PORTRAIT OF A BRAIN
CHARLES ATLAS
PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHARLIE ENGMAN
INTERVIEW BY HANS ULRICH OBRIST
OUT NOW
ISSUE 43 FW23
KALEIDOSCOPE's Fall/Winter 2023 issue launches with a set of six covers. Featuring Sampha, Alex Katz, Harmony Korine, a report into the metamorphosis of denim, a photo reportage by Dexter Navy, and a limited-edition cover by Isa Genzken.
Also featured in this issue: London-based band Bar Italia (photography by Jessica Madavo and interview by Conor McTernan), the archives of Hysteric Glamour (photography by Lorenzo Dalbosco and interview by Akio Kunisawa), Japanese underground illustrator Yoshitaka Amano (words by Alex Shulan), Marseille-based artist Sara Sadik (photography by Nicolas Poillot and interview by Daria Miricola), a survey about Japan’s new hip-hop scene starring Tohji (photography by Taito Itateyama and words by Ashley Ogawa Clarke), Richard Prince’s new book “The Entertainers” (words by Brad Phillips), “New Art: London” (featuring Adam Farah-Saad, Lenard Giller, Charlie Osborne, R.I.P. Germain, and Olukemi Ljiadu photographed by Bolade Banjo and interviewed by Ben Broome).
FROM THE CURRENT ISSUE
ESCAPE TO MIAMI
The most southernly city in the US, Miami exists in the tropical recesses of the American imagination: land of celebrity, thunderstorms, Tony Montana, and Art Deco architecture. Here, we meet the latest generation of Miamians—committed radicals in the fields of art, fashion, and music, who are dreaming up new narratives for the city they call home.
NEW ART: LONDON
The art world’s compulsion to categorize by the yardstick of “hot or not” has historically been the driving force behind the market and the gallery system. Commerce is intertwined with this metric, spurred on by the insatiable appetite to find talented young things to build up. This system is uninteresting: what’s in vogue rarely reflects those operating at the cutting edge. Who are those young emerging artists making work against all odds—work that is difficult and costly to make, store, exhibit, move, and sell? These five individuals typify this path. Working across video, sound, installation, and sculpture, they march onwards, carving out their own niche—exhibiting in empty shop spaces one day and major institutions the next. For them, making is guided by urgency, and persistence is motivated by blind faith.
SARA SADIK
KALEIDOSCOPE hosted a solo exhibition by Marseille-based artist Sara Sadik (b. 1994, Bordeaux), in November 2023 at Spazio Maiocchi in Milan, with the support of Slam Jam. Inspired by videogames, anime, science fiction, and French rap, Sara Sadik’s work explores the reality and fantasies of France’s Maghrebi youth, addressing issues of adolescence, masculinity, and social mythologies. Her work across video, performance, and installation often centers on male characters, using computer-generated scenarios to transform their condition of marginalization into something optimistic and poetic.
FROM THE SHOP
FROM THE ARCHIVE
MANIFESTO
In 2023, from June 22 to June 24 during Men’s Fashion Week in Paris, KALEIDOSCOPE and GOAT presented the new edition of our annual arts and culture festival, MANIFESTO. Against the unique setting of the French Communist Party building, a modern architectural landmark designed by legendary Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, the festival will bring together visionary creators from different areas of culture across three days of art, fashion and sound. The 2024 edition will run from June 21 to June 23.
CAPSULE PLAZA
In April 2023, a year after the launch of the magazine, Capsule introduced Capsule Plaza, a new initiative that infuses new energy into Milan Design Week by redefining the design showcase format. A hybrid between a fair and a collective exhibition, Capsule Plaza brings together designers and companies from various creative fields, bridging industry and culture with a bold curation that spans interiors and architecture, beauty and technology, ecology and craft. The 2024 edition will run from April 15 to April 21.
In today’s internet culture, everyone is a performer. But in the 70s, when artist Charles Atlas first started out making Super 8 films and collaborating with the likes of Merce Cunningham, Michael Clark, and Leigh Bowery, drag and rhythm were the stuff of the underground scene. Across a career as long as it is diverse—spanning from docu-fantasy to mathematics, from TV to TikTok—his lexicon remains one of raw energy and omnivorous imagination.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
I wanted to start by asking you how it all began. How did you come to art? How did art come to you? Was there an epiphany?
CHARLES ATLAS:
Not really. I started out with Super 8 film. I just wanted to make movies. In 1973, Merce Cunningham asked me to collaborate with him on video. In those early years, video and film weren’t really considered part of the art world—I didn’t have a real gallery until 1999.
HUO
And what prompted you to record? Because you have one of the most extraordinary archives. I was introduced to the idea of the archive by Jonas Mekas. In the early 90s, when I began curating, I was telling him that I have all these conversations with artists and I go to all these performances, and Jonas said, “You’ve got to film it all, and you will regret it one day if you don’t.”
CA
I took my camera to archive material in the 80s when I went out to clubs. I was always filming what was going on on the stage—the cabaret and the performance art. The stages were barely lit, and I was drunk and stoned at the time when I was recording. And also the camera I was using had an omnidirectional microphone, so you can really mostly hear my laugh. I laugh a lot. That’s the main sound.
HUO
In many interviews, you say that drag is your favorite thing.
CA
Well, I mean, it was the club culture of the late 80s and early 90s. My main hangout was the Pyramid Club, which had a drag show every Sunday night. It was underground culture at its best. The way it developed, the way drag is now, is more like mainstream commercial entertainment. I don’t really go for the whole Drag Race thing. I prefer the more raw, unfinished looks and takes.
HUO
I was a regular at the Pyramid and the Wah Wah Hut. How do you see New York now in comparison, post-COVID?
CA
Well, I don’t know, because I’ve been out so rarely. I mean the kids are all out, but I’m still a little worried about getting COVID, so I don’t go out that often. I’m isolated and I realize that it’s not good for me, because my inspiration really comes from being out and meeting people and seeing performances. So I have to get back to that, but it’s been a dry period lately.
HUO
During your activity, you saw media change a lot. In a friend of mine’s apartment, there is a shelf with VHS cassettes, another shelf with DVDs, and then another shelf with mini DVs. It’s very strange, because they feel almost like antiquities from another century.
CA
I’ve been through all of them.
HUO
How did your work change with the advent of all these new technologies? And then, also, how do you deal with it in relation to your archive?
CA
My archive is going to the Getty Research Institute. At least it’ll be saved. I’ve taken care of that. That’s one of the few things I’ve taken care of. But I feel like I barely made a dent; my house and every closet is still filled with video, film, hard drives, everything. At some point, I’d like to do an installation, or series of installations, in a whole museum that encompasses my entire career. That’s something that’s on my mind.
HUO
That’s amazing. You mentioned your collaboration with Merce Cunningham. Your relationship was similar to the one he had with John Cage. Very often they would work independently of each other and only come together at the very end.
CA
It transferred over. Merce had such good results from collaborating in an open way with John Cage, Bob Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns, so even though I was, like, 20 years old, he treated me like an equal.
HUO
Yeah, and it’s really beautiful. You taught him video, and he taught you to dance. And, in a way, that also influenced your editing, which is mostly based on rhythm. After Merce, you continued to have very intense collaborations—I love the work you did with Michael Clark. I’m very curious to know more about that.
CA
I first knew Michael when he was 19 years old and I wanted to work with him because he was such a gorgeous dancer. Hail the New Puritan (1987) was the first piece that I did with Michael—he wasn’t famous yet, but, for the narrative, we pretended that he was. We turned a performance space into his supposed living/dance loft—no one really had a live-in loft at that time—and we made up a club scene that wasn’t at a real club, so it was really like a docu-fantasy.
HUO
In 1996, Klaus Biesenbach and I made an appointment to meet Leigh Bowery, and it was very tragic, because the appointment was supposed to happen the day Leigh died.
CA
Leigh was one of my best friends. Going out with Leigh was really an experience. He would stay in my apartment, and we would go out to clubs. He had one look where he wore nothing but a bra, a pussy wig, boots, and the bug-eye head piece, and he would go out in the street like that in the winter. One of his philosophies was: unless a look had some pain to it, it really wasn’t good. He had another look where he had LEDs on his teeth that were powered by a battery on his back with the wires running into the sides of his mouth. But he didn’t like the way the wires looked, so he pierced his cheeks so they could go in through the sides of his face and light up the LEDs.
CA
Since the 80s, you’ve also worked with TV. Can you talk a little bit about the way you connect to it?
HUO
In the 70s, I was a TV addict. Really. I watched TV all the time. And when I started making pieces for TV, I realized that the aesthetic for TV is such that you have to change the image before the people change the channel. So that was always my challenge in making work for TV. And, at a certain point, because of the subject matter that I was interested in, my work became less and less appropriate for TV.
HUO
But then you also made a documentary on Merce in 2000, much later.
CA
I had made a piece called Son of Sam and Delilah (1991), which was programmed for PBS. It had drag queens in it, and serial killers, and blood. They withdrew it from the schedule, and I was blacklisted at PBS. I asked the programmer why, and she said, “Because people will be upset and they won’t know why.” And I said, “That’s exactly the point!” So then I did the Merce documentary to prove to them that I could deal with a primetime audience.
HUO
I’m very interested in how modalities and structures of representing identities changed during the last few decades. How do you see that change, also in relationship with technology and time-based media?
CA
Well, it is the internet and the fact that everyone is a performer now. I mean, in my early days, people didn’t know how to be on camera, and nowadays everyone is on camera all the time, so it’s nothing. I’m not on Facebook or Instagram or anything like that, but I am a TikTok addict. So in the piece at Pioneer Works, I include some TikTok dancing videos because I think that’s the contemporary way of filming dance—it is really much more about the energy, and less about the formal qualities.
HUO
What are you doing with TikTok? Can you talk more about this? Are you on TikTok?
CA
I’m not on, no, but I watch it all the time, forever. And I really enjoy watching real, normal people dance. So it’s just something that seems fresh to me … I mean, I’ve been filming dance for a long time.
HUO
And you’re not only filming dance; there is also porn! Staten Island Sex Cult is a porn movie that you did in 1998. You were in a producer’s office and someone said, “Let’s do a series of artists doing porn”?
CA
Well, it was a great experience. We filmed it in a brothel in Staten Island frequented by policemen and firemen; they closed it for the weekend, and we had it as a set for our film. The film was nominated for the best comedy porn in the adult video awards that year.
HUO
So Yvonne Rainer says that these porn movies are another example of your identity as an omnivore. And, as Yvonne says, you move so easily from one medium to another. And I think that’s also one of the many reasons why so many young artists are inspired by your work, because you don’t silo or pool knowledge.
CA
I’m just interested in a lot of things and in doing things I haven’t done before. I don’t like to repeat myself.
HUO
In 2015, you released Here she is…v1, a video installation featuring iconic drag performer Lady Bunny in a close-up portrait addressing systemic inequality and environmental catastrophe. Can you talk a little bit about what art can do in relation to that?
CA
Well, in a way, even though I’m a very progressive person, and I pay attention to politics, it only gets into my work through the side door. I’ve never really made a polemical piece. The Lady Bunny piece is the closest piece that I have come to polemics in my work. When I was working with Lady Bunny, we had a bunch of lunches and we talked about different things that were on our mind about politics, and then she just came out with that rant when I did the video with her. In 2012, I made a piece called The Illusion of Democracy. It was all numbers, but I wanted the spectator to think about how democracy in America is an illusion at the same time as they were watching this completely abstract piece. I consider the title another way of addressing the audience.
HUO
And what can you tell us about your current show at Pioneer Works?
CA
I’ve been interested for a long time in science, mathematics, and nonhuman facts. Most of my previous work was very related to the contemporary culture that I was living in. But as I’m getting older, I’m more interested in permanent, eternal facts; I mean big questions. And so, I was interested in consciousness and the origin of consciousness. I ended up making a portrait of my brain on the wall: it’s two symmetrical parts, and there are 26 windows. I thought of them as the places memories or thoughts are held, which includes my archive. What I learned about studying the brain is that memory is also imagination, because the same part of the brain that deals with memory also deals with the future. So memory is really imagining the past.
HUO
My friend Dan Graham passed away this year, and he once told me that we can only understand an artist if we also know what music they are listening to. So I wanted to ask you: What music are you listening to?
CA
Well, currently, I’m a huge fan of Billie Eilish. She’s so young, my God, but she has a real attitude. I like that she’s doing the opposite of what everyone else does.
Charles Atlas was born in St. Louis in 1949 and lives and works in New York City. Atlas’s new solo exhibition, “The Mathematics of Consciousness,” is on view at Pioneer Works in New York until November 20.
Hans Ulrich Obrist (Swiss, b. 1968) is a curator, critic, prolific artist interviewer, and author of several curatorial-milestone books. Obrist is the co-director of exhibitions and programs at the Serpentine Galleries, London.
PHOTOGRAPHY: CHARLIE ENGMAN
ART DIRECTION AND STYLING BY SPENCER E. SINGER
CREATIVE DIRECTION: ALESSIO ASCARI
PHOTO ASSISTANT: HENRY LOPEZ, AMINA GINGOLD
STYLING ASSISTANT: MICHEAL GLODY
GROOMING: JUNYA NAKASHIMA
PRODUCTION: CURT WEBER
ALL VIDEO STILLS COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND LUHRING AUGUSTINE, NEW YORK.