One of his older works is also of lasting relevance: “Shapolsky et al. Manhattan real estate holdings. A real-time social system, as of May 1, 1971”. In it, Hans Haacke examined the ownership of run-down New York apartment buildings. In uniform panels made up of black-and-white photographs of the buildings and information about their ownership in typewriter font, Haacke made it clear who was profiting from the misery of these areas – a difficult to untangle web of companies around their main owner.
The work made history because of what it triggered in the art world. An upcoming solo exhibition by Haacke at the Guggenheim Museum was flatly canceled by its director. He explained that he had to “ward off a foreign body that had penetrated the art museum’s organism.”
That’s what you read in the catalog that accompanies Haacke’s retrospective in the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt am Main. Haacke’s Shapolsky work can be seen in a separate area. Good thing, because a grievance that Haacke takes up and denounces using artistic means cannot tolerate the immediate proximity of the next problem.
Several years ago, Künstlerhaus Bethanien showed its works in separate rooms. The first German retrospective only followed in 2006, divided between the Berlin Academy of Arts and the Hamburg Deichtorhallen.
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Haacke, born in Cologne in 1934, has worked in the USA since 1961 and has lived in New York since 1967, became known for his political and art policy interventions. Just as famous as the Shapolsky work was the “Manet Project ’74”, which was for a Cologne exhibition to illustrate the economic influence of the donor Hermann Josef Abs, who was involved in the acquisition of Manet’s “Asparagus Stilllben” for the Wallraf-Richartz Museum was significantly involved. Here too, the tablets relating to the Manet purchase were excluded from the museum. A resourceful gallery in Cologne exhibited Haacke’s work and had public success on its side.
With the “Chocolate Master” in 1981, the artist exposed the next Cologne patron: the major collector Peter Ludwig. Haacke pairs his company’s numerous confectionery brands with explanations of Ludwig’s art businesses, which the Museum Ludwig, which was built with public funds, is involved in, all for the benefit – including tax – of the patron.
Haacke reaches into big politics with his work on US President Ronald Reagan. Here, in a hyper-realistically painted portrait, Reagan looks behind a red cordon at the large photo of a demonstration against US missiles stationed in Germany. Titled “Oil Painting. Homage to Marcel Broodthaers”, Haacke pays homage to the Belgian conceptual artist who died all too early and who made the art world the subject of his poetic works.
Well, “poetry” is not Haacke’s profession. He likes it direct, and so he simply named the work for the Berlin Reichstag building, for which he was selected as part of the Art in Architecture program in 2000, “The Population”. The copies of the letters from the gable inscription of the Bundestag, “Dem Deutschen Volke”, were laid flat on the floor of an atrium and surrounded with earth. MPs brought them with them from their constituencies. Plants grow out of the humus.
You understand what Haacke is getting at, but the conciseness of older works is missing; probably because it is no longer about a specific event, like the work on South African apartheid, advertising manipulation in the USA, or weapons production in Switzerland. Probably also because Haacke wants to do more “art” again as he gets older and avoids the label of political activist.
The artist has a wealth of early work to show. Curator Ingrid Pfeiffer displays it in the Schirn’s largest hall. Haacke appears under the spell of the “Zero” group and tries to turn physical processes into an art form: freezing water, a balloon in the air current, and finally grass sprouting from a cone of earth.
One of his most famous works naturally did not fit into the exhibition: the smashing of the marble floor in the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1993. It won the Golden Lion for the best national contribution. Hans Haacke is certainly not the only one who tackled the Nazi context. After all, as so often, he was the first.