How Did Hans Haacke Make Political Art That Directly Confronted the Moma and Guggenheim Art Museums?

THE Proper name HANS HAACKE has become synonymous with institutional critique. And with skilful reason—Haacke pioneered a singularly astute practice in which the economic and political weather of art's marketing and display function every bit an aesthetic medium. In this regard, his MoMA Poll of 1970 is exemplary: The artist asked museum visitors whether "the fact that Governor Rockefeller has not denounced President Nixon'south Indochina policy [would] exist a reason for you not voting for him in November." The question was far from innocent, given the Rockefeller family unit's prominent role as founders and patrons of the Museum of Modern Art. As in many of Haacke's projects, aesthetics were reinvented as sociological methods: "If 'aye' delight bandage your ballot into the left box; if 'no' into the right box," the wall text instructed. The results of the poll were clearly visible, since ballots accumulated in two transparent Plexiglas containers placed adjacent to each other for all to witness.

The very notion of critique presupposes a legible matrix of judgment: a right and a wrong (or a right and a left), a yes and a no—which is why Haacke'southward recent evidence at the X-Initiative in New York, "Weather, or non," was so intriguing. As the championship suggests, the notoriously fickle vagaries of weather—which, although they are fully capable of both seduction and devastation, cannot exist held morally answerable—served as the exhibition's primal metaphor. "Weather, or not" opened with Adam Smith'south iconic eighteenth-century phrase "the invisible hand of the market place," here transposed into a long, sparse billboard in which the word mitt was replaced by an animated, cartoonish icon of one. The move of this open palm from side to side seemed not only to wave hello to the gallery'southward visitors but besides to dismiss the millions of recently unemployed with a "adieu-bye" as blithe as a smiley face. The invisible hand of the market, of form, naturalizes fiscal fluctuations as a kind of conditions; in Smith'due south agreement, this flux was benign, or at least self-correcting, just in the current economic crunch, caused by years of neoliberal policies, information technology feels more than like a tsunami. (Indeed, quondam Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan warned against what he called a "credit tsunami.")

Of course, Haacke's citation of weather represents a render for him. As a photo in the exhibition, Spray of Ithaca Falls: Freezing and Melting on Rope, February. 7, 8, ix . . . 1969, reminds us, he began his career in the 1960s working with natural systems alongside sociological and political ones. Nonetheless, I tin can't assist taking the show'south punning title, "Conditions, or non," as a kind of echo and update of Haacke's referendum in MoMA Poll 40 years ago. Is he request whether or not art tin meet the twin challenges of our moment—namely, out-of-control weather condition and out-of-command markets? Or is he wondering if markets are themselves weather—acts of God, as the lawyers might say—or not? In both cases, the capacity for critique through the identification of a stable moral dichotomy is doubtful at best.

The initial impression here was one of abandonment—of a sparsely furnished, neglected, or deserted space (after all, the show did occupy the former Dia Heart headquarters in Manhattan, and the 10-Initiative ended its one-year life span immediately after this exhibition). Simply the installation was nevertheless complex, including several intersecting economic "conditions systems," of which I can requite simply a hint. Finance upper-case letter was represented not simply past Adam Smith'due south slogan but by a flashing sign that read bonus and Haacke'southward biting diptych Thank you, Paine Webber, 1979; traces of factory labor were unsaid through a series of anthropomorphic ranks of empty workers' lockers, some at angles, some lying on the floor as though knocked down; and the informal or blackness-market economic system was suggested in a few of Haacke'south photographs, pinned up askew. One showed a woman begging outside a yacht party at the Venice Biennale, while another (also in Venice) captured a vendor selling knockoff handbags in the borrowed low-cal of a Prada shopwindow.

What truly activated the exhibition, though, was that it created its own weather arrangement (and by this I don't mean a spectacular surround meant to entertain awestruck viewers, à la Olafur Eliasson). The several n and south windows in the vast gallery were kept open—and I tin attest, having visited on a very cold day in January, that the room was frigid. Mounted underneath the flashing bonus sign, a bank of vi noisy industrial-force fans blew hard on anyone in front of information technology; the current also kept a fiddling scrap of silver foil, suspended on a line, adrift beyond the room. Here, Haacke demonstrated not just that art may enter into natural ecologies but also that art is its own ecology—a point clearly made by the display of a hydrograph and a barograph, machines used by museums to track proper temperature and humidity for maintaining a work of art.

Who has ever seen a museum's windows open during the winter? What artist would let his work to be exhibited outside the narrow range of temperate weather optimal for its survival? And how much does information technology cost, anyway, for our museums to maintain works of art in such splendid comfort? Haacke has put his ain work (and those who wish to view it) on the street, so to speak, along with the beggar and black-market vendor in the midst of Venice. He thus takes a step beyond the ostensibly stable dichotomy of "critique" by issuing an upstanding phone call appropriate to the age of recession: to confront abandonment without passing judgment—to experience what it'south like to be outside the social, political, and economical perimeters of the fine art world, if only for a moment, looking in from the common cold.

David Joselit teaches modern art at Yale University in New Haven.

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Source: https://www.artforum.com/print/201003/hans-haacke-s-weather-or-not-24945

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