Hans Haacke
Encyclopedia
Hans Haacke is a German-American art
ist who lives and works in New York.
, Germany. He studied at the Staatliche Werkakademie in Kassel
, Germany, from 1956 to 1960. He was a student of Stanley William Hayter
, a well-known and influential English printmaker, draftsman, and painter. From 1961 to 1962 he studied on a Fulbright grant at the Tyler School of Art
at Temple University
in Philadelphia. From 1967 to 2002 Haacke was a professor at the Cooper Union
in New York City.
During his formative years in Germany, he was a member of Zero (an international group of artist, active ca. 1957-1966). This group was held together with common motivations: the longing to re-harmonize man and nature and to restore art's metaphysical dimension. They sought to organize the pictorial surface without using traditional devices.
Although their methods differed greatly, most of the work was monochromatic, geometric, kinetic, and gestural. But most of all they used nontraditional materials such as industrial materials, fire and water, light, and kinetic effects. The influence of the Zero group and the materials they used is clear in Haacke's early work from his paintings that allude to movement and expression to his early installations that are formally minimal and use earthly elements as materials.
These early installations focused on systems and processes. Condensation Cube (1963–65) embodies a physical occurrence, of the condensation cycle, in real time. Some of the themes in these works from the 1960s include the interactions of physical and biological systems, living animals, plants, and the states of water and the wind. He also made forays into Land Art
, but by the end of the 1960s his art had found a more specific focus.
and the system of exchange between museums and corporations and corporate leaders; he often underlines its effects in site-specific ways.
Haacke has been outspoken throughout his career about demystifying the relationship between museums and businesses and their individual practices. He writes, "what we have here is a real exchange of capital: financial capital
on the part of the sponsors and symbolic capital
on the part of the sponsored". Using this concept of Pierre Bourdieu's
, Haacke is underlining the idea that corporate sponsorship of art enhances their public reputation, which is of material use to them. Haacke believes, moreover, that both parties are aware of this exchange, and as an artist, Haacke is intent on making this relationship clear to viewers.
In 1970 Hans Haacke proposed a work for the exhibition entitled Information to be held at the Museum of Modern Art
in New York (an exhibition meant to be an overview of current younger artists), according to which the visitors would be asked to vote on a current socio-political issue. The proposal was accepted, and Haacke prepared his installation, entitled MoMA Poll, but did not hand in the specific question until right before the opening of the show. His query asked, "Would the fact that Governor Rockefeller has not denounced President Nixon's Indochina Policy be a reason for your not voting for him in November?" Visitors were asked to deposit their answers in the appropriate one of two transparent Plexiglas ballot boxes. At the end of the exhibition, there were approximately twice as many Yes ballots as No ballots. Haacke's question commented directly on the involvements of a major donor and board member at MOMA, Nelson Rockefeller. This installation is an early example of what in the art world came to be known as institutional critique
.
In one of his best-known works, which quickly became an art historical landmark, Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971, Haacke took on the real-estate holdings of one of New York City's biggest slum landlords. The work exposed, through meticulous documentation and photographs, the questionable transactions of Harry Shapolsky's real-estate business between 1951 and 1971. Haacke's solo show at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
, which was to include this work and which made an issue of the business and personal connections of the museum's trustees, was cancelled on the grounds of artistic impropriety by the museum's director six weeks before the opening. (Shapolsky was not such a trustee, although some have misunderstood the affair by assuming that he was.) Curator Edward Fry was consequently fired for his support of the work.
Following the abrupt cancellation of his exhibition and the trouble it had caused with the museum, Haacke turned to other galleries, to Europe and his native country, where his work was more often accepted. Ten years later he incuded the Shapolsky work—by then widely known—at his solo exhibition at the New Museum of Contemporary Art
, entitled "Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business".
At the John Weber gallery in New York, in 1972, on two separate occasions, Haacke created a sociological study, collecting data from gallery visitors. He requested the visitors fill out a questionnaire with 20 questions ranging from their personal demographic background information to opinions on social and political issues. The results of the questionnaires were translated into pie charts
and bar graphs that were presented in the gallery at a later date. They revealed, among other things, that most visitors were related in some way to the professions of art, art teaching, and museology, and most were politically liberal
.
In 1974, Haacke submitted another proposal that was subsequently rejected for an exhibition at the Wallraf-Richartz museum in Cologne
. The work described a well-documented history of the ownership (with individual biographies of each of the owners) of Manet
's painting Bunch of Asparagus in the museum's collection, narrating how it came into the collection, and in which the Third Reich activities of its donor were revealed. Instead, the work was exhibited in the Paul Menz Gallery in Cologne with a color reproduction in place of the original.
In 1975, Haacke created a similar piece to the Manet project at the John Weber gallery in New York, exposing the history of ownership of Seurat's Les Poseuses (small version). In the same manner as the previous installation, this work showed the increase of the value of the work as it passed from one patron to another.
Also In 1975, he created one of his most memorable installations, entitled On Social Grease. The work, which takes its title from a speech by a corporate head of one of the world's major oil companies, is made up of carefully factured plaques exhibiting quotes from business executives and important art world figures. These plaques display their opinions on the system of exchange between museums and businesses, speaking directly to the importance of the arts in business practices.
In 1978 Haacke had a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art
in Oxford, England, that included the new work A Breed Apart, which made explicit criticism of the state-owned British Leyland for exporting vehicles for police and military use to apartheid South Africa.
His 1979 solo exhibition at Chicago's Renaissance Society featured paintings that reproduced and altered print ads for Mobil
, Allied Chemical
, and Tiffany & Co.
and Margaret Thatcher
in 19th-century style, facing on the opposite wall a gigantic photograph of the demonstration against nuclear arms held earlier that year—the largest demonstration in Germany since the end of the Second World War. The clear implication, supported by Haacke's remarks, was that these two figures were attempting to roll back their respective nations to the socially and politically regressive, laissez-faire, and imperialist policies of the 19th century. In 1988 he was given an exhibition at the Tate Gallery
in London at which he exhibited the portrait of Margaret Thatcher, full of iconographic references featuring cameos of Maurice
and Charles Saatchi
. The Saatchis were well known not only as art collectors on an aggressive scale, widely affecting the course of the art world by their choices, but also as the managers of Thatcher's successful, fear-based political campaigns as well as that of the South African premier, P. W. Botha.
company's sponsorship of a 1989–90 exhibition about Cubism
at the Museum of Modern Art.
Haacke has had solo exhibitions since, at the New Museum of Contemporary Art
, New York; the Van Abbemuseum
, Eindhoven; and the Centre Georges Pompidou
, Paris.
In 1993 Haacke shared, with Nam June Paik
, the Golden Lion
for the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale
. Haacke's installation Germania made explicit reference to the pavilion's roots in the politics of Nazi Germany
. Haacke tore up the floor of the German pavilion as Hitler once had done. In 1993, looking through the doors of the pavilion, past the broken floor, the viewer witnesses the word on the wall: "Germania", Hitler's name for Nazi Berlin.
, at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art in New York, Haacke presented a piece that is a direct reaction to art censorship. The piece called Sanitation featured six anti-art quotes from US political figures on each side of mounted American flags.The quotes were in the Gothic style typeface once favored by Hitler's Third Reich. On the floor was an excerpt of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, guaranteeing freedom of speech and expression. Lined up against the wall were a dozen garbage cans with speakers emitting military marching sounds. Haacke claims that "Freedom of expression is the focus of the work".
. Burnham also points to Haacke's joining the Arts Workers Coalition and the boycott of the São Paulo
Bienal in Brazil in 1969 as catalyst for the artist's work to take a political direction. Writing by Haacke and his close friends and colleagues, including documentation of his work, are collected in two separate books by the artist.
Hans Haacke first published a book about the ideas and processes behind his and other conceptual art called Framing and Being Framed. Published in 1995, Free Exchange, is a transcription of a conversation between Haacke and Pierre Bourdieu
The two men met in the 1980s and, as Bourdieu states in the introduction, "very quickly discovered how much they have in common".
Art
Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....
ist who lives and works in New York.
Early life
Haacke was born in CologneCologne
Cologne is Germany's fourth-largest city , and is the largest city both in the Germany Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia and within the Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Area, one of the major European metropolitan areas with more than ten million inhabitants.Cologne is located on both sides of the...
, Germany. He studied at the Staatliche Werkakademie in Kassel
Kassel
Kassel is a town located on the Fulda River in northern Hesse, Germany. It is the administrative seat of the Kassel Regierungsbezirk and the Kreis of the same name and has approximately 195,000 inhabitants.- History :...
, Germany, from 1956 to 1960. He was a student of Stanley William Hayter
Stanley William Hayter
Stanley William Hayter , CBE was a British painter and printmaker associated in the 1930s with Surrealism and from 1940 onward with Abstract Expressionism. Regarded as one of the most significant printmakers of the 20th century, in 1927 Hayter founded the legendary Atelier 17 studio in Paris...
, a well-known and influential English printmaker, draftsman, and painter. From 1961 to 1962 he studied on a Fulbright grant at the Tyler School of Art
Tyler School of Art
The Stella Elkins Tyler School of Art, usually just referred to as Tyler School of Art is Temple University's school of art, which confers BFA and MFA degrees. The school was originally founded by sculptors Stella Elkins Tyler and Boris Blai on a separate 14-acre estate in Elkins Park...
at Temple University
Temple University
Temple University is a comprehensive public research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Originally founded in 1884 by Dr. Russell Conwell, Temple University is among the nation's largest providers of professional education and prepares the largest body of professional...
in Philadelphia. From 1967 to 2002 Haacke was a professor at the Cooper Union
Cooper Union
The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, commonly referred to simply as Cooper Union, is a privately funded college in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, United States, located at Cooper Square and Astor Place...
in New York City.
Although their methods differed greatly, most of the work was monochromatic, geometric, kinetic, and gestural. But most of all they used nontraditional materials such as industrial materials, fire and water, light, and kinetic effects. The influence of the Zero group and the materials they used is clear in Haacke's early work from his paintings that allude to movement and expression to his early installations that are formally minimal and use earthly elements as materials.
These early installations focused on systems and processes. Condensation Cube (1963–65) embodies a physical occurrence, of the condensation cycle, in real time. Some of the themes in these works from the 1960s include the interactions of physical and biological systems, living animals, plants, and the states of water and the wind. He also made forays into Land Art
Land art
Land art, Earthworks , or Earth art is an art movement which emerged in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in which landscape and the work of art are inextricably linked...
, but by the end of the 1960s his art had found a more specific focus.
Systems work (1970-present)
Haacke's interest in real-time systems propelled him into his criticism of social and political systems. In most of his work after the late 1960s, Haacke focused on the art worldArt world
The art world is composed of all the people involved in the production, commission, preservation, promotion, criticism, and sale of art. Howard S. Becker describes it as "the network of people whose cooperative activity, organized via their joint knowledge of conventional means of doing things,...
and the system of exchange between museums and corporations and corporate leaders; he often underlines its effects in site-specific ways.
Haacke has been outspoken throughout his career about demystifying the relationship between museums and businesses and their individual practices. He writes, "what we have here is a real exchange of capital: financial capital
Financial capital
Financial capital can refer to money used by entrepreneurs and businesses to buy what they need to make their products or provide their services or to that sector of the economy based on its operation, i.e. retail, corporate, investment banking, etc....
on the part of the sponsors and symbolic capital
Symbolic capital
In sociology and anthropology, symbolic capital can be referred to as the resources available to an individual on the basis of honor, prestige or recognition, and functions as an authoritative embodiment of cultural value...
on the part of the sponsored". Using this concept of Pierre Bourdieu's
Pierre Bourdieu
Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher.Starting from the role of economic capital for social positioning, Bourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field or location,...
, Haacke is underlining the idea that corporate sponsorship of art enhances their public reputation, which is of material use to them. Haacke believes, moreover, that both parties are aware of this exchange, and as an artist, Haacke is intent on making this relationship clear to viewers.
In 1970 Hans Haacke proposed a work for the exhibition entitled Information to be held at the Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
in New York (an exhibition meant to be an overview of current younger artists), according to which the visitors would be asked to vote on a current socio-political issue. The proposal was accepted, and Haacke prepared his installation, entitled MoMA Poll, but did not hand in the specific question until right before the opening of the show. His query asked, "Would the fact that Governor Rockefeller has not denounced President Nixon's Indochina Policy be a reason for your not voting for him in November?" Visitors were asked to deposit their answers in the appropriate one of two transparent Plexiglas ballot boxes. At the end of the exhibition, there were approximately twice as many Yes ballots as No ballots. Haacke's question commented directly on the involvements of a major donor and board member at MOMA, Nelson Rockefeller. This installation is an early example of what in the art world came to be known as institutional critique
Institutional Critique
Institutional Critique is an art term that describes the systematic inquiry into the workings of art institutions, for instance galleries and museums, and is most associated with the work of artists such as Michael Asher, Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, Andrea Fraser, Fred Wilson and Hans...
.
In one of his best-known works, which quickly became an art historical landmark, Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971, Haacke took on the real-estate holdings of one of New York City's biggest slum landlords. The work exposed, through meticulous documentation and photographs, the questionable transactions of Harry Shapolsky's real-estate business between 1951 and 1971. Haacke's solo show at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is a well-known museum located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States. It is the permanent home to a renowned collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern, and contemporary art and also features special exhibitions...
, which was to include this work and which made an issue of the business and personal connections of the museum's trustees, was cancelled on the grounds of artistic impropriety by the museum's director six weeks before the opening. (Shapolsky was not such a trustee, although some have misunderstood the affair by assuming that he was.) Curator Edward Fry was consequently fired for his support of the work.
Following the abrupt cancellation of his exhibition and the trouble it had caused with the museum, Haacke turned to other galleries, to Europe and his native country, where his work was more often accepted. Ten years later he incuded the Shapolsky work—by then widely known—at his solo exhibition at the New Museum of Contemporary Art
New Museum of Contemporary Art
The New Museum, founded in 1977 by Marcia Tucker, is the only museum in New York City exclusively devoted to presenting contemporary art from around the world...
, entitled "Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business".
At the John Weber gallery in New York, in 1972, on two separate occasions, Haacke created a sociological study, collecting data from gallery visitors. He requested the visitors fill out a questionnaire with 20 questions ranging from their personal demographic background information to opinions on social and political issues. The results of the questionnaires were translated into pie charts
Pie chart
A pie chart is a circular chart divided into sectors, illustrating proportion. In a pie chart, the arc length of each sector , is proportional to the quantity it represents. When angles are measured with 1 turn as unit then a number of percent is identified with the same number of centiturns...
and bar graphs that were presented in the gallery at a later date. They revealed, among other things, that most visitors were related in some way to the professions of art, art teaching, and museology, and most were politically liberal
Liberalism
Liberalism is the belief in the importance of liberty and equal rights. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally, liberals support ideas such as constitutionalism, liberal democracy, free and fair elections, human rights,...
.
In 1974, Haacke submitted another proposal that was subsequently rejected for an exhibition at the Wallraf-Richartz museum in Cologne
Cologne
Cologne is Germany's fourth-largest city , and is the largest city both in the Germany Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia and within the Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Area, one of the major European metropolitan areas with more than ten million inhabitants.Cologne is located on both sides of the...
. The work described a well-documented history of the ownership (with individual biographies of each of the owners) of Manet
Manet
-MANET as an abbreviation:*MANET is a mobile ad hoc network, a self-configuring mobile wireless network.*MANET database or Molecular Ancestry Network, bioinformatics database-People with the surname Manet:*Édouard Manet, a 19th-century French painter....
's painting Bunch of Asparagus in the museum's collection, narrating how it came into the collection, and in which the Third Reich activities of its donor were revealed. Instead, the work was exhibited in the Paul Menz Gallery in Cologne with a color reproduction in place of the original.
In 1975, Haacke created a similar piece to the Manet project at the John Weber gallery in New York, exposing the history of ownership of Seurat's Les Poseuses (small version). In the same manner as the previous installation, this work showed the increase of the value of the work as it passed from one patron to another.
Also In 1975, he created one of his most memorable installations, entitled On Social Grease. The work, which takes its title from a speech by a corporate head of one of the world's major oil companies, is made up of carefully factured plaques exhibiting quotes from business executives and important art world figures. These plaques display their opinions on the system of exchange between museums and businesses, speaking directly to the importance of the arts in business practices.
In 1978 Haacke had a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art
Modern Art Oxford
Modern Art Oxford is an art gallery established in 1965 in Oxford, England. From 1965 to 2002, it was called The Museum of Modern Art, Oxford.-Foundation:...
in Oxford, England, that included the new work A Breed Apart, which made explicit criticism of the state-owned British Leyland for exporting vehicles for police and military use to apartheid South Africa.
His 1979 solo exhibition at Chicago's Renaissance Society featured paintings that reproduced and altered print ads for Mobil
Mobil
Mobil, previously known as the Socony-Vacuum Oil Company, was a major American oil company which merged with Exxon in 1999 to form ExxonMobil. Today Mobil continues as a major brand name within the combined company, as well as still being a gas station sometimes paired with their own store or On...
, Allied Chemical
AlliedSignal
AlliedSignal was an aerospace, automotive and engineering company that acquired and merged with Honeywell for $15 billion in 1999, after which the new group adopted the Honeywell name.AlliedSignal was created through a 1985 merger of Allied Corp...
, and Tiffany & Co.
Tiffany & Co.
Tiffany & Co. is an American jewelry and silverware company. As part of its branding, the company is strongly associated with its Tiffany Blue , which is a registered trademark.- History :...
1980s
With extensive research Haacke continued throughout the 1980s to target corporations and museums in his work through larger scale installations and paintings. In 1982, at the documenta 7 exhibition, Haacke exhibited a very large work that included oil portraits of Ronald ReaganRonald Reagan
Ronald Wilson Reagan was the 40th President of the United States , the 33rd Governor of California and, prior to that, a radio, film and television actor....
and Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990...
in 19th-century style, facing on the opposite wall a gigantic photograph of the demonstration against nuclear arms held earlier that year—the largest demonstration in Germany since the end of the Second World War. The clear implication, supported by Haacke's remarks, was that these two figures were attempting to roll back their respective nations to the socially and politically regressive, laissez-faire, and imperialist policies of the 19th century. In 1988 he was given an exhibition at the Tate Gallery
Tate Gallery
The Tate is an institution that houses the United Kingdom's national collection of British Art, and International Modern and Contemporary Art...
in London at which he exhibited the portrait of Margaret Thatcher, full of iconographic references featuring cameos of Maurice
Maurice Saatchi, Baron Saatchi
Maurice Nathan Saatchi, Baron Saatchi is the co-founder, with his brother Charles, of the advertising agencies Saatchi and Saatchi and M&C Saatchi, where he currently serves as Executive Director.- Early life :...
and Charles Saatchi
Charles Saatchi
Charles Saatchi is the co-founder with his brother Maurice of the global advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, and led that business - the world's largest advertising agency in the 1980s - until they were forced out in 1995. In the same year the Saatchi brothers formed a new agency called M&C...
. The Saatchis were well known not only as art collectors on an aggressive scale, widely affecting the course of the art world by their choices, but also as the managers of Thatcher's successful, fear-based political campaigns as well as that of the South African premier, P. W. Botha.
1990s
Haacke's controversial 1990 painting Cowboy with Cigarette turned Picasso's Man with a Hat (1912–13) into a cigarette advertisement. The work was a reaction to the Phillip MorrisAltria Group
Altria Group, Inc. is based in Henrico County, Virginia, and is the parent company of Philip Morris USA, John Middleton, Inc., U.S. Smokeless Tobacco Company, Inc., Philip Morris Capital Corporation, and Chateau Ste. Michelle Wine Estates. It is one of the world's largest tobacco corporations...
company's sponsorship of a 1989–90 exhibition about Cubism
Cubism
Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture...
at the Museum of Modern Art.
Haacke has had solo exhibitions since, at the New Museum of Contemporary Art
New Museum of Contemporary Art
The New Museum, founded in 1977 by Marcia Tucker, is the only museum in New York City exclusively devoted to presenting contemporary art from around the world...
, New York; the Van Abbemuseum
Van Abbemuseum
Van Abbemuseum is a museum of modern and contemporary art located in central Eindhoven, Netherlands, on the east bank of the Dommel river. Established in 1936, the Abbe Museum is named after its founder, Abbe Henri. Abbe was a lover of modern art and wanted to enjoy it there from Eindhoven...
, Eindhoven; and the Centre Georges Pompidou
Centre Georges Pompidou
Centre Georges Pompidou is a complex in the Beaubourg area of the 4th arrondissement of Paris, near Les Halles, rue Montorgueil and the Marais...
, Paris.
In 1993 Haacke shared, with Nam June Paik
Nam June Paik
Nam June Paik was a Korean American artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the first video artist....
, the Golden Lion
Golden Lion
Il Leone d’Oro is the highest prize given to a film at the Venice Film Festival. The prize was introduced in 1949 by the organizing committee and is now regarded as one of the film industry's most distinguished prizes...
for the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale
Venice Biennale
The Venice Biennale is a major contemporary art exhibition that takes place once every two years in Venice, Italy. The Venice Film Festival is part of it. So too is the Venice Biennale of Architecture, which is held in even years...
. Haacke's installation Germania made explicit reference to the pavilion's roots in the politics of Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
. Haacke tore up the floor of the German pavilion as Hitler once had done. In 1993, looking through the doors of the pavilion, past the broken floor, the viewer witnesses the word on the wall: "Germania", Hitler's name for Nazi Berlin.
2000s
At the 2000 Whitney BiennialWhitney Biennial
The Whitney Biennial is a biennale exhibition of contemporary American art, typically by young and lesser known artists, on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, USA. The event began as an annual exhibition in 1932, the first biennial was in 1973...
, at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art in New York, Haacke presented a piece that is a direct reaction to art censorship. The piece called Sanitation featured six anti-art quotes from US political figures on each side of mounted American flags.The quotes were in the Gothic style typeface once favored by Hitler's Third Reich. On the floor was an excerpt of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, guaranteeing freedom of speech and expression. Lined up against the wall were a dozen garbage cans with speakers emitting military marching sounds. Haacke claims that "Freedom of expression is the focus of the work".
Writing and publications
On being considered a political artist Haacke says: "it is uncomfortable for me to be a politicized artist.... the work of an artist with such a label is in danger of being understood one dimensionally without exception.... all artwork have a political component whether its intended or not". Jack Burnham comments on Haacke's political growth and links its roots to exposure to a time of political unrest in the US surrounding the Vietnam WarVietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
. Burnham also points to Haacke's joining the Arts Workers Coalition and the boycott of the São Paulo
São Paulo
São Paulo is the largest city in Brazil, the largest city in the southern hemisphere and South America, and the world's seventh largest city by population. The metropolis is anchor to the São Paulo metropolitan area, ranked as the second-most populous metropolitan area in the Americas and among...
Bienal in Brazil in 1969 as catalyst for the artist's work to take a political direction. Writing by Haacke and his close friends and colleagues, including documentation of his work, are collected in two separate books by the artist.
Hans Haacke first published a book about the ideas and processes behind his and other conceptual art called Framing and Being Framed. Published in 1995, Free Exchange, is a transcription of a conversation between Haacke and Pierre Bourdieu
Pierre Bourdieu
Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher.Starting from the role of economic capital for social positioning, Bourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field or location,...
The two men met in the 1980s and, as Bourdieu states in the introduction, "very quickly discovered how much they have in common".
Further reading
- Luke Skrebowski, "All Systems Go: Recovering Hans Haacke's Systems Art", in Grey Room, Winter 2008, No. 30, Pages 54–83.
- Flügge, Matthias, and Fleck, Robert (ed.). 2007. "Hans Haacke - Wirklich. Werke 1959-2006". Düsseldorf: Richter. (catalogue to a retrospective exhibition at Deichtorhallen Hamburg 17.11.2006 - 4.2.2007 and Akademie der Künste, Berlin 18.11.2006 - 14.1.2007)
- Grasskamp, Walter, Hans Haacke, and Benjamin Buchloh. "Obra social": Hans Haacke. Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1995. ISBN 84-88786-08-5 Text in Catalan, English and Castilian.
- Bourdieu, P. and H. Haacke. Free Exchange. Stanford: Stanford Univ Press, 1995.
- Wallis, B. (ed). 1986. Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business. New York and Cambridge: New Museum of Contemporary Art and MIT Press.
- Jean-Hubert Martin, Valerie Hilling, Catherine Millet and Mattijs Visser. "ZERO, Internationale Künstler Avantgarde", exhibition catalog published by Museum Kunst Palast and Cantz, Düsseldorf/Ostfildern 2006, ISBN 3-9809060-4-3
- Duncan, Carol. "The Art Museum as Ritual" from The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, ed. by Donald Preziosi Oxford: Oxford University, 1998, 474-475.
- Jameson, Frederic. Postmordernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism Durham, North Carolina: Duke University, 1991,4-5.
- Harvey, David. "The Art of Rent: Globalization, Monopoly and the Commodification of Culture". from A World of Contradictions: Socialist Register 2002, ed. by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys.
- Kaye, Nick. Site-specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation. London: Routledge, 2000.
External links
- https://www.watkins.edu/sites/all/files/imagecache/gallery_full/portfolios/images/05.jpg
- "Hans Haaacke: Talking Art" Tate Channel
- Hans Haacke on Artcyclopedia
- Hans Haacke at Artnet.com
- MoMa.org Audio Program, All Systems Go: Recovering Hans Haacke's Systems Art by Luke Skrebowski, Middlesex University, England, MP3 file (30 min/28MB).
- ZERO foundation
- ZERO group