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Weibel at the ZKM Karlsruhe: his place of work for 24 years
Photo: Uli Deck / picture alliance / dpa
The internationally renowned media artist Peter Weibel is dead. The long-standing director of the Karlsruhe Center for Art and Media (ZKM) died on Wednesday after a short, serious illness in a Karlsruhe hospital, as a ZKM spokesman said on Thursday.
Weibel would have been 79 years old on Sunday.
The "Badische Latest News" had previously reported on it.
Born in 1944 in Odessa, Ukraine, the Austrian was an important performance and video artist.
He leaves behind a partner.
Baden-Württemberg's Minister of Art Petra Olschowski (Greens) said: "His advanced approaches were always challenging, because in his often brilliant concepts Peter Weibel was often ahead of today." This attitude and uncompromising commitment are the worldwide reputation, the constant further development and opening up the ZKM to topics and social issues.
»In this sense, he was an important advisor in many committees in the country and also to me personally.«
The city is losing a pioneer and an outstanding personality, said Mayor Frank Mentrup (SPD).
»Karlsruhe remains associated with his name worldwide as the location of the ZKM and as a UNESCO city of media art.«
In the course of his life, Weibel had taught in Vienna, Canada and New York, among other places.
From 1989 to 1994 he headed the Institute for New Media he founded at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. From 1993 to 1999 he was Commissioner for Austria at the Venice Biennale and artistic director of the Neue Galerie at the Landesmuseum Joanneum in Graz.
He has received many awards for his work.
He has been managing the ZKM since 1999 – almost a quarter of a century – and helped the house achieve international renown and become a hub for digital art.
In a few weeks, at the end of March, the era should have ended.
Only recently, for this reason, had he been photographed in his office, which was filled with mountains of paper, books, bags, boxes, photos and a change of shoes.
"The ZKM was a spaceship with an unbelievable altitude," he said with a little wistfulness.
Alistair Hudson will succeed him as ZKM board member on April 1st.
"My main quality is speed," Weibel once said.
And that's exactly how he spoke: he rattled off his views on art and the world at breakneck speed - always friendly, precise, full of ideas and up to date.
Avant-garde media and techno art
A major retrospective at the ZKM in 2019 gave an insight into his broad spectrum of work.
The "respective Peter Weibel" presented him with around 400 works as an action, video, sound and photo artist, but also as a theorist and scientist.
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Weibel and Valie Export at a performance as part of the "Underground Explosion" happening in Zurich in 1969
Photo: Niklaus Stauss / akg-images
After his parents separated, Weibel spent his youth in a home in a small town in Upper Austria.
Initially, he was only able to attend secondary school, but made it to high school of his own accord.
He studied various things, he wrote his dissertation on modal logic in mathematics.
At the same time, his artistic work began in Vienna.
With the Viennese Actionists around Hermann Nitsch and Otto Mühl, he caused a stir in 1968 with a provocative performance entitled »Art and Revolution« in a lecture hall at the University of Vienna: »Brus mutilated himself, Mühl simulated a masturbation scene, and I kept burning Glove gave a lecture, a tirade against Austria's government,« he told KulturSPIEGEL in 2009.
Also in 1968, the Austrian media artist Valerie Export led her artist colleague Peter Weibel on all fours through Vienna on a dog leash.
The action was supposed to be a case study on the sociology of human behavior - recorded in the video poem »Map of Dogs«.
He became known for his avant-garde media and techno art, which has been exhibited worldwide and which has been taking up the ideas of virtual reality and cyberspace since the 1970s.
He also created a media opera and films for television, often in collaboration with other artists, and published treatises on chaos, commerce, chronocracy and logo culture.
Weibel advised festivals such as the Ars Electronica in Linz, where he was artistic director from 1992-1995, and organized the “Virtual Architecture” section at the Steirischer Herbst in Graz.
Weibel remained unreconciled with the official art scene.
As early as the late 1960s, he called his program of rebellion against the »commercial, display and exchange value of culture« »art as criminality«.
feb/dpa