Interview with hans haacke

JESSICA PRINZ

In 1970, and partly in response to your work, Daniel Buren wrote that “art, whatever else it might be, is exclusively political.” Do you believe that art is exclusively political?

Hans Haacke

No, but it always is also political

RICHARD ROTH

I sense in your work a sincere desire to communicate. That seems to me an overriding aspect, but people talk about your work also in terms of art world strategy; whether you challenge minimalism as an art strategy

HH

Like other fields, the art world has its own history, practices and social dynamics (and, let’s not forget, there are many art worlds coexisting, here and in the rest of the world). Of course, these peculiar social enclaves are not isolated from society at large. In fact, they are affected by that general social environment more than many of their denizens believe. It varies from case to case to what extent artists are aware of these often undeclared customs, influences, and constraints, and how they unquestioningly adjust to or are ready to challenge them. I usually take into account the context for which I prepare a work In that sense I think strategically. And in that sense I sometimes also make references to art historical periods or mannerisms—and, perhaps, provoke a rethinking of accepted positions

RR

Should art transcend the market place? Is art privileged in its ability to do this?

HH

Yes, of course. If supply and demand were the exclusive criteria, I wouldn’t be involved. It would be too boring. Historically, the demands of the market, galleries, collectors, institutions, etc. have been a powerful but by no means exclusive factor in determining the work of artists. In spite of the amply justified griping about the pressures of the market and the willingness of many artists to sail with the wind, the market isn’t the only motivating force today either. Many of the more interesting projects I and others have been involved in were not inspired by the art world’s trading posts. But the “marketplace” is not a forum to be shunned at all cost. Communication via commercial galleries can be quite effective—and, if one is lucky, can help pay the bills. Because I have a secure teaching job, I am more independent from market whims than others. I am also fortunate in being with a gallery that tolerates my not being market driven

RR

Why is it so objectionable for corporations to use art or use culture to make themselves more desirable?

HH

The corporate agenda, i.e. the maximization of “shareholder value” is incompatible with the values of what is fuzzily referred to as “culture.” The last thing people think of when they decide to get involved with the arts, as artists, art historians, dealers, etc. is to become marketing and public relations operatives for products and attitudes they do not believe in or even reject. It is the very aura of the disinterested, the noncommercial, bordering on the “otherworldly,” that makes culture so attractive to corporations or, for that matter, to the promotion of a political agenda. The cloak of culture protects them against public scrutiny of, for example, their labor practices, the health and safety of their plants and products, their environmental record, as well as their attempts to influence public policy on taxes, trade, regulations, etc. We must fend off the takeover of culture, our turf, and its subjection to the business rationale—with its inevitable consequences of censorship and self-censorship. We have to fight against being made stooges in corporate and political strategies

MetroMobiltan, 1985 by Hans Haacke. Mobil sponsored numerous blockbuster exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, among them Treasures of Ancient Nigeria (Mobil has petroleum interests in Nigeria). For years, the company rejected shareholder resolutions to stop supplying the South African military and police who were enforcing the racist policies of the apartheid regime. The photo behind the banners was taken at a funeral of blacks killed by the police in 1985. The text on the entablature is excerpted from the Museum's flier The Business of Art Knows the Art of Good Business. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203871423/b38a823b-a476-4d0b-bc07-e9af66a0137b/content/ufig_4_C.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> JP

Leo Steinberg observed that your work is basically apolitical since, as he said, “it is hard to conceive any action resulting from it.” He writes, “The artist knows perfectly well that Mobil will not be induced to retreat from its South African market; that its shareholders will continue to expect maximum earnings; that no museum can refuse money, no matter where or how it was made; and that few museumgoers will forego an interesting art exhibition just because it was funded by a corporation whose politics differs from theirs. In short, nothing practical can, or will, come of it.” Do you agree with this characterization of your work and what do you see as its consequences or effects?

HH

No, I don’t agree with him on this. I believe Leo Steinberg has a rather mechanical understanding of how public opinion is shaped, and how, in turn, public opinion affects what corporations and politicians do. Social interaction (both public and private) is influenced by a myriad of factors. The art world, part of what has been called the “consciousness industry” participates in this “negotiation.” What happens in the art world rubs off, usually not in a mechanical, easily traceable manner but rather at the level of “atmospherics,” i.e. of the social and political climate. It affects the cocktail and dinner party talk, particularly in media capitals like New York, Paris, and London, where the so-called movers and shakers get together. We should not underestimate the political power of such seemingly silly party talk. It often is in the unpressured setting of social gatherings that opinions are formed and shared, and decisions are made on what will be printed, what will go on the air, and what slant it will have. And that, of course, has political repercussions. In this indirect manner, and often only in a slow and perhaps homeopathic way, the art world participates in shaping public opinion. Like the art world, the universities are not isolated, and what happens on campuses, as we have seen, has consequences elsewhere. The lecture I give here, this interview and its possible future publication, the books and catalogs you and your students discuss, they also play a little role in the process of adding ingredients to the social consensus. At many varied levels, in concert with events and activities in diverse fields, the art world has an impact and participates in the shaping of what we call the Zeitgeist. It is at that level that it has a political effect.

Let me give you an example. Contrary to what Leo Steinberg anticipated in 1986, Mobil did pull out of South Africa in 1989. I like to believe that, even though only in a very minor way, I contributed to this move by showing Mobil’s sponsorship of the arts for what it was designed to do, namely, throw up a smoke screen behind which the company thought it could continue supplying the police and military of the apartheid regime with strategically essential petroleum. At Cooper Union, where I teach, like in many universities, student protests led the trustees to rid the school’s portfolio of Mobil stock. State and municipal pension funds dropped their Mobil investments (obviously, they acted independently of my work). The press and, with it, the public and Washington became increasingly critical of the racist South African regime. Singly, none of these efforts would have made Mobil and other corporations pull up their stakes. But together they did have an effect—with the happy ending of free elections and the presidency of Nelson Mandela.

I can give you two examples for a more direct impact. My memorial to the Nazi victims of the Austrian province of Styria in the center of Graz, which was fire-bombed, not only led to prison sentences for the arsonists but, as a sociology professor of the university in Graz assured me, it served as a catalyst for the reexamination of the city’s Nazi past (amplified by the Austrian media).

And in 1990, I exhibited in a New York gallery two works which revealed that Philip Morris, in addition to its known campaign contributions to Jesse Helms, also contributed heavily to a Jesse Helms museum, that was to promote the Senator’s “American principles.” Philip Morris’s sponsorship of Helms coincided with his assault on the NEA and Robert Mapplethorpe. When the gay community learned about the cowboys’ support of Helms, ACT UP called for an international boycott of Miller beer (a Philip Morris product). Miller sales did, in fact, drop that year, possibly because of the cancellation of contracts by gay bars. I saw a sticker “Boycott Philip Morris” on a cigarette vending machine even in Berlin. Philip Morris has since strenuously tried to smooth its relations with the gay community. And it continues to woo the art world, obviously, in order to mute criticism of its peddling deadly products. Not entirely with success: a number of prominent artists no longer participate in exhibitions sponsored by Philip Morris

RR

There is a view that art is just another object if we strip away its privileged status. I think art in general has been moving in this populist direction, reconsidering the idea of aura, which is more or less artificial. You seem to be utilizing the acceptance of art’s aura as a subversive tool

HH

For the time being, art still does have this aura. That’s why corporations and others like to associate themselves with art and hope to profit from what public relations people call a “positive image transfer.” I believe the longer this instrumentalization continues, the more the aura will wear off. I also believe that the recasting of culture as entertainment has a corrosive effect on its status. However, as long as art has a privileged status, certainly artists can use it as an asset

RR

I seem to be resisting the easy separation of art and aura from that which is not art and “auraless.” These categorizations no longer seem very meaningful and perhaps they are not healthy in the long run

HH

The notion of art as we understand it today is fairly short. It is not older than five hundred years. It has been around since the Renaissance (let me add, it is a Western idea). Before that time the objects we celebrate today as works of art were considered craft, and artists were considered craftsmen, ordinary folks with no elevated social status. During the romantic period, the idea of the “genius” was born, a kind of secularized sainthood. In many ways, that is the world in which we still live today. However, for some years now, that elevated status has been challenged. In certain ways I participate in this questioning. But I am not sure whether “art” can again be totally integrated in our social relations, as it appears to have been in the past, as well as in non-Western and in tribal cultures. I certainly do not consider its subjection to a globalized marketing rationale a desirable “integration.”

JP

I have a very different kind of question. In The Theory Death of the Avant Garde, Paul Mann argues that because you use museum and gallery spaces your art is recuperated or co-opted and as a result it is not as adversarial as it appears to be. How do you respond to Paul Mann?

HH

I haven’t read Paul Mann’s Theory. I can therefore only respond to his argument as you state it. If “adversarial” means challenging generally accepted ideological notions and social practices, and if one is not satisfied with doing that merely as a “bohemian” gesture, it is necessary to do so not only outside, whatever that may mean, but also inside existing institutions, including museums and commercial galleries. The German sociologist Oskar Negt once criticized calls for a boycott of Documenta by remarking “we should not leave these institutions to the Right.” I agree with him not only for strategic reasons. Most art institutions in this country are tax-exempt and thus indirectly supported by all of us. In Europe, Canada, and Australia they are for the most part municipal or state institutions and as such directly maintained by taxpayers’ money. I think we have a constitutional right in a democracy, as the loyal opposition, so to speak, to having access to our institutions. The fear of co-optation makes us impotent. Paul Mann’s thesis, again, as you describe it, strikes me as romantic, based on old, bohemian ideas of the avant garde. Similar to Leo Steinberg, it does not seem to be based on a full understanding of contemporary social dynamics, how they are managed, controlled—and challenged

JP

So you believe it’s possible to be adversarial while within an institution?

HH

Oh, absolutely. But let’s not forget, “adversarial” work is usually not what institutions are looking for, as I can testify to from my own experience. However, they do not form a homogeneous block. If they did, we would not be talking here, I would not have been invited to speak at your art center, and I would not have been able to show you slides of work produced in the kinds of institutions we are talking about

JP

You actually asked this question in your 1973 “Visitors Profile 2” at the John Weber Gallery, but I’d like to ask you the same question. Do you think the preferences of those who financially back the art world influence the kind of work artists produce?

HH

I would have answered yes in 1973, and I would answer yes today. The survival of galleries and to some degree also of artists depends on sales. Galleries are businesses. Most artists are eager to have a gallery and sell their work. Collectors, both private and institutional collectors, as well as agencies that give grants or commission art works, are not all alike; their predilections differ and, like people, they respond to the social climate and are not insensitive to what their peers think and do. Whatever their differences, their financial power does have a considerable impact on what gets to be seen, produced, and talked about. It would be naive to assume that artists don’t have a sense for this. Irrespective of whether they are aware of it, I believe many make the appropriate adjustments. It would be presumptuous for me to exempt myself from this. And that has been the case throughout history

JP

I have a question about the book Unfinished Business. Do you think that is a good vehicle for your art or do you think it’s important for people actually to see your work in museums and galleries? If somebody just saw the book would that be an adequate introduction to your work?

HH

Adequate no, but not useless. I think the encounter with the actual work is essential. The sensuous experience of its materials, surface and shapes, of its size in relation to one’s body, the peculiarities of the space in which it is seen, and the kinesthetic experience of the encounter, all that matters a great deal and cannot be reproduced in a book. You remember me saying that the slides of the locker room of my installation Eagle with Prey were totally inadequate to give you a sense of what it was like being in this dark space lit only by two electric candles. Also, there is no way to duplicate in a book the experience of the social significance of the site in which a work is located. A good example for that is the watchtower in the deathstrip between East and West Berlin, that desolate area which had been cleared of mines only a few months before I tinkered with the watchtower. When it comes to the dissemination of information, newspapers, magazines, books, catalogs and the electronic media are very important. I met people from faraway places, from Moscow, Australia, and South Africa who spoke to me in great detail about a work of mine and what it meant to them, based on seeing pictures and reading about it. At the secondary level, publications can be influential and, as I explained earlier, can affect the Zeitgeist

RR

The book Painting as Model by Yve-Alain Bois mentions a discussion with you from 1977. Bois says “A brief return to our early dialogue with Haacke will introduce yet another type of blackmail, the sociopolitical (the obligation to offer a sociopolitical interpretation of a work of art, recently supplemented by the obligation, for an artist, to make explicit the sociopolitical implications of his work). In our 1977 debate about Greenberg, politics had been the stumbling block, the dividing line: if you were a formalist, you were a reactionary.” What is your reaction to this, now sixteen years later? Do you still see a dividing line between formalism and sociopolitical art?

HH

Oh absolutely

RR

Please tell us more

HH

I would have to reread the introduction to his book to get the context of this quote before I give you a reasoned response. But when it comes to Clement Greenberg’s position not to consider as art any work that incorporates social or psychological elements (inevitably they also have a political dimension), then this is just silly. According to this doctrine, Greenberg must excommunicate almost all things we have come to accept as belonging to the history of art. Being consistent, he, in fact, dismisses as “extra-artistic” surrealism, constructivism, and dadaism, some of the most fertile cultural movements of the twentieth century from which we still take clues today and which, ironically, have inspired many of the artists he championed. Seen from an anthropological perspective, his peculiar version of formalism is a fascinating even though ludicrous episode of cultural sectarianism

RR

Let’s not talk about Greenberg. Let’s talk about art that is about form, sensuality, personal pleasures

HH

Visual articulation means giving form to something, giving it a sensuous presence. If done well, that gives pleasure to both the maker and the receiver. I very much hope you didn’t get the impression that I don’t care about form and sensuousness, or that I have no fun

RR

Could we talk a little about education? I know you’ve taught for a long time, and I’m always concerned about what’s happening in terms of educating artists. Maybe you could describe what you think of as an ideal art school. If someone came to you and said, “Hans, we want you to educate artists of the future, here are the facilities, you can have anything that you want, what would you do?

HH

I wouldn’t know

RR

Turn down the opportunity?

HH

I don’t know. If people ask me, “What do you want for your ideal art school?,” as you do now, I’m always at a loss for a specific answer. The reason is probably that I’m not thinking about things which are, for all practical purposes, impossible. I’m thinking about what I am confronted with today and I try to come to terms with that. That’s hard enough. But let me try to give you a few general thoughts. I would like students to develop a critical understanding of where we are coming from, why things are the way they are today and how to critically evaluate the present. Most important, I want them to be resourceful and able to think for themselves. And I would hope they are given an ethical core strong enough to guide them in whatever situation they may find themselves. Adequate facilities and a good curriculum are important. More important, however, is an intelligent faculty that cannot only teach the tricks of the trade but is inspired by these principles

RR

Tell us a little about what you teach

HH

That’s a bit easier. For one, I teach a three-dimensional design course for fresh-men. It is predominantly a formal introduction to the peculiarities of working in space. Most beginning students are rather inept in dealing with the three-dimensional. Different from my generation their experience with the world is mostly two-dimensional, by way of paper, the movie, and the TV and computer screen. To some extent the course therefore performs a remedial function. It also includes an introduction to the structural peculiarities of various materials, to working with light and motion and a hint at the semiotic and ideological implications of what the students bring to class. Reference is made also to historical examples of visual communication and art, both high and low. At Cooper Union we agree that our 3-DD course is not a beginning sculpture course but is to serve, like the other foundation program courses, all fields to which the students might gravitate after finishing their freshman year. Sculpture classes are offered from the second year on. Because the sculpture faculty believes that students learn as much from each other as from their faculty, sophomores, juniors and seniors are working in the same class. Contrary to the program of rigorous assignments of the freshman year, like most of my colleagues, I do not give assignments in my sculpture class. We fear that by continuing with assignments we would not only risk producing clones of ourselves (which would be a horrendous disservice to the students) but also discourage their moving in rather diverse directions, including the exploration of things that are traditionally not associated with sculpture. Their work is reviewed by all in the class. We pay particular attention to the expressed or implicit meanings it conveys and position it in a historical context. These discussions are held in the spirit that I alluded to in my answer to your previous question. As children get through a variety of childhood diseases, students are allowed to and must make mistakes. They have to get things out of their system before they develop a sense for what is worth doing and can add to what has been done already. I see my role as that of a coach. I encourage and push them. But they have to do the running. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203871423/b38a823b-a476-4d0b-bc07-e9af66a0137b/content/ufig_5_C.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>