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This spring, De Hallen Haarlem is presenting Discount Body
Parts, Charles Atlas's first ever comprehensive museum exhibition. Born
in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1949, Atlas is known above all for his
groundbreaking work in collaboration with choreographers and performers
like Merce Cunningham, Michael Clark, Yvonne Rainer, and Leigh Bowery.
Atlas actively crosses the borders between the fields of dance,
performance, and the visual arts. Starting out in New York in the early
1970s, Atlas was part of the first generation of artists to explore the
artistic possibilities of video. With dancer/choreographer Merce
Cunningham, a close collaborator for much of his career, Atlas developed
what he described as 'media dance,' a radically new way of incorporating
the camera into live performance. Rather than using the camera as a static
recording device, Atlas and Cunningham started to develop pieces in which
it played an active part in the choreography. Much of the exhibition will
be devoted to a video installation that fills the whole of the room,
highlighting these collaborations with Cunningham, whose dance company gave
its last performance on 31 December 2011.
MC9
Discount Body Parts brings together several crucial
aspects of Atlas's artistic practice. In the sweeping multi-channel video
installation, which is entitled MC9, excerpts from his
long-time collaboration with Merce Cunningham (1919-2009) are combined into
an immersive audio-visual environment. Using footage from twenty-seven
media dances, documentaries, and other material created with Cunningham
over a period of forty years, MC9 showcases Atlas's ideas
about reinterpreting, editing, and presenting existing material. Freely
drawing on his image archive, the artist has developed a synchronized
multi-channel video and sound installation that responds to the spatial
characteristics of the monumental seventeenth-century exhibition space of
De Vleeshal. The installation includes scenes from acclaimed media dances
like Fractions (1978), Locale (1980), Channels/Inserts
(1981) and Ocean (2011). Atlas has developed an idiosyncratic
approach to editing, in which he employs graphic components like monochrome
screens and countdown timers—allowing him to precisely (and
rhythmically) direct the temporality of each individual screen in relation
to the experiential time space of the installation as a whole.
Joints 4Tet
In addition to MC9 and single
screen 'video portraits' like Teach, 99, and Ten, the
exhibition will host another whole-room multi-channel installation:
Joints 4tet for Ensemble (1971-2010). The installation combines
footage from a series of Super-8 colour films made by Atlas and Cunningham
in 1971, to which Atlas added unpublished ambient recordings by John Cage
in 2010. Joints 4tet for Ensemble is a four-channel installation
that plays out over a constellation of ten different sized monitors. The
monitors are lit by a couple of slowly panning theatre lights that throw
dramatic shadows on the walls of the exhibition space. The footage shows
close-ups of Merce Cunningham's wrists, elbows, ankles, and knees,
testifying to the dancer's unique physicality. Atlas and Cunningham filmed
outside the studio on a warm afternoon, after a rehearsal in California. By
adding Cage's soundtrack, which was recorded in different cities that Cage
travelled to with Cunningham in the 1980s, and is made up chiefly of the
sounds of the city, Atlas subtly pits the individual fragility of the human
body against the immersive chaos of the urban environment. In this work, as
in MC9, notions of the fragmented body, and of the
fragment versus the whole, are linked to the medium-specific possibilities
of the multi-channel video installation.
Curated by Xander
Karskens
Charles Atlas's work has been represented in the
collection of De Hallen Haarlem since 2009. His films Nevada and
Floor (both 1974), made in collaboration with choreographer Douglas
Dunn, are important works in the museum's collection of performative film
and video art.
Charles Atlas's widely-exhibited work was
recently shown in the South London Gallery, the New Museum, and the Museum
of Modern Art in New York. His work is currently part of the Whitney
Biennial. In the past few years De Hallen Haarlem has shown Atlas's films
in several group exhibitions, such as He disappeared into complete
silence (2011) and Body/Space Mechanics (2010). Alongside
Charles Atlas's exhibition, De Hallen Haarlem also presents the solo
exhibition La Vache Qui Rit by Hamid el Kanbouhi, and a display of
recent acquisitions.
De Hallen Extra
21 May 2012,
8pm
Screening of Charles Atlas's film Hail the New Puritan
(1987) and a Q&A session with the artist.
Venue: Toneelschuur,
Lange Begijnestraat 9, Haarlem, the Netherlands. Admission: EUR 9.
Tickets from www.toneelschuur.nl
*Image above:
Charles Atlas, Discount Body
Parts. Installation view at De Hallen Haarlem, 2012.
Photo by Gert
Jan van Rooij.
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