“The maturity of the late works of significant artists does not resemble the kind one finds in fruit. They are, for the most part, not round, but furrowed, even ravaged. Devoid of sweetness, bitter and spiny, they do not surrender themselves to mere delectation.”
—Theodor Adorno, “Late Style in Beethoven” (1937)
Around a year ago, I went to see Charles Atlas give a talk at the Dia Art Foundation in New York. He was there to speak about the dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, Atlas’s most important and longstanding creative partner in a career full of collaboration. Atlas pioneered the genre of “media dance” as the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s filmmaker-in-residence from the mid-1970s until 1983, and after a period of independent work, returned to collaborate with Cunningham from 1999 until the choreographer’s death in 2009. One notable feature of the talk at the Dia was that the action didn’t only happen up front: on either side of the audience, a silent montage of clips from their collaborations unfolded at its own rhythm. Occasionally, Atlas would see something and interrupt his sequential account of their collaborations, prompting the assembled fans to crane their necks wildly.
Atlas’s presentation was punctuated by numerous video clips of his collaborations with Cunningham, and it seemed like every time he played one, the audience erupted in cheers and applause that matched (or exceeded) its duration. It was charming and funny and a little awkward: I already felt underdressed amid the genteel crowd, and began to feel that my casual interest in Atlas’s work rendered me psychologically underdressed as well. There was nothing casual about anything or anyone else in the room. I remember thinking, Who is this guy?
Atlas’s current retrospective at the ICA, touted as his first in the United States, promises to offer a deeper understanding of who he is and why his work is important. As it turns out, it feels like a misnomer to think of the show as a retrospective at all: it is really a showcase of Atlas’s “late style,” as the scholar and film critic Erika Balsom provocatively calls it in her essay in the exhibition’s catalogue.1 The show includes nine works total; all were made in the last twenty years. Most are multichannel video installations (or “walk-through experiences,” as Atlas calls them) that sample and remix his earlier single-channel works. This strategy allows video to mimic the dynamism and complexity of live performance, and promises a more immersive encounter with Atlas’s storied collaborators and the queer underground performance scenes that produced them. The artist once described one of his installations as “both an ordered experience and an amusement park ride, or maybe more like a haunted house at a midwestern carnival”—a statement that could apply to his installation practice as a whole.2 As I stood near the exhibition entrance, I listened to gallery attendants warn incoming visitors of everything to expect: sexual content, simulated violence, flashing lights, and the possibility of sudden screaming. What could be more fun?
Charles Atlas, The Years, 2018. Six-channel video installation (color, silent; 16:55 minutes), dimensions variable. Installation view, “Charles Atlas: About Time,” the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, 2024–2025. Photo by Mel Taing. Courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.
Even so, the longer I sat with the show, the more I wanted to see beneath its upbeat, celebratory façade. The fragmented style of Atlas’s late works began to feel like a diffuse meditation on absence, loss, and forgetting. Consider, for instance, The Years (2018), which opens the show and is conceived as a capsule retrospective of Atlas’s work. It consists, in part, of four large monitors turned vertically, each with a scrolling sequence of clips spanning a quarter of Atlas’s career: the first from 1970 to 1981, the second from 1982 to 1993, the third from 1994 to 2006, and the final from 2007 to 2017. Bodies dash across the screens in an energetic montage of light and movement. Those familiar with Atlas’s oeuvre will recognize specific works and the faces of his collaborators: Here’s Leigh Bowery strolling through New York City’s Meatpacking District dressed as Mrs. Peanut; here’s Yvonne Rainer doing Trio A; here’s Anohni performing a song; here’s the face of Marina Abramović. “They come to see us degrade ourselves one last time,” says a woman who then throws off her clothes—a scene from Jackie 60, a weekly party that ran throughout the 1990s at the nightclub Mother.
The Years is equally prepared for the possibility that all of this goes unrecognized. Behind the monitors, four young people are projected onto the wall. They are still except for the occasional blink of the eye and their barely perceptible swaying. White specks, which emanate from a separate projector placed on the gallery floor, drift and shimmer in the background like stars in the cosmos, or the slow dance of marine snow. The young people are almost expressionless; their indifference in the face of Atlas’s life’s work reminded me of my own bewildered experience at Dia. I was moved by the sly humor and humility in this: each generation, after all, is born with no knowledge of the “legends,” and must grapple anew with the meaning of their work. Atlas has referred to the piece as a “video graveyard,” and like all his late work, it has a double-edged quality: It resurrects the dynamic force of his earlier works while condemning them to fragmentation.
Charles Atlas, Hail the New Puritan (still), 1986. 16mm film transferred to video (color, sound; 84:54 minutes), dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York. © Charles Atlas.
The central portion of the exhibition is composed of “exploded” multichannel works that are splayed across monitors and hanging projector screens. These works have no front or back, and barely indicate a beginning or end, though they do typically focus on a specific collaborator or aspect of Atlas’s work. A Prune Twin (2020), for instance, is devoted to his collaborations with the Scottish choreographer Michael Clark, and draws from two feature-length films they made together: Hail the New Puritan (1986), which narrates a fictional day in Clark’s life from rehearsal studio to nightclub, and Because We Must (1989), based on a stage production of the same name. In these films, the disparate references of Clark’s choreography—Scottish dancing, punk, ballet, and drag—collide against the ruinous backdrop of Thatcherite neoliberalism. While the films have loose narrative structures, A Prune Twin dispenses with continuity entirely. Watching it sometimes feels like skipping to your favorite parts of a movie and watching them over and over again. At other times, its logic feels more haphazard and abrupt, and recalled for me the orphaned video excerpts that end up, almost by chance, on YouTube. More time with the work reveals its balance and precision: I noticed, for instance, that the image on one monitor almost always mirrors a projection on the other side of the room. The overall effect is one of frenetic simultaneity: bells toll, Clark dances, bagpipes play, people have sex, cars are destroyed in a wrecking yard. In Atlas’s work and especially in this exhibition, everything happens at the same time.
Atlas has long navigated the polarity of two intersecting but distinct worlds: modernist avant-garde dance and queer underground subcultures. If A Prune Twin represents the latter, another major multichannel installation MC9 (2012) represents the former, as embodied in the figure of Merce Cunningham. It includes clips from dozens of their collaborative works, from Walkaround Time (1973) to Ocean (2010), representing a decades-long exploration of how dancers and cameras can interact. The work’s spatial presence creates its own kind of choreography—bodies rush across the room, gathering and dispersing like atmospheric patterns of pressure and vapor. The soundtrack jumps around as well, from minimal flute to electronic noise, and is sometimes overtaken by the tender sound of dancers’ feet on the floor. As with A Prune Twin, sensory overstimulation is balanced with moments of order. Individual screens periodically flash to brief sequences of a colored countdown leader, lending the work a sense of urgency and careful calibration. These flashes of color, sometimes coordinated across screens, create moments of alignment between different rhythms, like dancers converging to share a pose onstage. As fractured as it is, MC9 functions as a single machine of dance and images and time.
Charles Atlas, MC9, 2012. Nine-channel video installation (color, sound; 18:00 minutes), dimensions variable. Installation view, “Charles Atlas: About Time,” the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, 2024–2025. Photo by Mel Taing. Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.
Atlas’s multichannel installations date to the early 1980s, but his work did not primarily exist in the visual arts sphere until the past decade or so. He has stated that he prefers not to transport works made for proscenium spaces or television broadcast into gallery spaces unaltered. In that sense, his late style can be viewed as a self-conscious response, as Balsom argues, to changing institutional conditions for the distribution and consumption of moving-image art. Atlas’s late works are also symptomatic of the incorporation of queer performance practices within visual arts contexts. Sometimes, they could even be called vehicles of that institutionalization: MC9, for instance, was the centerpiece of a major Cunningham exhibition at the Walker Art Center in 2017, while A Prune Twin was commissioned for a major 2020 exhibition devoted to Clark at the Barbican Art Gallery in London. It doesn’t feel totally coincidental that the final days of Atlas’s show in Boston coincide with the opening weeks of a major Bowery survey at Tate Modern.
Despite the warm reception Atlas and his peers have received, and despite the triumphalism that inevitably accompanies any major institutional outing for an older artist, there are signs that this work still sits uneasily within the context of an art museum, as suggested in my earlier quibble with the word “retrospective.” At the ICA, Atlas’s work prior to 2000 is both everywhere and nowhere. It is visible everywhere, but nowhere is it really explicated: In fact, only two works made before 2000 are mentioned by name anywhere in the exhibition’s interpretive text. There is no printed ephemera from past performances and exhibitions; no photographic or technical documentation of earlier installations; no correspondence, scripts, or notebooks that could lend insight into the process of collaboration; and no clear attempt to evoke the specific queer subcultures that produced Atlas’s works. This is remedied, somewhat, by the show’s catalogue, which includes critical essays alongside several loving tributes by artists Ryan Trecartin, Martine Syms, Eileen Myles, Nicole Eisenman, and Jordan Strafer. Curator Jeffrey De Blois’s essay, for instance, helpfully walks through Atlas’s key works and the evolution of his approach to filming dance: from the three-camera setup initially purchased by Merce Cunningham Dance Company to the incorporation of monitors into performance space in Fractions I (1978) to the introduction of moving cameras in Locale (1980), and so on. But this sense of the sequential unfolding of Atlas’s work is entirely absent from the exhibition itself, which ultimately registers as a single phantasmagoria. It is as if, as a friend remarked to me, the museum expects viewers to walk through the exhibition and be blinded by the light.
It would be unfair, however, to hold the museum entirely responsible: It is Atlas’s own aesthetic choices that fracture the past, rendering it diffuse, bristling, and ungraspable. (He once referred to the rapidly cut shots of his media dances as “shards of broken glass.”3) As I’ve sat with the show, I’ve been drawn back to Balsom’s brief invocation of “late style,” which led me to Theodor Adorno, Edward Said, and other theorists of this prickly and elegiac category. I became interested in the resonance between the “exploded” quality of Atlas’s late works and the fissiparous, unsynthesized tendency of late style as a whole. For Adorno, the prototypical example of late style was Beethoven, and he saw in the composer’s final works—the Ninth Symphony, the late string quartets and piano sonatas, the Missa Solemnis—a litany of “sudden discontinuities,” a “catching fire between the extremes, which no longer allow for any secure middle ground or harmony of spontaneity.”4 Rather than coalescing into a crowning statement about mortality, the artist’s subjectivity evaporates, speaking “only through the blank spaces from which it has disengaged itself.” As Said glosses, “Beethoven’s late works remain unreconciled, uncoopted by a higher synthesis … since their irresolution and unsynthesized fragmentariness are constitutive, neither ornamental nor symbolic of something else.”5 In a crucial paradox, Adorno insists on late style as an aesthetic category (rather than a biographical or psychological one), even as the term remains definitionally linked to the progression of an artist’s life and a certain proximity to death.
The opening line of Atlas’s talk at Dia was “I miss Merce Cunningham,” and I imagine that many of his works, new and old, function now as memory pieces. I think, too, about the AIDS epidemic and the destruction it wrought on queer communities everywhere. This doomsday feeling is captured most potently in Atlas’s short Son of Sam and Delilah (1991), which stitches together several outrageous and macabre performances by artists associated with the Pyramid Club and other East Village performance venues: A serial killer (played by artist John Kelly) wrestles with a rottweiler; two women (the duo DANCENOISE) hack dummies with cleavers; drag queens make toast; clubgoers dance in front of a silver scrim. The piece ends with the dancers being shot down, one by one, by the unseen assassin. Equal parts gory and giddy, Son of Sam and Delilah formed part of a larger group of works in the 1990s dealing with sex and death, including Superhoney (1994) and The Hanged One (1997), and its montage-like structure was a departure from Atlas’s portraits of individual performers and documentation of individual performances. “I didn’t realize what the piece was really about until a year or so later, after I had edited it,” Atlas reflected later. “It’s about AIDS. It’s an emotional response to seeing all these people die.”6 I wonder if this impulse is sublimated in the form of Atlas’s late work—a playful, performative flirting with annihilation, along with an undercurrent of mourning for lives and communities cut prematurely short. To quote Adorno again, “In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes.”7
Charles Atlas, The Tyranny of Consciousness, 2017. Five-channel video installation (color, sound; 23:44 minutes), dimensions variable. Installation view, “Charles Atlas: About Time,” the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, 2024–2025. Photo by Mel Taing. Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.
Of course, Atlas’s oeuvre is more than that: it’s joyful, musical, campy, and sometimes flat-out pornographic. Even as I’ve tried to claim Atlas’s late style as a gesture of queer negativity, it’s hard to append the word “catastrophe” to it without inflecting it with sarcasm: It’s all fake blood, after all.8 The Tyranny of Consciousness (2017), ends his ICA show on an appropriately contemplative yet apocalyptic note. It combines Atlas’s recent number and grid pieces—several of which are on view in the adjoining gallery—with his longtime interest in drag and queer nightlife. For most of its duration, it shows a grid of sunsets slowly descending over the ocean taken during a 2013 residency at the Rauschenberg Foundation in Captiva, Florida. The floor-to-ceiling projection is accompanied by a digital countdown clock projected on both sides of a freestanding screen that starts at eighteen minutes and descends (down to the centisecond) to zero. The work’s soundtrack is a sibylline monologue about the dismal state of contemporary politics—austerity for the poor, war profits for the rich—spoken by the drag queen Lady Bunny. As the countdown ends, the suns finally sink beneath the horizon, and the world goes black for a moment, only to be illuminated again by an upbeat disco song. Lady Bunny’s bouffant fills the screen as she sings her own sorry story of belated understanding: “I looked in the mirror, and it all got clearer / Slowly I’m being forced to see / You were the one, I knew it, I blew it / You were the one, the one for me.”
Lady Bunny’s monologue was recorded during the second Obama term, that brooding period of interregnum that has since given way to endless cascading crises in the American political system and beyond. The Marxist critic Alberto Toscano has used the term “late fascism” to name the predicament of understanding contemporary far-right movements without resorting to reductive analogies and diagnoses. To the extent that these movements have common objects of grievance and cathexis, it is drag queens and trans people (alongside migrants as supposed agents of racial “replacement”) who are incessantly figured as harbingers of civilizational collapse. “Today’s late fascisms,” Toscano writes, “fixate on gender non-conformity as both metaphor and metonymy, cause and symptom of a disorder at scales both personal and planetary.”9 Lateness, here, points to the feeble and anachronistic (and nonetheless devastating) solutions these movements propose to the crises produced by capitalism, and perhaps a more diffuse sense that it’s too late to substantially address the void that threatens to engulf the entire world.10
The Tyranny of Consciousness, then, is perched precariously on the edge of something. It lingers there, pulling the sun, again and again, back from the brink. In contrast to the restless dynamism of the rest of the ICA exhibition, I observed many visitors sitting with this work and waiting. “The world should end and then there should be a disco song,” Atlas has said simply of this work.11 It does not attempt a synthesis of the two: Partying and politics are left to spar unto eternity, embodying the prerogative that Said attributed to late style itself: “to render disenchantment and pleasure without resolving the contradiction between them.”12 Atlas’s exhibition is a testament to the forms of weird and wild creativity that queer people have sustained through the ends of many worlds.13 At the same time, its glittering shards and fleeting fragments herald the dawning realization that at this late hour, we—trans people, queer people—are the catastrophe.
1 Erika Balsom, “All the Images Will Reappear,” in Charles Atlas: About Time, ed. Jeffrey De Blois (ICA/Boston, DelMonico Books, and D.A.P.: 2024), 26.
2 Matthew Yokobosky, “The Real Charles Atlas: An Interview,” Performing Arts Journal 19, no. 3 (Sept. 1997), 22.
3 Charles Atlas with Johanna Fateman, “Parafango,” in Charles Atlas, ed. Lauren Wittels (Prestel/Luhring Augustine: 2015), 52.
4 Theodor Adorno, “Late Style in Beethoven,” trans. Susan H. Gillespie, in Essays on Music (University of California Press, 2002), 567.
5 Edward Said, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (Knopf: 2006), 21.
6 Charles Atlas with Johanna Fateman, “Son of Sam and Delilah,” in Charles Atlas, 148.
7 Adorno, “Late Style in Beethoven,” 567.
8 See Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and Death Drive (Duke University Press: 2004), Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of 9 Queer History (Harvard University Press: 2007), and Hil Malatino, Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad (University of Minnesota Press: 2022).
9 Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism, and the Politics of Crisis (Verso, 2023), 153.
10 Mike Davis, “Thanatos Triumphant,” New Left Review, March 7, 2022, https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/thanatos-triumphant
11 Emily Colucci, “Disco Apocalypse: Charles Atlas Films the End Times,” Vice, March 11, 2015, https://www.vice.com/en/article/disco-apocalypse-charles-atlas-films-the-end-of-times-with-sunsets-and-lady-bunny-405/
12 Said, On Late Style, 122.
13 Kai Cheng Thom, “How to Survive the Apocalypse (Again),” Xtra Magazine, November 4, 2024, https://xtramagazine.com/health/survive-mental-health-homophobia-transphobia-268850
“Charles Atlas: About Time” is on view through March 16, 2025, at the ICA / Boston, 25 Harbor Shore Drive.
