The catalogue Charlemagne Palestine GesammttkkunnsttMeshuggahhLaandtttt appears in conjunction with the two iterations of the eponymous exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien (18 September to 8 November 2015) and Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art (29 January – 8 May 2016) respectively.
GesammttkkunnsttMeshuggahhLaandtttt, is a solo exhibition with artist Charlemagne Palestine, including his early video works, sculptures, paintings, installations, and sound scores. Charlemagne Palestine works form a highly personal universe of rituals, intoxication, and shamanism. In the last four decades, the artist has created an extensive body of experimental musical compositions, bodily performances, and, in later years, visual art works that are inhabited by stuffed animals. To Palestine, teddy bears figure as powerful shamanic totems, which he fondly calls Divinities.
Central to his exhibition are a grand piano, as the sounding heart of the show, and a new large-scale version of the so-called God-Bear Museum Model, a proposal for a new kind of museum where music and performance find a home just as easily as a painting would. Also part of the exhibition are Palestine’s extraordinary music or sound annotations, a vast collection of works on paper, which aim to translate sound into image.
This new catalogue documents GesammttkkunnsttMeshuggahhLaandtttt and includes an interview between Charlemagne Palestine and Luca Lo Pinto, curator at the Kunsthalle Wien, as well as an essay by Jay Sanders, Curator of Performance at the Whitney Museum of American Art, reflecting on Palestine’s work. The publication is co-published by Witte de With Publishers and Sternberg Press on behalf of Kunsthalle Wien.