Art in NYC: Hans Haacke at the New Museum
Hans Haacke: All Connected, an exhibition of artworks from the 1960s to the present is on view at the New Museum until January 26, 2020
A retrospective of works by conceptual artist Hans Haacke at the New Museum is the first major survey of the artist’s works in 30 years. It presents the artist’s oeuvre from the 1960s to the present.
Renown in the art world for his interest in the systems, from mechanical to environmental to social, Haacke’s explorations in the field of investigative art made a splashy headlines in 1971 when his exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum was canceled because it included Shapolsky et al Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System which probed the real estate dealings of the landlords of Manhattan’s slums. This time Shapolsky et al is on view at the New Museum.
The exhibition also includes Haacke’s kinetic and mechanical art which was created at the start of his career in Germany in the early 1960s. It progresses throughout the years to the recent Make Mar-a-Lago Great Again arrangement from 2019.
Spread over the four floors and the lobby, there are loaded installations that cover such topics as the troubled corporate sponsorship of the arts, the duplicity of business culture, and the societal biases in how the public values and appreciates the art. Haacke’s famous entry for the Fourth Plinth project was Gift Horse, 2014. Conceived in 1998, the project selects artwork for a temporary exhibition on the unoccupied corner on the Trafalgar Square in London. A tribute to Scottish economist Adam Smith, the bronze skeleton of the thoroughbred with the electronic ribbon which displayed the ticker feed from the London Stock exchange (for the exhibit at the New Museum it displays a feed from the New York Stock exchange) was commissioned by the Mayor of London to stand alongside the permanent sculptures of King George IV and the two generals Henry Havelock and Charles James Napier.
The exhibition is a strong reminder about the societal disharmonies of the past and current times. Stroll through the galleries, ponder over the peculiar physics of wave formation or condensation process which are the subjects of Haacke’s early period, participate in the museum visiter’s survey as a participatory piece of art, and get deep into an uneasy relationship between the business and the art.
Hans Haacke: All Connected exhibit is on view at the New Museum from October 24, 2019 – January 26, 2020.
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Hans Haacke was born in Cologne, Germany in 1936. He studied art in Kassel and became a member of the group Zero, which proposed using non-traditional materials to make non-traditional art. Haacke’s early kinetic works are strongly influenced by that philosophy. He continued his study on a Fulbright Grant at Temple University Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, PA in 1961-1962 and taught at Cooper Union in New York City until 2002.
Throughout his career, Haacke was interested in the systems, from natural to organizational to societal. With a systematic approach to investigate the origin of a particular phenomenon, for example, the price change for a piece of art once the work changed hands led to Haacke’s creation of the installation Les Poseuses, 1975. It traces the ownership and price change of Seurat’s Les Poseuses painting. The approach is similar to the conventional provenance search only instead of the artwork it focuses on the owners of the piece and their family history and connections. It is a fascinating journey into the circumstances, ambitions, and naked financial arbitrage.
Radically charged and edgy, many of the works from the late seventies to late nighties center on the political crises of that time. With time, those, not that distant events while cleverly depicted had lost its potency. So while it is interesting to look at the events through the artist’s eyes and experience the hypocrisy and the about-face efforts by the businesses and the governments in the 1970s to 1990s, as time passes the pain dulls and figuratively the colors fade. The hypocrisies of Mobil and Leyland Vehicles companies or Reagan’s administration take the second seat to today’s problems.
Some of the works make an impression of the ethnographic exposition with too many details to take in. This seems to be particularly true for Shapolsky et al regardless of its notoriety back in 1971 when it caused the cancellation of the exhibition and the firing of the curator. It presents a cautionary tale about the effectiveness of political art in our fast-moving time.
The survey of the Gallery-Goers’ Birthplace and Residence Profile still fascinates. That could likely be because there are few changes in the gallery visitors’ residency distribution for 2019 vs 1972 when it was conceived. A continuation of the project is the survey that visitors to the New Museum can take while at the museum. Only now it is done with a tablet instead of a printout form.
Haacke’s art brings into focus institutional critique, an art movement that he started first with Shapolsky et al at Guggenheim and with a study of business and personal connections of the trustees of the Guggenheim Museum in 1971-1972. In his early 80s now, he continues making art pointing to today’s squabbles and incriminations. His wit, keen observation, and a deep feeling of injustice are the key features of his art then and now.
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Dates: October 24, 2019 – January 26, 2020
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