“Joints Array” is a multimedia installation by the groundbreaking video artist Charles Atlas (b. 1949, St. Louis, Missouri). For more than forty years, Atlas has explored the possibilities of filmed movement and time-based portraiture through a melding of narrative, fiction, documentation, technological innovation, and precise editing. Since 2003, he has been creating live-edited works presented in the exhibition space, as a performance, and, later on, as completed works. Atlas’s films, videos, installations, performances, set, and lighting designs have involved collaborations with leading figures in dance, music, and art, including Cunningham, Marina Abramović, Antony and the Johnsons, Leigh Bowery, Michael Clark, Fennesz, Bill Irwin, John Kelly, Yvonne Rainer, and, most recently, Mika Tajima and New Humans. “Charles Atlas: Joints Array” is curated by Jenny Moore, Assistant Curator.
Atlas began working for his mentor and collaborator Merce Cunningham as an assistant stage manager in the early 1970s and was filmmaker-in-residence for Cunningham’s dance company from 1978 to 1983. On the occasion of Cunningham’s death in 2009, Atlas revisited his earliest films of the dancer and made Joints 4tet for Ensemble, a four-channel installation of synchronized videos choreographed across ten variously sized monitors. For the New Museum exhibition, Atlas will expand upon this earlier work by presenting a new installation of the original four videos as large-scale projections on a multitude of variously sized monitors. The exhibition features excerpts of Atlas’s first Super 8 color films of Cunningham: filmic experiments shot while the dancer was taking a break from rehearsals. Close-up shots of Cunningham’s wrist, elbow, ankle, and knee capture the dancer’s unique style of movement and function as a fractured portrait of motion and form that varies in tempo and scale. The soundtrack comprises unpublished ambient recordings by Cunningham’s life partner, the avant-garde composer John Cage, from cities the pair visited together. Theatrical lights define the space and shape the experience of the images moving across the array of screens. Intimate, poignant, and provocative, the videos stand in distinct contrast to the more formal collaborations between Atlas and Cunningham that comprise the bulk of their work together. “Joints Array” transforms a casual interaction between dancer and filmmaker into a vivid performance of personal and cultural importance.
This is Charles Atlas’s first New York museum presentation in fifteen years. His videos and installations have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Tate Modern, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Recent presentations include a solo exhibition at Vilma Gold, London; a collaborative exhibition with Mika Tajima and New Humans at South First Gallery, London; and a collaboration with Michael Clark in the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern, London.
