Eyebeam One-On-One: Barbara London and Charles Atlas in Conversation 

One-on-One: Barbara London and Charles Atlas in Conversation

Tuesday, April 23, 2019
6-8PM

Join us on Tuesday, April 23rd for the second in the series of intimate conversations between celebrated curator Barbara London, and artists she has worked with and admired throughout her seminal career.

London will sit down with pioneering filmmaker and video artist Charles Atlas to discuss four of the artist’s works that reflect distinct but related approaches to a productive video practice of more than four decades. Produced between 1975 and 2015, the featured work will include single-channel video, an installation based on a reworking of the artist’s earlier project of 1971, a made for television documentary about the downtown New York music scene, and a recent immersive installation.

For four decades, London paved the way for media artists at MoMA, founding the museum’s video and media art collection and curating its first ever show on sound art. Phaidon will release her book, Video/Art, the First Fifty Years, in January 2020. Atlas is widely known for his prolific work spanning across mediums and collaborative practice, and was central to the development of media-dance, a genre in which original performance work is created for the camera.

Bios

Charles Atlas has been a pioneering figure in film and video for over four decades. Atlas has extended the limits of his medium, forging new territory in a far-reaching range of genres, stylistic approaches, and techniques. Throughout his production, the artist has consistently fostered collaborative relationships, working intimately with such artists and performers as Leigh Bowery, Michael Clark, Douglas Dunn, Marina Abramovic, Yvonne Rainer, Mika Tajima/New Humans, Antony and the Johnsons, and most notably Merce Cunningham, for whom he served as in-house videographer for a

decade from the early 1970s through 1983; their close working relationship continued until Cunningham’s death in 2009. Atlas was born in St. Louis, MO in 1949; he has lived and worked in New York City since the early 1970s.

Barbara London is an author, curator and longstanding interpreter of video, performance, media, installation, and sound art. She founded the video exhibition and collection programs at The Museum of Modern Art, where she worked between 1973 and 2013. The exhibitions she organized include one-person shows with artists Nam June Paik, Joan Jonas, Bill Viola, Steina Vasulka, Shigeko Kubota, Peter Campus, Gary Hill, and Laurie Anderson, as well as the work of Asian artists Zhang Peili, Song Dong, Teiji Furuhashi, Feng Mengbo, and Yang Fudong. She was the first to integrate the Internet as part of curatorial practice. This includes Stir-fry (1994); Internyet (1998); and dot.jp (http://www.moma.org/dotjp/) (1999.) She is adjunct professor in the Yale Graduate Department of Fine Art, a consultant with the Kadist Foundation, and has authored a book that Phaidon will publish fall 2019. The book offers an account that unfolds chronologically and traces technology’s move from analog to digital, from small TV monitors to projection and flat screens, and from clunky to user-friendly hardware and software that became more efficient and versatile. London maps out how video and media evolved to assume a central position and be taken seriously as the foremost art of today.