IN THE SUMMER of 1970, as part of the group exhibition “Information,” one of the first major surveys of conceptual art, the artist Hans Haacke presented a work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York called “Poll of MoMA Visitors.” Museumgoers were given slips of paper to deposit into one of two plexiglass boxes. On the wall was a sign about Nelson Rockefeller, then in his third term as governor of New York and running for a fourth. “Question,” it read, “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? Answer: If ‘yes,’ please cast your ballot into the left box; if ‘no,’ into the right box.”
The Rockefeller family helped found MoMA in 1929. In 1963, Nelson’s brother David was elected the chair of the museum’s board of trustees. As governor, Nelson Rockefeller had begun calling for a broadening of the war in Vietnam and a South Vietnamese-led invasion of Cambodia and Laos as early as 1964. That wasn’t the family’s only connection to the conflict. Henry Kissinger, who worked for the Rockefellers in the 1950s and advised Nelson on his presidential campaigns beginning in 1960, was also Nixon’s national security adviser and the chief architect of the secret carpet bombing campaign of Cambodia that began in 1969 and is estimated to have killed more than 150,000 civilians. It led to the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, which Nixon announced on TV on April 30, 1970. The following day, students began demonstrating across the country in numbers that would soon reach the millions and, on May 4, the National Guard opened fire on protesters at Kent State University in Ohio, killing four.
Tensions were high at MoMA as well, where “Information” opened that July. Haacke kept the exact content of his work secret until he had finished installing it. Unlike a lot of conceptual art, it was simple but, in looking critically at a figure of great behind-the-scenes power at MoMA from the vantage point of an artist exhibiting at the museum, Haacke had created an entirely new art form. David Rockefeller was furious about the exhibition; Nelson Rockefeller’s office called John Hightower, the museum’s director, to ask for Haacke’s poll to be removed, but the work remained. It was among the factors that eventually led to Hightower’s forced resignation. Haacke would quickly become an art-world pariah. For a Guggenheim Museum show scheduled for the following year, he had created a new work called “Shapolsky et al.,” for which he used public records to chart the real estate holdings and shell corporations of the New York City landlord Harry Shapolsky, whom the district attorney had accused of being “a front for high officials of the Department of Buildings” and who had been found guilty of rent gouging. Because of the Shapolsky work, as well as another similar piece about a pair of real estate developers, the Guggenheim’s then-director, Thomas Messer, canceled the exhibition, describing Haacke’s work as “an alien substance” that he would not allow to “[enter] the art museum organism.” The curator Massimiliano Gioni, who co-organized a 2019 solo show of Haacke at the New Museum — the only major American museum ever to give him one — compared the Guggenheim’s censoring of “Shapolsky et al.” to the “legendary refusal of ‘Nude Descending a Staircase,’” referring to Marcel Duchamp’s 1912 Cubo-Futurist painting that was rejected from a Paris exhibition for being, as Duchamp would later describe it, too disrespectful of the nude form. “It’s such a defining moment,” Gioni said of Haacke’s canceled show. “It must have shocked him, but it also proclaimed his integrity, which is at a level that is still uncomfortable for some institutions.”
Before Haacke, museums were considered, in the words of the New York Times critic Holland Cotter, “genteel and politically marginal.” Robber barons might have donated to them to enhance their social clout, but such cultural largess was seldom questioned. Today, though, when phrases like “artwashing” and “toxic philanthropy” have entered the lexicon to describe the role that museums and other cultural organizations play in boosting the images of corporations and billionaires, Haacke’s work is more than just relevant — it’s prophetic. With persistent clarity, he seemed to understand, half a century before anyone else, the stakes of the uncomfortable relationship between art and politics.
ONCE A WEEK for three weeks last May, I met Haacke, who’s 88, at the Bus Stop Cafe on Hudson Street, an almost monastic diner of the kind that doesn’t really exist in Lower Manhattan anymore, where there was never any trouble getting a seat, no one was on a laptop and the waiter didn’t care that we never ordered any food. Each time, Haacke had a glass of cranberry juice. He always brought his son Paul, 47, who’s an adjunct professor of humanities and media studies at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and who didn’t say much other than to delicately push back on a date or some other small detail. (Paul had once worked as a fact-checker at magazines and now assumed that role for his father.)
Haacke isn’t reclusive, but he has tried his best to let his work speak for itself. He’ll occasionally agree to interviews but, as a rule, he won’t show his face in photographs. (Being photographed “would be a problem for me,” he said, the only time he adopted a slightly severe tone.) He’s rail thin, with a neatly trimmed gray beard and perfectly circular glasses, and wore a loosefitting flannel shirt. It was difficult to square what I knew of his work, unforgiving in its critique of wealth and power, with the man himself, who was reserved, friendly and at times so mild-mannered that his voice was inaudible under the sound of buses screeching to a halt a few feet away. He’s one of the most censored artists of the past 100 years, and yet he seemed incapable of expressing anger or resentment. This is how he described “MoMA Poll,” as it is now commonly known: “People would answer yes or no to a question that I put up. And for about 16 years after that, I was not invited to participate in anything at the Museum of Modern Art.” The most animated I saw him was when one of his neighbors from the nearby Westbeth apartment complex — the subsidized artist housing where Haacke has lived since 1971 — zoomed around the corner in an electric wheelchair. “Look how fast she’s going!” said Haacke, who was also using a wheelchair after a recent surgery. He sounded concerned and vaguely envious.
Haacke had been preparing for a major exhibition in Frankfurt that will open at the Schirn Kunsthalle in November and travel to the Belvedere Museum in Vienna. He also currently has work on view in New York, in a group show dedicated to the American flag at Paula Cooper Gallery. The Frankfurt show, a career retrospective, includes many artworks about his native Germany, among them another influential, often suppressed piece, 1981’s “Der Pralinenmeister,” about Peter Ludwig, a chocolate manufacturer and one of Germany’s most famous art collectors. Across 14 framed panels that include photographs of Ludwig and his factory workers, Haacke wrote a text detailing the overlap between patronage and commerce: Ludwig received tax advantages from donating artworks and displaying his collection publicly and would loan artworks to cities where he produced or distributed his chocolate. “Der Pralinenmeister” also notes that Ludwig’s factories housed female foreign workers in on-site hostels that didn’t offer day care, so women who gave birth were forced to leave or find foster homes for their children — or give them up for adoption. According to Haacke’s text, the company’s personnel department stated that it was “a chocolate factory and not a kindergarten.” Ludwig, who died in 1996, was reportedly interested in buying the work, perhaps to remove it from circulation, but Haacke wouldn’t sell it to him.
In works like “Shapolsky” and “Der Pralinenmeister,” Haacke said, “I had to do research like a journalist does.” He’d scour documents, noticing details that other histories ignored, and present facts, often via text, in a detached, almost omniscient voice. Early on, he was influenced by the American art writer Jack Burnham, who developed what he called systems aesthetics in the late ’60s, which Haacke described as “everything is connected to everything else.” (The subtitle of “Shapolsky” identifies it as “A Real-Time Social System.”) Through art, people like Ludwig had managed to quite literally buy themselves good will. Or as David Rockefeller put it in a quote that Haacke engraved on a plaque that he hung at an earlier show at the New Museum in 1986, “Involvement in the arts … can provide a company with extensive publicity and advertising, a brighter public reputation and an improved corporate image.”
HAACKE WAS BORN in Cologne in 1936, the same year that the Nazis marched into the demilitarized Rhineland. His father, a member of the center-left Social Democratic Party, worked for the city; when the Nazis took over, they demanded that everyone in Cologne’s government join the party. Haacke’s father refused and went to work as an accountant.
One of Haacke’s first memories is from when he was 6. “There was an air raid alert during the night, and we were in the basement, trying to wait it out,” he said. “The next morning, when I walked to school on the street where we lived, one building had been hit by a bomb. It was burned out. Otherwise, no other building was hit. I will never forget that.” Why that building and not his? He’d spend the rest of his life trying to extract meaning from such seemingly random events.
In 1956 he moved to Kassel, an industrial town in West Germany within 30 miles of Soviet-occupied territory. He wanted to attend the Kunsthochschule Kassel because, he said, it was “the only art school at that time that was still somewhat in the tradition of the Bauhaus,” which had taken a multidisciplinary approach to teaching subjects as diverse as pottery and typography. His plan was to become a high school art teacher.
Kassel is best known today as the location of Documenta, one of the world’s most important contemporary art exhibitions, held every five years. In 1959, in Documenta’s second iteration, Kunsthochschule students were tasked with running its day-to-day operations, and Haacke, who worked as a security guard and helped with installation, also took pictures, producing his first major work, “Photographic Notes, Documenta 2, 1959.” In a deadpan style, he showed visitors interacting with the exhibition and, in doing so, created a snapshot of Cold War-era West Germany. In one image, a little boy has his back turned to an abstract canvas by Wassily Kandinsky, who had been featured in the Nazis’ 1937 exhibition of so-called degenerate art; the child’s face is buried in a Mickey Mouse comic book instead.
Though he mostly studied abstract painting, he spent much of the ’60s thinking about how to reinvent the medium of sculpture. He met Linda Snyder, a Brooklyn native who had just finished her bachelor’s degree in French, in 1962, while he was in the United States on a Fulbright to study art. They married in Germany in 1965 and returned to the States by ocean liner. (They have one other son, Carl, a tech entrepreneur.) Upon reaching New York Harbor, Haacke received a telegram inviting him to put on a solo exhibition at the Howard Wise Gallery; his friend Otto Piene, a German artist who showed there, had arranged it as a wedding present. (“It was like a fairy tale,” Haacke said of his arrival in Manhattan. “I really was very lucky.”) Initially working out of a one-room studio on the Bowery, he made sculptures that featured natural materials: filling a plexiglass container with water that gradually evaporated and condensed, placing a white sheet above fans so that the material rippled endlessly, planting grass on a mound of dirt. His sculptures foreshadowed his later career, showing an artist obsessed with cause and effect, with decisions and their repercussions.
The shift in his work from physical and ecological systems to overtly political ones dates roughly to 1968. Following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., he wrote a letter to Burnham: “Linda and I were gloomy for days and still have not quite recovered. The event pressed something into focus that I have known for long but never realized so bitterly and helplessly, namely that what we are doing, the production and the talk about sculpture, has no relation to the urgent problems of our society. … Not a single napalm bomb will not be dropped by all the shows of ‘Angry Arts.’ Art is utterly unsuited as a political tool. … I’ve known that for a number of years, and I was never really bothered by it. All of a sudden it bugs me.”
As an artist, he knew he couldn’t stop a war or influence an election. (Most respondents of “MoMA Poll” seemed disinclined to vote for Rockefeller, but he won a fourth term as governor and served as vice president under Gerald Ford.) Yet “MoMA Poll” helped change how the public thought of the art they saw in a museum and its relationship to the world at large, and Haacke’s work ever since has been as unsparing and revelatory. In 1971, he began conducting demographic surveys of exhibition visitors at the Milwaukee Art Center, the John Weber Gallery in New York and other venues, creating one of the first empiric statements about the art business’s liberal insularity; in 1975, he charted the rise of art as an investment opportunity by tracing, across text panels, the provenance and sales history of Georges Seurat’s 1888 painting “Les Poseuses” (small version), which had passed through, among others, the hands of a Luxembourg-based holding company. And at the 1993 Venice Biennale, only a few years after German reunification, in an installation he titled “Germania,” he destroyed the marble floor of the German pavilion, which had been remodeled by the Nazis in 1938, and hung a picture of Adolf Hitler visiting the Biennale in 1934. At an optimistic moment for democracy and Germany, Haacke reminded people to consider the dark past alongside any brighter future. Paula Cooper, Haacke’s dealer, described waiting in line for the show behind Peter Ludwig. “He didn’t look happy,” she said.
TODAY, HAACKE OCCUPIES an unusual place in the contemporary canon: He has been illustrious and canceled, critically revered and commercially undervalued. He supported himself by teaching at Cooper Union for 35 years, and Gioni told me that he’s one of the only artists of his caliber who still owns much of his work. “Hans is extremely successful,” Gioni said, “but he lives his success in ways that are rarely celebrated by the art industry. He’s Franciscan in his modesty.” The art historian Benjamin Buchloh, who considers Haacke to be one of the most important postwar figures, said with disappointment that at this moment in time, “nothing could be further from the mind of the New York art world than Hans Haacke.” That his 2019 retrospective in New York was at the New Museum and not, say, MoMA “shows that institutions don’t feel comfortable with the challenge he poses, even now,” Buchloh said.
We often think of artists as being ahead of their time. Perhaps Haacke was so far ahead of his that it’s not fair to expect the world to catch up to him, this man who, out of what Gioni described as a “perverse form of love,” held museums to a higher moral standard than most religions require of their practitioners. One can, however, see his legacy in the rise of activist groups like the Guerrilla Girls in the 1980s, who’ve critiqued art institutions for their exclusion of female artists, and more recently Just Stop Oil, Occupy Museums and the photographer Nan Goldin’s P.A.I.N., which have forced museums to sever ties with collectors who came by their wealth through profiteering, like the Sackler family with their opioid fortune. Despite Haacke’s work being uncommercial, his influence has seeped into the wider culture, an uncommon feat for a conceptual artist. In reminding the public that museums, like universities, don’t exist on some higher plane above the scrum of politics and business but are in their own way corporations making decisions that can be as calculated as a bank’s, he created a subgenre of art that is now so widespread that we take its very existence for granted. His heirs include Darren Bader, Andrea Fraser, Walid Raad, Fred Wilson and any artist who has made the structural flaws of the art business into their subject. In the years since “MoMA Poll” went up, cultural institutions in general have been forced to look more closely at the sources of their funding. There was great outrage over the Koch brothers, for instance, who have long used their fortune to prevent federal climate change regulations, putting their names on the facades of venues like the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Often the uproar fizzles out. (The public space in front of the Met was renamed the David H. Koch Plaza in 2014.) But it was Haacke who helped show people where to direct their indignation.
Unlike some of his peers, though, Haacke has never been a spokesperson for the causes championed in his work. His art isn’t didactic. He’s blunt but measured, driven by inquiry rather than impulse. He didn’t have a lot to say about the current state of the art world, where censorship and fear among galleries and museums navigating political fault lines have increased of late. He had spent too much of the last year in a hospital bed, unequipped to perform his usual investigations. The conduct of the art business — and the possibility of art actually influencing politics — was now a younger generation’s responsibility.
But Haacke had certainly left them an interesting road map. In our last meeting, we discussed what is probably his most hopeful work, “Der Bevölkerung” (2000), whose title translates as “To the Population.” It’s an enormous trough of soil with that phrase spelled out in neon letters, permanently installed in the courtyard of the Reichstag, the German parliament in Berlin. The idea was that throughout the year, representatives would bring soil from their districts, and it would mix together, home to whatever sprouted in it, a metaphor for the democratic experiment. The phrase “Der Bevölkerung” is a play on the inscription on the facade of the Reichstag: “Dem Deutschen Volke,” which means “To the German People.” Haacke proposed the work in 1999, at a time of increased migration to Germany from Turkey and other predominately Muslim countries. “Rather than a dedication to the German people, I wanted a dedication to the people who live in the country,” Haacke said, not just “those who were native German, so to speak.” The center-right Christian Democratic Union, which then held a majority of seats in parliament, was “solidly against” Haacke’s idea, he said, and pushed for the 669-member body to debate whether to let him install his art at the Reichstag.
“There was furious resistance to my proposal,” said Haacke, who attended the proceedings in April 2000. “I didn’t believe that it would pass. In the end, it did [by] two votes.” Among those in favor of the work were two women who voted against their own party, and one of them, Haacke said, “was from Nuremberg, where the Nazis were prosecuted for crimes against humanity.”
Next year is the work’s 25th anniversary. Anti-immigrant sentiment is on the rise in Germany, as in many Western nations, and the far right has gained more power there. But, Haacke told me, “things have changed. After a while, a considerable number of people from the parties that had voted against ‘Der Bevölkerung’ have contributed soil.”
It’s not only soil. In it are seeds from plants, and their blooming has become an annual ritual. “I insisted it should not be a garden,” Haacke said. “It was a wild growth.” More important, he added, “it’s ongoing.” The work wasn’t complete. By design, it never would be.
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