Hans Haacke

7 Works 1970-75

Framing and Being Framed

Texts by Hans Haacke that range from straightforward descriptions of his artworks to wide-ranging reflections on the relationship between art and politics. Hans Haacke's art articulates the interdependence of multiple elements. An artwork is not merely an object but is also its context—the economic, social, and political conditions of the art world and the world at large. Among his best-known works are MoMA-Poll (1970), which polled museumgoers on their opinions about Nelson Rockefeller and the Nixon administration's Indochina policy; Gallery-Goers' Birthplace and Residence Profile (1969), which canvassed visitors to the Howard Wise Gallery in Manhattan; and the famously canceled 1971 solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, which was meant to display, among other things, works on two New York real estate empires. This volume collects writings by Haacke that explain and document his practice. The texts, some of which have never before been published, run from straightforward descriptions to wide-ranging reflections and full-throated polemics. They include correspondence with MoMA and the Guggenheim and a letter refusing to represent the United States at the 1969 São Paulo Biennial; the title piece, “Working Conditions,” which discusses corporate influence on the art world; Haacke's thinking about “real-time social systems”; and texts written for museum catalogs on various artworks, including GERMANIA, in the German Pavilion of the 1993 Venice Biennial; DER BEVÖLKERUNG (To the Population) of 2000 at the Berlin Reichstag; Mixed Messages, an exhibition of objects from the Victoria and Albert Museum (2001); and Gift Horse, unveiled on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square in 2015.

The Writings of Hans Haacke

Working Conditions

Rosalyn Deutsche

New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York, N.Y.)

For the past fifteen years, Hans Haacke's work has been concerned with issues that are at the core of postmodern investigations - the nature of art as institution, the authorship of the artist, the social behavior of the art world, the network of cultural policies such as the role and function of the museum, the critic, and the public, and many other sociological problems. This book is based on a major retrospective exhibition of Haacke's work, the first in an American museum. The works selected show the different ways in which he has addressed the social and political concerns affecting art production. By laying bare the explicit functioning and interconnectedness of systems of finance, social organization, and representations, Haacke demonstrates how these employ art and other forms of presentation and representation as formalized means of power and coercion. In this important respect, his work has set a precedent for that of many younger, social concerned artists. A group of significant essays by Leo Steinberg, Fredric Jameson, Rosalyn Deutsche, and an introduction and overview by Brian Wallis place Haacke's work in a larger social and aesthetic context. Hans Haacke was born in Cologne, Germany, in 1936 and, since 1967, has taught at the Cooper Union in New York. Earlier retrospective exhibitions of his work have been held at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, the Tate Gallery, London, and museums in Berlin and Bern. His work has also been included in many major international group exhibitions, including the Tokyo Biennal, the Venice Biennale, and Documenta. Brian Wallis is Adjunct Curator at The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, and editor of Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representationand of the magazine Wedge. Hans Haackeis copublished with The New Museum of Contemporary Art and distributed by The MIT Press.

Hans Haacke, Unfinished Business

Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.)

John Baldessari

Jeff Koons

Mark Lawrence Rosenthal

Chuck Close

Vija Celmins

Alex Katz

Robert Gober

Deborah Kass

Ian Alteveer

Andy Warhol Museum

Alfredo Jaar

Marla Prather

Luc Tuymans

Julian Schnabel

Rebecca Lowery

Polly Apfelbaum

Ryan Trecartin

This sumptuous volume presents the first full-scale exploration of warhol's tremendous influence across the generations of artists that have succeeded him. Warhol brought to the art world a unique awareness of the relationship that art might have with popular consumer culture and tabloid news, with celebrity, and with sexuality. Each of these themes is explored through visual dialogues between warhol and some sixty artists, among them John Baldessari, Vija Celmins, Gilbert & George, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Robert Gober, Nan Goldin, Damien Hirst, Alfredo Jaar, Deborah Kass, Alex Katz, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Glenn Ligon, Robert Mapplethorpe, Vik Muniz, Takashi Murakami, Bruce Nauman, Cady Noland, Elizabeth Peyton, Sigmar Polke, Richard Prince, Gerhard Richter, Ed Ruscha, Cindy Sherman and Luc Tuymans. These juxtapositions not only demonstrate warhol's overt influence but also suggest how artists have either worked in parallel modes or developed his model in dynamic new directions. Featuring commentary by many of the world's leading contemporary artists, as well as a major essay by the celebrated critic Mark Rosenthal and an extensive illustrated chronology, Regarding Warhol is an out-standing publication that will be essential reading for anyone with an interest in contemporary art.

Sixty Artists, Fifty Years

Regarding Warhol

The Chocolate Master

Caroline A. Jones

When invited to do a solo exhibition at MIT in 1967, Hans Haacke was known as a kinetic artist-yet he made it clear upon arriving that his works were now to be called systems, produced with the explicit intention of having their components physically communicate with each other, and the whole communicate physically with the environment, according to the artist's statements in 1967. These early works involved provoking and staging time-based events: wind in water vs. water in wind; the cycles of feedback systems of organic life; the dynamism of water in its solid state-freezing, evaporating, and melting; and the production of artificial climates. The exhibition Hans Haacke 1967 brought together from Haacke's solo 1967 exhibition together again for the first time in fourty-four years. The exhibition was organized for MIT's List Visual Arts Center by Caroline A. Jones, professor in the History, Theory, and Criticism Program at MIT. This catalogue publication features an essay by Jones, writings by Haacke, and the first English publication of a text written by art historian and curator Edward F. Fry. Fry's text served as the introduction to the catalogue accompanying his cancelled survey of Haacke's work which was planned for the Solomon R. Guggenhiem Museum in New York in 1971

Hans Haacke 1967

Deichtorhallen Hamburg

When Hans Haacke was awarded the Peter Weiss Prize in 2004, he called Weiss' writings "courageous interventions, driven by moral outrage." Since the early 1960s Haacke himself has been a socially engaged artist. Living in New York since 1965 (born Cologne, 1936), he has participated in the public debate through his sculptures, installations, paintings and photographs, as well as by his writings and teaching. In 1971, several works for a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum were deemed "inappropriate" by the Museum's director and he cancelled the show (one was an exposé of the real estate empire of a New York slumlord. At the 1993 Venice Biennial, the artist broke up the marble floor the Nazis had installed in the German pavilion and he displayed the replica of a 1-DM coin minted in the year of German reunification above the entrance. His 2000 installation DER BEVÖLKERUNG (To the population), a work in progress in the German Parliament building in Berlin, also makes reference to the Nazi past but, in addition, addresses contemporary issues of citizenship and the integration of foreign-born residents. Recently, several works have paid critical attention to the Iraq war. This publication was produced for a 2006 retrospective exhibition at the Hamburg Deichtorhallen and the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. It offers a survey of Haacke's works from 1959 to the present. It includes a selection of his writings and essays by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Rosalyn Deutsche and Walter Grasskamp.

For Real : Works 1959-2006

Hans Haacke

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