reviews Hans Haacke
HAns HAAcke
Paula cooPer Gallery, new york
11 January – 16 February
Matching the abstinence of American museums, collectors are also refraining from association with works that
question the wisdom and morality of current U.S. government actions in Iraq. The widely shared opinion of art
critics is that such works do not qualify as art. – Hans Haacke
How, it would seem logical to ask, should a critic proceed in the critical assessment of a small retrospective show
of Hans Haacke’s art when the artist has preempted one’s ‘opinion’ on the matter? Either I must agree with
Haacke’s statement (which the artist issued in response to a questionnaire circulated by the editors of October
concerning the art industry’s response to the current war) and so discount at least one of the five pieces in this
exhibition: Mission Accomplished (2005), a torn-in-half print of the stars portion of the Stars and Stripes, one
half of which lies on the ground while its complement remains framed on the wall; or I must disagree, and so
be seen to dissent from my fellow critics by accepting any and all forms of cultural production that are overtly
critical of the Iraq War – which is to say, that are ‘politically engaged’ in general – as ‘art’.
Now, dissent is not a problem, but in defence of my fellow (at least likeminded) critics, the question has
never been one of accepting politically engaged art as such; it has been one of finding politically engaged art
that is any good (and no, not all cultural production can claim the strategic or semi-autonomy – of economic
sequestration, of critical distance, or purposeful purposelessness – that qualifies it as ‘art’). And Haacke’s art
– for the past 50 years quite possibly the most consistently politically engaged on offer – happens to be some
of the best. That’s because such engagement does not issue from knee-jerk liberal rage, ill-informed idealism
Trickle Up, 1992, threadbare sofa,
or fatuous sloganeering, but from research into systems made manifest both physically and ideologically.
embroidered pillow, dimensions variable.
© the artist/ars. courtesy the artist and
Like Haacke’s more well known Condensation Cube (1963–5), Wide White Flow (1967), a more than Paula cooper Gallery, new york
1,200-square-foot sheet of floor-bound white silk
set billowing by four electric fans, presents an object
lesson in dynamics (thermo- for Cube; fluid for Flow).
These are complex systems at work, systems which
respond to every environmental variable, including
the presence of any ‘actors’ within the space. The
point here is that such terms as ‘observers’ or ‘viewers’
imply a passivity which is impossible to maintain.
From here it is only a short step towards recognising
Haacke’s early Photographic Notes, Documenta 2,
1959 (1959) – a series of black-and-white photographs
revealing a European public coming to terms with the
(visual) legacy of its own Modernism – as moments
in the unfolding of a different but no less complex
system; and so on to the artist’s Sol Goldman and Alex
DiLorenzo Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-
Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 (1971), which
should speak for itself.
Of course there are moments when poetics
trumps Haacke’s systems thinking, as it does in
Mission Accomplished. The work is at once subtle and
poignant, but reads more like a statement of physical
fact: such is the case with our now divided States of
America. Jonathan T.D. Neil
133 Artreview
REVIEWS_April Part 1.indd 133 3/3/08 13:33:02
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