Hans
Haacke
by Walter Grasskamp
Phaidon Press, New York NY, 2004
160 pp., illus. 30 b/w, 120 col. Paper,
$39.95
ISBN: 0-7148-4319-9
Reviewed by Artur Golczewski
Department of Art, University of Northern
Iowa
artur.goczewski@uni.edu
Hans Haacke (b. 1936) is a well-known
German artist whose work is frequently
portrayed as controversial. Given that
controversy, and the thinly veiled hostility
that is expressed toward him in certain
quarters, the mere appearance of this
book (from a publisher as prominent as
Phaidon) is a sign that he must be succeeding.
There is consistency in the various critical
writings on Haacke, in the sense that
his work is often misinterpreted in order
to make it compatible with such familiar
criteria as idealism, formalism, and so
on. It is instructive (and not unamusing
at times) to watch as art critics go to
great lengths to dredge up some compositional
plan in his work and/or to point out meanings
of the sort that this artist would never
intend. In truth, his art has more to
do with unmasking the insidious influence
of socio-political agendas, and with showing
the extent to which value judgmentsin
art as much as in anything elseare
dependent on power relations between the
various participants. Nothing is more
essential to Haackes work than for
him to violate the bounds of preconceived
definitions of artin response to
which, as one might expect, his art is
almost always scorned as esthetically
deficient, as a paradigm of what not to
do, as the work of a mere pundit, or as
a dubious dalliance with Marxist art.
This particular book is comprised of a
number of interesting parts: There is
an interview with Hans Haacke conducted
by Molly Nesbit; two critical essays on
his work by Walter Grasskamp and Jon Bird;
extracts from a statement by the German
playwright Bertolt Brecht; a selection
of the artists own writings; and
a chronology of his career. Each section
is enriched by the reproduction of works
by Haacke that relate to the writings
with which they are paired.
The essay by Walter Grasskamp, titled
"Survey," looks back on the
work that Haacke has produced since the
late 1950s. As an essay, it is both informative
and well-documented, but, unfortunately,
its point of view is too narrowly based
on formal analysis. Instead of showing
Haacke to be radically opposed to current
ideas about art, his work is rendered
harmless by portraying it as mere experimentation,
an avant-garde extension of the current
status quo in art. If he is different
from other artists, it is because he makes
"political art," which means
that the subjects he focuses on have socio-political
implications, or draw attention to certain
cultural issues, which he transforms artistically
through his inventive use of materials
or media. Thus, say his critics, although
we may not enjoy or approve of his methods
and their consequences, it is because
of his integrity, hard work, and precision
that his work is of such merit that it
now can be safely included in the estimable
category of art. Without a coherent critical
base, assessments of Haackes art
depend almost entirely on an assessment
of his ethical-moral sensibilitieswith
the result that, ironically, he is increasingly
embraced by a system that he would much
rather subvert.
The essay by Jon Bird, titled "Focus,"
is different from that of Grasskamp, in
the sense that (in keeping with its title)
it discusses a single work by Haacke,
an installation titled Mixed Messages,
that was featured at the Serpentine Gallery
in London in 2001. It recounts
the installations theme, which consisted
of seemingly unrelated juxtapositions
of two- and three-dimensional images of
the human figure, placed and/or displaced
within a variety of time periods and cultural
settings. The essay also talks about various
sub-groupings in the installation, in
which (according to the writer) among
the issues addressed are "nationality
and nationhood, gender and identity, war
and masculinity," "related discourses
of the museum and the discipline of art
history," "projections of the
divisions of class, sexuality, race and
identity," and so on. While the issues
of "power" and "value"
are raised, this is only momentary, with
the result that there is no extended critique
of the operational mechanisms of those
issues or their socio-political implications.
As a result, it is decided that whatever
structure there is in Haackes arrangements
is as inscrutable as (the Surrealists
would say) "the fortuitous encounter
of an umbrella and a sewing machine on
a dissecting table." Writes Bird:
"What possible sense could a viewer
make of this bricolage other then
opening to the objects competing
claims on their perceptual, cognitive
and unconscious responses and allowing
free association of meanings and memories
to make them players in the game of cadavre
exquis?"
Part of the baggage that inevitably comes
from exhibiting in an art museum or gallery
is a tacit reduction of options, an economy
of values, that is a microcosmic clone
of the socio-political structure of the
larger culture. This reduction of options
will always have the upper hand unless
or until there arises (and this is Haackes
prime motivation) a momentous critique
of our culture, where the rationales of
value judgments and power relations are
perceived as intertwined and are re-cognized
as functions of interests and thus subject
to re-conception. As Haacke himself says
in his writings, the concept of "sovereignty"
may be what enables the empowered to limit
the options of others. Those who are sovereign
are often persuasive because they claim
to have access to an internalized universal
Truth, through which they are able to
wisely decide the laws and other limits
for individual and social behavior. Artists
are sometimes assumed to convey direct
(self)expressions of Truth, just as politicians
claim that the rationale for what they
do is legitimized by their ethical-moral
connection to Truth. (Both of these are
examples of what the French structuralist
Michel Foucault called "pastoral
power.") The installation art of
Hans Haacke identifies the various means
by which power constitutes values and,
in turn, defines the limits or boundaries
for individual and social behavior. In
Haackes view, psychological self-reflection
(or self-expression) is not a defining
condition of art, nor should art be thought
to be a path to universal Truth, in which
esthetics provides its legitimacy. Instead,
artists ought to help us see the means
and effects of subjugation; and the process
of art should provide us with opportunities
to redesign the framework of the values
that define the bounds of our personal
and social lives. The esthetic sensibility
is certainly not excluded from the process
of art-making as the re-cognition of culture
in terms of dis- and em-powerment, but
first it must be detached from its usual
role as a sign of access to, and reification
of, universal Truth.