CHARLEMAGNE PALESTINE
GESAMMTTKKUNNSTTMESHUGGAHHLAANDTTTT
Curated by: Luca Lo Pinto
Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz
Karlsplatz, Treitlstr 2 - Vienna
17/9/2015 - 8/11/2015
Kunsthalle Wien and Witte de With Center
for Contemporary Art are pleased to present Charlemagne Palestine.
GesammttkkunnsttMeshuggahhLaandtttt—an exhibition on the musician, composer,
performer and visual artist Charlemagne Palestine including his early video
works, stuffed animal sculptures, paintings, installations, and book scores
alongside other works that have rarely been shown before.
Conceived as a
Gesamtkunstwerk in itself, the exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz will
present works ranging from several decades in an all-over environment. One of
the core pieces, as in any of Palestine’s exhibitions, will be a piano—a
Bösendorfer Imperial—fully covered with stuffed animals, the fetish objects that
accompany the artist everywhere he goes. This will also serve as the setting for
two performances.
Since the end of the 1960′s, Palestine has executed and
performed many provocative, unusual, evocative works and happenings. In his
early years, he collaborated with choreographer Simone Forti and artists Tony
Conrad and Richard Serra, and performed alongside avant-garde artist La Monte
Young and composers Terry Riley, Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Nevertheless,
Palestine always resisted being labelled as a minimalist, opting instead for the
term “maximalist.” In the 1970s, he produced a seminal body of videos consisting
of performances made with and for the camera. In these video works, the artist
creates an outward articulation of his own internal state of mind by chanting
hypnotically, running hysterically, worshipping teddy bears, and drinking
cognac. After years of these intense ritualistic, shamanistic music compositions
and performances, his desire to develop visual works began to overshadow his
concerns for music. The body of works he produced in the following three decades
is therefore marked by the use of stuffed animals that are regarded as shamanic
totems and inhabit his paintings, sculptures and installations.
Charlemagne
Palestine (b. 1943) lives and works in Brussels. He has released more than 20
solo albums and has performed all around the world in the last 40 years. His
work has been exhibited internationally at public and private institutions
including: the Venice Biennale, Italy; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New
York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Kunsthalle,
Basel, Switzerland; the Long Beach Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary
Art, Houston; Palais des Beaux-Arts, Bruxelles; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam;
Documenta 8, Kassel; the Walker Art center, Minneapolis; the Art Institute of
Chicago; Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva; Musée d’Art Contemporain, Montreal;
and Wiels, Brussels. In 2014, he participated in the Whitney Biennial and
performed with Simone Forti at MoMA in New York and at the Louvre in Paris.
Image: Charlemagne Palestine. Photo: Agnès Gania.
