The book, Charlemagne Palestine: Sacred Bordello (Guzman 2003) edited by Antonio Guzman contains five written accounts of Charlemagne Palestine’s life and work and a comprehensive biography of his career as a practicing artist. The accounts are by writers in various fields and I will review them in chronological order. The book is published by Black Dog Publishing and in their method and choice of subject, they certainly achieve their aim;
…to represent an eclectic take on contemporary culture (Black Dog Publishing, 2008)
Contrasting typefaces are used to distinguish the five chapters and more than half of the 191 pages are full colour prints of Palestine’s various works. There are printed photographs of Palestine playing the Bösendorfer piano, this is the only piano manufacturer that he will use. There are many more images of installations of his family, an enormous collection of soft toy animals. The bold contrasting colours and large prints make a reading of this book into a demanding visual experience. Palestine’s apparently eclectic method is taken up by Antonio Guzman in the first chapter; Let all the children boogie; Blood on the keyboards / Brooklyn boy / Choir boy / Golden boy / Old boy / Bad boy: A preface. Guzman is an art critic, art historian and writer on contemporary art. In 1991 he took on directorship of L’Ecole des Beaux-arts of Valenciennes. Guzman compares Palestine’s installations to his music and performance and in doing so identifies a striking heterogeneity across the contrasting techniques employed by Palestine.
His work manipulates opposite poles of the sacred and the secular, the mystical and the popular, the quick and inanimate. It juxtaposes discrepancies; classicism and kitsch, culture and vulgarity, maturity and childhood, good taste and bad. (Guzman 2003 p.17)
Guzman observes that the music performances by Palestine function within temporality and the installations of toy animals are derived from sculpture. His music performances given at the piano are often very long and repetitive. The installations appear to consist of vast gatherings of toys arranged on the floor or in galleries, boxes, on makeshift shelves, step ladders and fabric covered plinths. Guzman refers to the writings of Hubert Damisch, Lessing, Hegel and Schopenhauer to describe Palestine’s non-hierarchical application of artistic disciplines across different media within his practice.
The titles of various installations, including Sacred Bordello are listed to illustrate the view that Palestine’s work can be located between ritualistic and totemic. Guzman suggests that Palestine is transforming the disposable consumer item into the vehicle of a deity by means of magic Gnostic ceremony. The soft and cuddly animal toy is elevated to God status by Palestine. This fetishisation presents a profound contrast to the audience; the signification of childhood innocence idolised as the presence of a divinity.
The second chapter; Divine Insurrection is written by Edwin Pouncey. Pouncey is a practicing artist and writer known as Savage Pencil. He writes and draws for The Wire Magazine and much of his report on Palestine is harvested from an interview published in issue 154 of The Wire in 1996 (Pouncey 1996). Pouncey begins with a biographical account of Palestine’s childhood and early career. Palestine was born in 1947 in Brooklyn, New York (although other articles state he was born in 1945). He describes his traditional Jewish upbringing and focuses on the synagogue as the place where he discovered spatial acoustics resonance and perhaps most importantly the long recitals of Hebrew texts. This is a clue to the durational element within his performances at the piano. Pouncey describes that when Palestine became the carillonneur at Saint Thomas church he developed a kind of corporeal sense of how to play. He performed church music twice weekly for six years and was eventually given the window of opportunity to perform his own experimental works. He performed for fifteen minutes per day what is described as a musical soap opera. Where he finished one day he would begin again the next. This drew crowds and the attention of Tony Conrad who, as Palestine recalls, later introduced him to other eminent New York artists of the time. Conrad asked Palestine to play bells for the film Coming Attractions along with other musicians including Young and Zazeela, Riley and Cale.
Pouncey describes that while working on synthesised drones at The Intermedia Centre, New York he became influenced by the teachings of Pandit Pran Nath. Palestine was working on The Spectral Continuum Drones for church pipe organ, which would later evolve into an early form of Strumming music for piano. He moved to California and continued work on synthesised drone whereupon he built an electronic Drone Machine comparable to the Indian Sruti box (a small hand-operated reed drone maker). He found that the very clear sounding overtones of the Bösendorfer piano was as pleasing to him as his very precise Drone Machine. He began to compose for the piano and as Pouncey reports, performed Strumming Music countless times during the 1970s and became an instrumental figure within the minimalist movement. Palestine’s return to New York in 1973 heralded a new phase of video work and very physically and mentally demanding live performances at the piano. He describes how he would anesthetise himself with cognac and Indonesian kretek cigarettes prior to performances of Timbral Assault. Palestine would sit almost in a trance at the piano for several hours playing repeated notes, listening to the overtones and consequently often producing a bloody keyboard. He highlights his influence on performers including Chris Burden and Iggy Pop.
The essay Sacré, Sacré, Sacré Charlemagne! is written by Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux an artist and writer. He opens with an anecdotal reminder of Palestine’s manner of simultaneously evoking the sacred and the profane. Labelle-Rojoux goes on to give a personal account of one of Palestine’s performances in the early 1980s. Palestine was sat between two Bösendorfers performing Strumming Music to the entranced audience. He uses the word purring to describe other minimalist music of the time and then says this of Palestine’s work;
The music spoke to a sense of dislocated sacredness, inadequate and bizarre, that was far removed from religion of a more conventional coin… (Labelle-Rojoux from Guzman 2003 p.100)
He states that Palestine’s work retained a sense of sacredness and unease as it evolved throughout the 1980s from music into art installation. He draws a comparison with Joseph Beuys’ ritual shamanic works involving inanimate animals and the religious equipment of the Chinese prayer table. A more striking comparison is made between he and Sun Ra. Labelle-Rojoux is proud to have witnessed a performance by Sun Ra in the 1970s and recalls the personal cosmography that Sun Ra seems to use that corresponds to Palestine’s method of evoking an atmosphere of ritual within his performances. Labelle-Rojoux acknowledges that Sun Ra and Palestine’s work are of course very different in form and content. The similarities are brought out in mystic symbolism.
…as surely as Sun Ra’s flying saucers. Charlemagne’s swarm of coloured stuffed animals does not conjure up a childhood idealised by memory, but instead evokes childhood’s residence in the present, populated by the soft caresses, irrational fears, secret pleasures, and incommunicable thoughts of the distanced, repressed world of adults: an animal carnival, far from ordinary socialised life… (Labelle-Rojoux from Guzman 2003 p.105)
Labelle-Rojoux concludes his essay with a final comparison of Palestine’s work to that of Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley. Here the comparison draws attention to the contrast of a child’s rites and rituals to the asserted value system of the adult responsible world. The implication remains that Palestine’s work is often characterised by intuition that is at odds with a traditional or commonly accepted sense of responsibility.
The next essay by Edwin Pouncey consists of an elucidation on Palestine’s use of stuffed toy animals. The chapter is almost exclusively composed of Pouncey’s interview with Palestine on this subject. The essay is titled; Sponges and Magnets: The Shamanic Art, which refers to a comment Palestine makes about the gathering of stuffed toys ‘Charleworld’ in the context of throwaway consumer culture. He is explaining that the stuffed toys he uses in his works are collected or rescued from thrift stores and they have a particular energy partly because of this source. Pouncey asks how Palestine decides which animals to use, Palestine replies;
…when I look at these animals for a certain period of time, they seem to present themselves in this inanimate, but animated world of sponges and magnets. Like a sunflower, when the sun shines they open up, and by doing so they reveal who they are. They become characters in this strange, continuous theatre of inanimate animism… They absorb a certain kind of energy and then they transmit it into the other space. (Pouncey from Guzman 2003 p.143)
The energy appears to have been there throughout Palestine’s life as the chapter opens with Palestine’s recollection of an early artwork made at the University of Buffalo, which consisted of arrangements of stuffed toy animals. This work echoes his memory of being eight years old watching television in bed under a blanket arranged like a tepee, surrounded by toy animals that he felt were there to protect him. He watched the television with his favourite bear while the other toys around him held plastic weapons. He describes that as he grew older, the animals remained close to him and became central to his work during the 1980s.
Palestine recalls feeling close to other primary American artists of the 1960s and 70s when he also felt regarded as an outsider. He describes having difficulty positioning his work in the context of an art audience that was becoming increasingly hungry to consume objects and perhaps a little tired of minimalist concepts. He didn’t feel that he had enough practical business knowledge to compete with younger artists, for example Mike Kelley and Tony Ousler. However, Palestine seems to have maintained confidence in the durational presence of his work. His attitude towards his work appears to appropriately transcend the distraction of contemporary concerns while he brings ancient practices into the present. This attitude reflects Palestine’s ability to signify the continuum in his works. The shamanic nature of his performances is picked up when Palestine reflects on his Russian-Jewish upbringing. He states the he was surrounded by ritual and that this has naturally become integrated into his artistic practices. In a passage of text on page 129 Palestine vividly describes a trance-like state achieved during his early piano performances where the animal creatures are sitting on the piano;
The people around me who were watching and listening became a blur of energy to me. The things that looked at me straight in the eye with this sense of constant ‘presentness’ were these creatures that were sitting or hanging from my instrument… All of a sudden, all of the things around me become a blur, except that I became very conscious of space itself. The air became more important than the room or the things in it; and together with my animals we would experience this eternity of air. (Pouncey from Guzman 2003 p.129)
Towards the end of the 1970s Palestine began to work exclusively with the animals as his primary medium. He gives a detailed account of the build up to his exhibition of God Bear in 1987 at the Documenta 8 exhibition in Kassel. The bear is influenced by a model of the hindu god Ganesha depicted with three heads. The exhibition marks a shift in his creative output towards the installation and sculpture and away from the ritualistic performance of music. He has clearly illustrated that some of the animals in his work appear to be on a transcendental journey with him. A profoundly succinct comment on the maturation of his method is made by Palestine in response to a question about the character Blind Monkey. He explains that the third eye of the blind monkey is symbolic of a kind of primal spiritual sense that Palestine has discovered and has used to navigate his way along a personally challenging and dynamic journey. Palestine describes the nature of his intuitive method with reference to John Cage.
I didn’t have a concept like John Cage, which I could immediately present, and then spend my life showing the permutations and combinations of all that can be done with this approach. I came ‘blind’ like Blind Monkey, bumping into everything. After a lifetime of bumping into things I began to understand, like blind people do, how the planets are placed in my solar system, so I don’t continually bang into them all the time. (Pouncey from Guzman 2003 p.143)
In the final chapter of the book Guy De Biévre attempts formal musical analysis of Palestine’s work beginning with a focus on the works Holy 1 and Holy 2 composed 35 years apart. He seems to imply the conclusion that analysis of Palestine’s compositional notes and instructions for performance are not particularly enlightening as to his vitally important performance and method. The descriptions of piano works such as Piano Drone and Strumming Music are technically illustrative as is the reference to Palestine’s carillon work; Music for Big Ears.
BLACK DOG PUBLISHING, (2008). [online]. London: Black Dog Publishing. Available at: http://www.blackdogonline.com [Accessed 17th February 2008].
GUZMAN, A. (2003). Charlemagne Palestine: sacred bordello. London, Black Dog.
POUNCEY, E. (1996). Charlemagne Palestine. Divine Insurrection. The Wire magazine #154. December 1996.
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