One of the challenges with performance art is the exhibition and presentation of it. How do you capture the “liveness” of the live event in a stationary museum setting? Jeffrey De Bois, with Max Gruber, curators of Charles Atlas: About Time at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston, managed to do just that. Viewers are confronted with movement and the concept of time from the start of the exhibition to the very end. Meandering through a succession of rooms, viewers encounter a series of screens and labyrinths, and only pause near the end for a respite, before the final room of sunsets and—the grand finale—a disco song.

Upon entering the exhibition, viewers stand face to face with four “tweens” who stare in judgment—motionless, expressionless—with only a slow blink to indicate any kind of acknowledgment of visitors. Behind them, space—a starlit sky—expands. In front of them stand four screens that offer up a taste of what is yet to come, a series of videos created over the span of Atlas’s lifetime. Entitled The Years (2019), Atlas imagined it as a “stand-alone retrospective of his career” (Charles Atlas: About Time, Museum Label, ICA Boston, 2024). The screens are unironically shaped like gravestones, a recognition that the bell tolls for all eventually.

After this relatively staid introduction, the exhibition gets going, and the next several rooms are comparatively chaotic and involved, starting with MC9 (2013). For those unfamiliar with the Boston ICA, one of its strengths is the massive and flexible space it offers. Charles Atlas: About Time takes full advantage of that. What regular visitors to the museum know as a bland rectangular concrete space has been turned into a warren of large screens, visible from both sides. Merce Cunningham is immediately recognizable on many of them. MC9 is in fact a homage to Cunningham, who recognized Atlas for his filmmaking ability. After moving to New York City in 1970, Atlas took a job as an assistant stage manager for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, then, in 1974, Cunningham made him the filmmaker in residence for the company. Together, they created what they referred to as “media dance.” Just as performance artists can create live works or “performances for the camera,” where the only witness at the time of action is the camera, “media dance” is a way of filming dance where the camera moves around with the dancers, rather than filming from a fixed point.

The effect of this set-up is a mesmerizing experience where one feels as if in constant motion. Sound comes from all directions, different screens project varying scenes, and viewers wander directionless between it all. But there is a constant reminder of time ticking away in the form of “countdown reels,” the screen changing to a solid bright color, numbers ticking down from nine, eight, seven . . . with the expected beep, beep, beep to accompany it.

The next room provides no break from the action. In Personalities (2024), ten monitors are set up in a spiral in the center of an orange room, with orange polka dots, made of light projections, dotting the floor. Two monitors sit on the wall at either end of the room. As viewers navigate this smaller space they are presented with disjointed audio and video. Occasionally, the audio matches the action, but other times, the screen in view plays the audio belonging to another screen blaring in the background. It is disorienting, to say the least. The only grounding elements are the familiar faces, or “personalities” that pop up on the screens—Atlas’s collaborators, among them Marina Abramović, Leigh Bowery, the rock band Sonic Youth, and filmmaker John Waters.

If one’s head were not spinning by now, it would be in the next room, which contains another large-scale installation reminiscent of MC9. But this time viewers are confronted with a mash-up of two different works: Atlas’s “antidocumentary,” Hail the New Puritan (1986), a fictionalized life-in-the-day of dancer Michael Clark, Atlas’s long-time collaborator; and Because we Must (1989) a film based on a theatrical stage production showing the behind-the-scenes drama. In between interview scenes with Clark from Hail the New Puritan, the viewer is assaulted with over-the-top dance and theatrical scenes, lavish Baroque sets, and costumes. Leigh Bowery features prominently in these scenes, including his performance of Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder’s “Ebony and Ivory.”

By the time viewers arrive in the next, and penultimate, room, they will no doubt need an interlude. Unlike the previous three rooms, seating takes center stage here. Viewers are invited to sit and don headphones to listen to the audio accompanying the individual video works. In addition to the room being quieter, the videos in this room are much smaller scale, and invite quiet looking. Some of these, like The Geometry of Thought (2019) were created as large-scale projections onto existing architectural structures. The videos provide only an approximation of the original works. The sound was composed by Lazar Bozic in conjunction with Atlas and offers an atmospheric addition to the visuals on the screen. At the end of the room sits Plato’s Alley (2008), a mesmerizing single-channel video projection that projects into a site-specific architectural installation. And once again time is foregrounded, with numbers ticking away. One anomaly in this room is The Mathematics of Consciousness (2022), a video collage that includes some of Atlas’s favorite TikTok clips.

The final room reminded me of the gentle swaying of an amusement park ride that has just thrown riders up and down and back and forth. A bit of rocking can return one to the steadiness of the earth, and that is what The Tyranny of Consciousness (2017) provides.

Unlike many of the previous rooms, what this gallery offers is space. A large-scale video collage sits on the far wall, showing thirty-six various stages of a sunset, and a single large screen stands in the corner with a doomsday clock providing yet another countdown. In the background, ambient music and even bagpipes play as drag performer Lady Bunny laments the state of the world—noting various economic crises, social injustices, and political upheavals from the last century. As the suns continue to set, viewers wait, and after eighteen minutes, darkness comes. Then, the room erupts in song—a video performance for the camera of Lady Bunny belting out “You Were the One” complete with costume changes and wig changes that grow ever larger. Atlas ends his exhibition the way he said the world should end, with a disco song (Charles Atlas, in Emily Colucci, “Disco Apocalypse: Charles Atlas Films the End Times,” Vice, March 11, 2015.) The stark contrast between the dramatic sunset and doomsday clock with the joyous disco song reminded me of Oliver’s dance to “Panic at the Disco” at the end of Saltburn (dir. Emerald Fennell, 2023) a completely outlandish display among both the decadence and despair of the preceding action.

Charles Atlas: About Time is everything one would expect it to be and more. As a person who is not easily overstimulated, my first viewing of the exhibition was disorienting and overwhelming. I felt both exhausted and at the same time inspired to move and dance, imitating some of the dancers on the screen. Walking through the maze of screens, with asynchronous sound and movement, watching the images in reverse when standing on the other side of the screen, all felt a bit much. But on my second pass through the exhibition, perhaps having been a bit more oriented, I was able to let the cacophony envelop me and embrace it, rather than fighting against it, wishing for order and logic.

It is no surprise that Charles Atlas is fascinated with TikTok. In some ways, his retrospective provides perhaps the perfect exhibition for Gen Z, or even for the tweens that stood in judgment at the entrance—an exhibition that is meant to be consumed in bite-sized pieces, because you cannot consume it all at once. Much like performance art in general, one will never absorb the entire performance. Every position offers a different view and experience. The entire layout of the exhibition reminded me of one of the first performance art pieces, Untitled Theater Piece by John Cage (in which Merce Cunningham participated) at Black Mountain College in 1953, with different events and actions taking place all on the same stage. It is peculiar, then, that the last image Atlas leaves us with is one of a close-up, tight-framed video of Lady Bunny singing us out. But perhaps it is an equally fitting metaphor for life—the end is singular and finite, unlike the variability of life and one’s experiences, a diversity reflected throughout the entirety of the exhibition.