem, in any case, to be the sensibilities of what’s on show, from his quiet observations in Doves (his Super 8 camera tracing the grass-pecking of an absurdly feathered white bird, 1970) or Water Reels (watching a clear glass as it fills, fizzes, and overspills with water, 1971), to the collaborative works he made with increasingly rambunctious dancers and players.

Atlas came to the medium of film in 1970 through his work as a stage manager with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.2 He worked first on lighting and then recording, taking the camera off the tripod to follow dancers so that his footage was, in his own words, “choreographed within and around the dance.”3 Atlas captured Cunningham’s performances, including pared-down balletic sequences with marquee dancers like Carolyn Brown, visible here in Some TV Rerun Movies (1972). And he adopted some of Cunningham’s subversions of the proscenium stage in the filmed floor-bound set piece featuring Douglas Dunn, Floor (1974). But it was with more rogue performers that Atlas found his form in the 1980s exploring pop culture, fashion, camp, and nocturnal life. The emphasis on these themes distinguishes this exhibition from previous London outings focused on the earlier Cunningham-adjacent works (Vilma Gold, 2010; Tate Tanks, 2013) or his later collaborations (South London Gallery, 2011; Bloomberg Space, 2013).

Butchers’ Vogue (1990) was made with Atlas’s friends in Florent, a twenty-four-hour diner in New York’s Meatpacking District, shot full of customers at night. Outside, two gorgeous trans prostitutes (Gina Vetro and Connie Fleming) escape a rogue cop (DJ Keoki) and come inside only to seduce and then beat up a handsome male diner, having lured him into the basement. The short piece culminates in a restaurant-floor group-dance to camera, choreographed by Richard Move, the central duo lip-syncing to Madonna’s Vogue. It was motivated by Atlas’s fury that the pop star had totally appropriated gay ballroom culture: “she didn’t get it.”4 Rejected by the MTV competition for which it was made, Atlas’s video played instead in the city’s club scene. Here, it was a hit. And unsurprisingly, given how funny and invigorating it is to watch.

The sense of defiance in his 1980s works is apposite for a period marked by LGBTQ+ activism, racial justice campaigning, and the splintering of second-wave feminism under Reaganism. On the basement floor, From an Island Summer (1983–84) shows Karole Armitage and her dancers roaming from the sunny promenades of Long Island to the sweaty nights of Time Square. Beside cinema marquees, booth girls, and scintillating bulbs, they bound and spin through busy Manhattan streets exuding a fearlessness that is all the more poignant given the devastation of AIDS then befalling the city. Schlocky femme horror surfaces in his DANCENOISE Scraps (2010), his ode to the queer performance duet Anne Iobst and Lucy Sexton. They gad about with their upper bodies tied into black sacks while their stray legs wriggle in US-flag cycling shorts, symbolizing a creepy, headless patriotism. Sequences appear hammy and angry and hilarious before Atlas’s roving lens.

Outside the gallery, nine city billboards have been pasted with stills from Mayonnaise Number One (1973), a filmed tableau vivant (featuring Dunn) based on Manet’s deeply lit and suggestively titled portrait Boy with Cherries (1858). They are, perhaps, an invitation to intrepid Londoners to trace Atlas’s work back to the gallery—though they seem a somewhat anodyne urban intervention compared to the punkish pleasures of what’s held inside. This bustling little show seems enough of a provocation for a larger institutional survey (like those of his friends Michael Clark and Leigh Bowery at London’s Barbican and Tate Modern, respectively) to explore how Atlas’s work has linked queer performance subcultures and sensibilities between cities over the years. I left the show feeling enlivened, and wanting more.