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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 judgments–in art as much as in anything else–are dependent on power relations between the various participants. Nothing is more essential to Haacke’s work than for him to violate the bounds of preconceived definitions of art–in 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 artist’s 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 Haacke’s art depend almost entirely on an assessment of his ethical-moral sensibilities–with 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 installation’s 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 Haacke’s 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 Haacke’s 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 Haacke’s 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.

 

 




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