“I’m a huge Rauschenberg fan. He has been my main inspiration all my artistic life,” says the media artist Charles Atlas, one of the many contributors who will help shape the late artist’s forthcoming survey when it travels to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in May 2017. It opens at Tate Modern in London in December.
Atlas told The Art Newspaper that it was his admiration for Rauschenberg’s work that first drew him to a performance by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in New York. Rauschenberg collaborated with Cunningham on more than 20 performances from 1954 to 1964, creating sets, backdrops, costumes and lighting.
“I went to see Rauschenberg’s work—that was my introduction to Merce,” Atlas says. He went on to work for a decade as the videographer-in-residence for the dance company. One of the company’s stand-out productions for Atlas was Antic Meet (1958), a comic set of ten dances for which Rauschenberg designed costumes that included dresses made from parachutes and blocky sweaters with extra arms instead of neck holes.
The New York version of the Rauschenberg retrospective “has been conceived as an open monograph—as other artists, dancers, musicians and writers came into Rauschenberg’s creative life, their work will enter the exhibition”, a press release says. Atlas is working with the MoMA curator Leah Dickerman on the presentation of the moving images in the exhibition. “I’m designing how they’re shown and I’m making a little piece out of some of the elements for nine evening [events],” he says.
