A Clear-Eyed Rebellion Revealed in Work
For a man known for his defiantly political art, Hans Haacke is remarkably staid in person: sensible sandals, roomy jeans and a plaid shirt, with an amiable way of answering questions.
Despite his huge reputation in Europe, American curators have mostly shunned him.
“Before they make a move,” said the 83-year-old artist, “one that is not quite the norm, they need to consider (and I don’t blame them for that) whether this is good for their personal career.”
In 1971, Mr. Haacke was about to be honored with a survey at the Guggenheim Museum, but the show was canceled. Once the director learned that the art would include research into questionable real estate dealings, he said there was no way his museum would display such “muckraking.” He fired the survey’s curator, too.
Mr. Haacke’s conceptual artwork, “Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971,” made up of photographs, charts and financial histories of buildings in New York, remains one of his best-known pieces.
“To introduce something that deals with the social and political world that we live in — that was alien,” Mr. Haacke recalled. “Maybe I was naïve,” he added, “but I did not expect that this would cause problems.”
Mr. Haacke admits that the furor around the cancellation helped establish him as an art-world force, but it also cost him: “It was not easy. We had a two-year-old child. I had an adjunct position at Cooper Union. I could not sell my stuff — it was hard.”
It has been 33 years since Mr. Haacke’s last United States survey, at the New Museum in New York, which has now filled four of its floors with his works for an exhibition ending on January 26.
“We felt it was important to do this show,” said Massimiliano Gioni, co-curator of the New Museum retrospective, who hopes the survey will establish Mr. Haacke as “the artist who has opened the doors to a world outside,” making art for much more than art’s sake.
Mr. Gioni said that it was one of Mr. Haacke’s most polemical assaults on the establishment that first set the New Museum on the road to his survey. In 2015, the artist’s “Gift Horse,” a huge bronze skeleton of a thoroughbred, began its 18-month stay on a plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square. One of the horse’s front legs came wrapped in an LED display that carried the latest U.K. stock-market report.
After 33 years, U.S. curators bring back Hans Haacke.
(At the New Museum, the numbers come from Wall Street.)
Seth Cameron, who took a class taught by Mr. Haacke in 2002, at the end of his 35-year career at Cooper Union college in New York, remembered being impressed by his teacher’s determination to keep the spotlight on his art, to the point of refusing to ever have his face appear in print. He was surprised to find Mr. Haacke’s politics mostly absent from his actual talk and teaching.
“I feel uncomfortable to be seen running around with a clenched fist,” Mr. Haacke said.
The Times’s Jason Farago wrote that the exhibition “cannot disguise that Mr. Haacke has often been a better activist than artist. Much of his later work is flat-footed and polemical, when compared to his initial accomplishments in institutional critique. Yet there is still a value to Mr. Haacke’s early art of disclosure.”
One floor of the exhibition is devoted to 1960s works that explore physical and natural systems and human impacts on them. A 1966 piece, for example, lets us watch a rod of ice grow and shrink depending on the humidity released into the gallery by visitors.
Mr. Haacke first revealed a commitment to exploring social systems in a talk he gave in 1968, as he found himself reeling from the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. Faced with that, he said, artists could only realize “how unsuited their endeavors are for making society more humane.” And ever since, he’s taken society on.
In a 1970 contribution to the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition “Information,” he placed two ballot boxes made of clear acrylic in a gallery. Above them was a question: “Would the fact that Governor Rockefeller has not denounced President Nixon’s Indochina policy be a reason for you not to vote for him in November?” Not at all incidentally, New York’s governor at the time, Nelson Rockefeller, was a museum board member, and his younger brother David was its chairman. Twice as many museumgoers voted Yes as No.
But his work, he says, is still and always was art, not activism. “Of course, I don’t believe that artists really wield any significant power,” he once said. “At best, one can focus attention.”