CHARLES ATLAS: HAIL THE NEW PURITAN
The Bass is pleased to announce their latest exhibition Charles Atlas: Hail the New Puritan, on view beginning May 28 through October 19, 2025.
Hail the New Puritan (1985–86) by Charles Atlas is a landmark in the history of media-based performance, offering a fictionalized documentary of a day in the life of Scottish choreographer and dancer Michael Clark. Fusing the formal discipline of classical ballet with the raw vitality of punk, post-punk, and queer underground subcultures, Clark’s performances—and Atlas’s mock-documentary approach—broke new ground with their exploration of self-fashioned personas and the politics of style. Set against the backdrop of 1980s London, the film captures the spirit of a shifting cultural moment, where physical movement operates as both personal expression and social defiance. Atlas’s camera acts as an extension of the performing body, crafting a visual language attuned to the energies, textures, and codes of a changing society.
Nearly four decades later, Hail the New Puritan remains a vital cultural touchstone, its experimental pulse resonating across time. At The Bass, its presentation deepens a conversation already embedded within XI (2004), the immersive installation by assume vivid astro focus (avaf) currently on view on the museum’s second floor. Though distinct in form and approach, the two works share a commitment to performance as a space of transformation, where identity is continually constructed and remade through image, movement, and theatrical display.
The foundational connection between these works can be located in the archive. When XI entered The Bass’s collection in 2023, it was accompanied by an assortment of materials that chart the installation’s development. Across these notes, sketches, lists, and printouts from now-defunct search engines, Hail the New Puritan and Charles Atlas are mentioned repeatedly. A rare DVD copy of the film, purchased by avaf in 2004, is included in the archive, alongside mentions of another Atlas work, Mrs. Peanut Visits New York (1999). These materials point to the collective’s sustained engagement with Atlas’s practice. While avaf draws from a boundless range of influences in their staging of moving image, space, and the performing body, Atlas’s films emerge as a clear reference point in ways that find direct expression in XI.
This influence manifests across avaf’s installation, where traces of Hail the New Puritan surface both directly and atmospherically. Most notably, short excerpts from the film appear in Butch Queen Realness with a Twist in Pastel Colors (2004/24), a seven-hour video program curated by avaf that anchors the XI installation. Drawn from a wide range of moving-image works, the sequence opens with Hail the New Puritan and returns to this groundbreaking film three additional times—more than any other single work.
Beyond the video program, the influence of Atlas’s film resonates visually and spatially in XI itself. Echoes of the underground subcultures explored in Hail the New Puritan—from club scenes to experimental performance—can be felt in the installation’s use of color, staging, and choreographed display. Like Atlas’s film, XI blurs the line between performance and environment, drawing from queer and subcultural aesthetics to build a space where movement, persona, and visual excess are key to shaping identity.
Together, Hail the New Puritan, XI, and the surrounding archival and video works in the exhibition invite viewers into a shared, evolving conversation about media, memory, and performing identity. Viewed across time and across the museum, these works illuminate a lineage of artistic practices and cultural references that shape how performance is constructed and understood. At the center of this constellation, Atlas’s film stands not only as a defining work of its time but as an influential force that continues to inform how artists visualize movement, stage identity, and imagine the political possibilities of performance.
