Above: Install shots from Gavin Brown Enterprises.
Was there a performance element involved?
Always, it always starts as a performance. You mean in Rome? It’s the same process I did in Antwerp, which is I take an old instrument, I started with early piano music in the 60s and 70s with a Viennese piano, but I used to play it regularly. Now, I like to find an instrument that is like a divinity, it has it’s own tuning, meaning that after months or years it’s de-tuned in its own magical way. The piano that we found for Rome first came from Milan because I was with a gallery there that had just celebrated its fiftieth anniversary called Francovelli, and I had one of the centerpieces of the show, the piano, which I sanctified with lots of divinities, and that piano eventually went to the Gavin Brown show, and that’s the one that sanctifies the chapel — I adore that chapel. That’s one thing you can do in Europe that we can rarely do in America, you can find spaces that are hundreds of years old, and you can transform them and create a dialogue with a modern idea. Just next week I’ll be in Milan because there’s a church with Frank Stellas and all kinds of contemporary art that dialogues with a more ancient architecture — and I love that idea. I’m Jewish from New York, this would not be permitted so easily, though I did the Jewish Museum, but this disaffected chapel gives me a chance to work in a sacred space, no longer a visited chapel as a church, but now galleries are the new churches for the younger generation, for the capitalist generation and so forth.
Do you think that Judaism has played into your work?
Yes and no. I’m a New York Jew, there are almost 2 million in New York, it’s the second largest community in the world that still exists, and there are many of us that are not religious, but we’re Jewish, we’re intellectuals, artists, in literature, philosophers, scientists, but we’re also doctors, maybe you’d call it ‘secular,’ but I am absolutely Jewish, but from the secular side. I mean, but that’s very New York. When I go to Israel, I’m a little bit scared of their Judaism, it’s so arrogant, and so sometimes macho, and I don’t like that, I like to be an open Jew, open to everybody, and that’s a very New York quality.
Do you feel like there’s a play with childhood?
Unfortunately, a lot of my colleagues have used childhood as a way of — if you use childhood like Jeff Koons, and you start as a trader on the stock market and then you have pieces for millions and millions of dollars, then that’s childhood used to your advantage. People have always been using childhood to diminish the integrity and the seriousness of my work, but I use the old Barnum and Bailey term, which unfortunately just closed last year, it was an American circus that was over a hundred years old down in Florida and their most famous saying was, ‘our circus if for children of all ages,’ and that is exactly what my work is all about, as well as other things, but it’s for children of all ages.
So it’s sort of a magical pantheon where anything can happen.
I mean it is what it is. I’ve been doing it for 50 years, so I’m not a household name, though ‘Palestine’ is a household name, unfortunately, but in the most unfortunate context. And ‘Charlemagne’ actually was a Holy Roman emperor a thousand or two ago.
Is that your given name?
No, I was actually born Haim Moshe Palestine, it’s my diaspora name. And I have a diaspora name like so many Jews after the Queen Catolica of Spain banished us from Europe, and then like so many famous artists, we took on the name of the country of our origin, and Paelstine was where my family was from, from Odessa, when they immigrated to Coney Island which we still call to this day ;Little Odessa,' and I was brought up near Brownsville which was a Jewish mafia neighborhood which is still quite active. That was where my family lived from Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus, then on my father’s side was from Latvia and those were the ones who lived in Brighton Beach on the water.
The New York of when I was 20, it was 1967, you could find a loft in SoHo for like 200 dollars, and now it’s like 2 million dollars, and Brooklyn, no one even went to, you never said you were an artist from Brooklyn, they’d think you’re like Sesame Street and you live in a garbage can — it’s true! When I first went to high school they said, ‘Don’t tell them you’re from Brooklyn, they’ll think you’re an idiot.’ Now, I go all over the world and I tell people I’m from Brooklyn and they go, ‘Really?’ and their mouths open, they say, ‘That’s the center of the world.’ It’s funny how times change.
But to talk a little about what I did at MUHKA, I took a piano and I sanctified it —