Charles Atlas
Vilma Gold, London, UK
Charles Atlas, Plato's Alley (2008), single-channel video. Courtesy of the artist and Vilma Gold, London
In recent years, Charles Atlas has become a sort of court portraitist to the Anglo-American choreography and post-punk scenes, a world he has been part of since the late 1970s. In his biographical films, made since the ‘90s for both TV and cinema, Atlas has profiled such luminaries as Merce Cunningham, Michael Clark and Leigh Bowery, all of whom he has previously worked with as a set designer, director and video artist. Over the years Atlas has collaborated with, amongst others: Yvonne Rainer, Diamanda Galas, Marina Abramović and melancholic balladeers Antony and the Johnsons. Exhaustive as this list is, it does tend to reduce Atlas to a mere triangulation between starry points. In his second exhibition at Vilma Gold, he thankfully shrugs off the mantle of ‘biographer’ in an installation that’s at once strident, personal and startlingly innovative.
‘Tornado Warning’ consists of two rooms of hallucinatory video projects inspired by the artist’s childhood experiences of storm alerts in St. Louis, Missouri. There is a nostalgically technophile element to the show that recalls a moment in the early 1990s when the category of ‘media art’ seemed to open up new possibilities of both freedom and control. Plato’s Alley (all works 2008), a single-channel video projection occupying one end of the gallery space, realizes this ambivalent vision as a storm of numbers emerge from a grid, swirling around empty space like dust devils. Within the video loop, there’s a hypnagogic eye-of-the-storm moment in which gently vibrating vertical and horizontal swatches soothe the viewer, a lull before the numbers charge then halt, threatening numerals reading ‘1,2,3,4,5,6’.
Institute for Turbulence Research (2008), multi-channel video installation. Courtesy of the artist and Vilma Gold, London
Shown in the adjacent gallery, Institute for Turbulence Research is a vertiginous experience, comprising four video projections positioned at drunkenly oblique angles. Dominating the space, a black and white disk reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp’s phonographic ‘Rotoreliefs’ (1935) spins frantically, spilling onto the floor and an adjacent wall. Skittering erratically like a searchlight, a smaller projection displays snippets of found footage: a man is slapped hard in slow motion; a jumbo jet careens; and woman looks up mournfully from a sidewalk. Another projection issues a montage of images bound together by recurring circular motifs: an eye, a roulette wheel (more threatening numbers) and a man plummeting through empty space. Nearby, back-projected onto a screen slung between two walls, various ghostly objects – a chair, light bulb, pink teddy bear and packing crate – spin from an invisible thread to evoke a theatrical mock-up of the domestic effects of a violent storm.
Accompanying this visual onslaught, a thunderous electronic soundtrack attempts to do unnameable things to one’s already frayed nerves. In a litany redolent of ‘80s industrial music, a baby screams, a dull thud beats 4/4 time and a mechanical buzzing noise stalls against a piercing, corrugated explosion. Amongst this barrage of sound and vision, Tornado Warning choreographs a sense of bodies beaten black and blue by external forces. It’s easy to imagine the worst – Hurricane Katrina or, perhaps, the devastation of AIDS. Yet, as with industrial music, there’s something cathartic and even pleasurable about gorging on this dislocation. It’s a terrifying feast, masterfully orchestrated.
Colin Perry
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