Merce Cunningham (1919-2009)
For Merce.
Tap dancing in the opening segment for Time (Season Two). A collaboration with Charles Atlas. Announcement: The New York Times.
Rare Charles Atlas screening this Saturday in NYC
In the late 1990s, Art21 artist Charles Atlas created a series of video collages for Martha@Mother at the infamous and now defunct downtown New York nightclub Mother.
The non-advertised but very popular monthly event was a send-up of modern dance and in 1998 the New York Times described the event as:
…a satiric character study of Graham as artist, diva and publicity hound…as well as a loving tribute to modern dance and its practitioners. The combination of serious dance and high camp was devised by…[Richard] Move…in collaboration with Janet Stapleton….[they] wanted to create an event that fused their shared love for both contemporary choreography and the sweaty energy of the club scene.
On Saturday, December 20, Atlas will be screening most of these collage videos and appear in person for intermittent discussion and commentary.
Atlas has been active as an interdisciplinary filmmaker and video artist since the 1970s. Over the years he has made pioneering media/dance works, multi-channel video installations, feature-length documentaries, video art works for television, and live electronic performances.
He has collaborated with countless choreographers and performers, including Marina Abramovic, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Leigh Bowery, Merce Cunningham, Diamanda Galas, Bill Irwin and Yvonne Rainer.
In November 2006, London’s Tate Modern honored him with a retrospective of his work, which was titled Hail the New Puritan.
This is a must for fans of Atlas’ irreverent brand of video. Event info:
Saturday, December 20th, 8 PM to 11 PM
Doors open from 7:30 to 10:30 PM
541 Broadway (between Prince and Spring) 3rd Floor, New York City
Free admission
Charles Atlas at Vilma Gold
Tornado Warning, an exhibition of new works by Charles Atlas opens next week at Vilma Gold Gallery in London. The Art21 artist’s videos often take dance and performance as their point of departure, creating collaborations between the two genres that journey them from traditional documentary to provocative and ironic minglings where narration and fiction overlap. Recently Atlas has taken interest in real-time video as stand-alone, on-stage or live electronic improvisations, coupling the spontaneity of the medium with meticulous formal precision to create visually arresting and challenging new environments.
Several new installations comprise the Vilma Gold exhibition, including the eponymous Tornado Warning, a five-channel video work installed throughout the gallery space that explore the intersection between chaos and order arising from Atlas’ early memories of tornado warnings in his childhood town of St Louis, Missouri. Tornado Alley consists of two rooms that contrast in appearance, form, content and atmosphere, utilizing montage to fashion a large scale installation “that delves into the powers of perception, triggering memory and submerging the viewer in his dream like world.”
Tornado Warning opens November 14 and runs through December 7.
Day 3 – Art21 Online Fundraising Drive
There is one more week to donate to Art21’s first-ever Online Fundraising Drive and be entered to win Art21 DVDs and books! Donate today at Art21.org/donate or the Art21 Facebook Cause to support the production of our TV series, education materials, and extensive Public Programs.
As an organization without a physical exhibition space, Art21 welcomes the opportunity to collaborate with museums, schools, libraries, and other community organizations on public screenings of Art:21. Wherever possible, we like to pair screenings with discussions, and thanks to our new blog, we have been able to share several of these with you during the past few months.
We hope you’ve enjoyed reading excerpts from our series of events at the New York Public Library this winter, most recently the interview with video artist and Art21 Consulting Director, Charles Atlas.
Charles Atlas’ work on Art:21 is representative of our approach: we collaborate with extremely talented individuals to help create our films and programs. In a conversation last fall, the artist spoke about his work on the series:
We really try to honor the people that have been chosen for the series.
I’ve had a long experience in television, and when I’m making something for television, I think about how it’s going to be received, in the same way when I’m making something for a gallery, I think about that context.
What we’re making is 13 minute portraits of artists and their work. This is the primary subject, and the subject is much more important than the forum. Things that you might do in a 13-minute [art] piece that would seem to be fun or interesting wouldn’t necessarily serve the art.
We make variations on the 13 minute documentary. The artists speak for themselves mostly and I try to break down a little bit of the opaqueness. Some of what we actually shoot is quite difficult, so we try to make it clearer without changing the meaning.
In the coming months we will be offering additional excerpts from Art21 Public Programs on our blog and keeping you informed of upcoming Art21 programs nationwide. Donate to Art21 at Art21.org/donate or the Art21 Facebook Cause today to help make this possible!
All those who donate $10 or more to Art21 by Friday, June 20, 2008 will be entered to win Art21 DVDs and books. Read here for details.
Conversations | Charles Atlas with Lia Gangitano | Ask questions for follow-up interview
The following interview took place at the Mid-Manhattan branch of the New York Public Library on April 7, 2008, following a screening of the Art:21 episode Paradox. Consulting Director and video artist Charles Atlas spoke with Lia Gangitano, Director of Participant, Inc.
**Now have the chance to ask Charles Atlas your own questions about his work. Art21 will conduct a follow-up interview with him next month and will publish it on this blog. Leave a question in the comment space below by Friday, June 27 to participate!**
LIA GANGITANO: It’s a great pleasure to be here, and always an honor to have an opportunity to talk with Charlie Atlas. I thought it might be good to ask Charlie to talk a little bit about his work in television, but maybe we should start by giving a tiny bit of information about our working relationship: it has certain overlaps in terms of involvement with people and other artists, ideas about collaboration and general topics that I think are pertinent to everything that Charlie works on. The way that we know each other is through a project that occurred a few years ago at Participant Inc., which began as a discussion about the two of us doing a show together. What that show was initially going to be was sort of a screening or multiple nights of screenings selected from Charlie’s many decades of film and video work. However, as our relationship progressed it became clear that the opportunity Charlie really wanted from an alternative space such as Participant was to actually create a new work on-site, which would be somewhat based on the idea of the portrait or the street portrait.
Charlie scrapped the idea of showing any existing work in lieu of setting up a studio in the lower level of a two-level space. I don’t know if we spoke directly about it, but I got the feeling that if you could have put your studio out on the street you would have done that to be more like a street portrait and a video. What I think was really important was what unfolded in the space, which not only gave rise to a totally different kind of exhibition in that it was live for the duration of three weeks. It also was an open invitation to artists to perform or be interviewed or engage with Charlie, who was working with a variety of analog and digital tools to manipulate footage as the performance or the interview was being conducted. Does that sound right?
CHARLES ATLAS: Yes. The show that I did at Participant was called Instant Fame. It was based on an idea that I started to work on in 2003—to do live video in and as a performance. This was a further exploration of the idea of having a video studio in the gallery space, so that I could create instantaneous live portraits of whoever would come by the space. My original idea was that a very intimate space would be the creation space and that the presentation would be a very public space. So these low-key and lo-fi technological performances, interviews, or portraits would be in a space as public as Times Square. I suppose when I think back on it now it’s sort of a little pre-YouTube—the whole idea of performance, casualness, and messiness.
Photos from Charles Atlas/Lia Gangitano at NYPL
Check out the pictures from yesterday night’s screening of Paradox and discussion with Charles Atlas and Lia Gangitano, Director of Participant Inc, at the Mid-Manhattan Library.
Art21 is co-presenting monthly screenings of each Season 4 episode at the NYPL throughout the spring.
Reminder: Charles Atlas with Lia Gangitano at NYPL tonight
Art21, BOMB, & the Mid-Manhattan Library
present
a film screening and conversation
Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century Season 4 episode Paradox
After the screening Lia Gangitano, Director of Participant Inc., will join consulting director and video artist Charles Atlas for a conversation and Q&A session.
TONIGHT Monday, April 7, 2008 at 6:30pm
Mid-Manhattan Library
The New York Public Library
40th Street and 5th Avenue, 6th floor
New York, NY 10016
212-340-0871
Elevators to access the 6th floor.
All events are FREE and open to the public.
Save the date: Charles Atlas with Lia Gangitano at New York Public Library April 7
Art21, BOMB, & the Mid-Manhattan Library
present
a film screening and conversation
Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century Season 4 episode Paradox
After the screening Lia Gangitano, Director of Participant Inc., will join consulting director and video artist Charles Atlas for a conversation and Q&A session.
Monday, April 7, 2008 at 6:30pm
Mid-Manhattan Library
The New York Public Library
40th Street and 5th Avenue, 6th floor
New York, NY 10016
212-340-0871
Elevators to access the 6th floor.
All events are FREE and open to the public.
Photos from Charles Atlas screening at EAI
Photos from last night’s screening and discussion with Art21 artist Charles Atlas at Electronic Arts Intermix in New York. His recently restored classic underground film, Hail the New Puritan was shown, along with an excerpt from his live installation Instant Fame and clips from recent live performances he’s done with Antony and the Johnsons and experimental Austrian musician Fennesz. EAI’s John Thomson led a lively conversation with Atlas after the film and between each clip.
View more photos on Art21’s Flickr site here.
Charles Atlas at Electronic Arts Intermix tomorrow night
Wednesday, September 19, 2007 at 6:30 pm
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)
535 West 22nd Street, 5th Floor
New York, NY 10011
Free Admission
Electronic Arts Intermix presents a screening of the work of Season 2 video artist and Season 3/4 director Charles Atlas, followed by an in-depth talk. The recently restored Hail the New Puritan (1985-86), Atlas’ groundbreaking collaboration with choreographer Michael Clark, will be screened, along with excerpts from his recent Instant Fame installation series and his live collaborations with Fennesz and Antony and the Johnsons. Atlas will discuss his work and take questions from the audience.
A mesmerizing blend of dance, music, drama and “mockumentary,” Hail the New Puritan engagingly presents Clark as choreographer, dancer, celebrity, lover, and nightclubber. It portrays the vitality of London’s mid-’80s underground scene in the face of economic turmoil and political division, through the lens of athletic, post-modern dance.
Atlas has collaborated live with many eminent performers. In Turning, his recent partnership with celebrated singer Antony, he captured and processed images of thirteen “beauties” as they literally turned on a podium onstage, projecting their refashioned images onto a large screen. Atlas’ video intensified Antony’s intimate investigations of image, identity, and metamorphosis.
In his collaboration with Austrian electronic music composer and performer Fennesz, Atlas processed visual samples live, while Fennesz played guitar and manipulated appropriated sounds. In dialogue with the composer’s moody, atmospheric music, Atlas’ poignant collages were a dramatic mix of found film footage and video clips.
Atlas also used live mixing in his recent video installation Instant Fame. In a Warholian celebration of exhibitionism, he set up a studio in a gallery and shot footage of anyone who wanted to be videotaped: they could perform or simply sit for the camera. The images were reworked in real time and simultaneously projected in an adjacent exhibition space.
View additional images and clips of Atlas’ work on EAI’s site here.
