Hans Haacke
Auteur de Libre échange
A propos de l'auteur
Œuvres de Hans Haacke
Four Works 1978 - 79 1 exemplaire
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Hans Haacke Volume II 1 exemplaire
Hans Haacke 1 exemplaire
Hans Haacke : Recent Work 1 exemplaire
Étiqueté
Partage des connaissances
- Date de naissance
- 1936-08-12
- Sexe
- male
- Nationalité
- Germany
- Pays (pour la carte)
- Germany
- Lieu de naissance
- Cologne, Germany
- Lieux de résidence
- New York City, New York, USA
- Études
- Staatliche Werkakademie
Tyler School of Art, Temple University - Professions
- artist
Membres
Critiques
Hans Haacke, Werkmonographie par Hans Haacke; Edward F. Fry
Collection of texts and documents which were to be used in the 1971 Guggenheim exhibition catalogue of Haacke; the exhbition and catalogue were cancelled because of the critical attitude of the artist towards the museum exhibition policy; publication contains an introduction in German by Fry
review of
Hans Haacke's Mia san mia
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - April 4, 2012
My original review of this is too long for GoodReads restrictions. B/c of this, I've placed the longer version in my "Writing" section here:
http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/297435-mia-san-mia-review
When I think of the artists whose work I think of as Concept(ual) Art that I respect, Hans Haacke is one of the artists that I immediately think of. But even w/ Haacke, I end up w/ the same problem that I have w/ almost every Concept(ual) Artist: Is "Concept(ual) Art" the best umbrella term or are there others more accurately descriptive? In Haacke's case, I think of him as, 1st & foremost, a political artist, as a practitioner of Institutional Critique.
Despite my strong liking for Haacke's work, I've done very little to follow it. As such, I decided it was about time to learn more about recent activities. Hence, I got 2 Haacke bks & read this one 1st as the earliest of the 2. It hasn't disappointed me. By the time of the bk's title piece, Haacke was in his mid-60s. He's still a very sharp & thoughtful social analyst.
"Mia san mia" means "We are what we are." To me, that implies a vague fatalism or avoidance of responsibility along the lines of: 'Well, yes, something fucked-up happened, but we are what we are so such things are inevitable.' In this case, it's the name of an installation that Haacke made in Austria as a way of addressing social memory & the significance of its framing - particularly in relation to Austria & Nazism.
An essay of Haacke's reflecting on his 1970 MoMA (NYC) poll appears near the end of this bk. Here's an excerpt:
"Here is a modest example of a work I produced for a given socio-political situation. In response to an invitation to participate in the Information show held by the New York Museum of Modern Art in the summer of 1970, I entered two transparent ballot boxes, each equipped with automatic counting devices, into which visitors to the exhibition were invited to drop ballots signifying their response to a yes-no question. The question was: 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? By the end of the exhibition, the counter of the YES-box had made 25,566 registrations, the NO-box had a tally of 11,563. For a number of reasons, the result has to be taken with a grain of salt, although the general trend seems to be trustworthy.
"Emily Genauer commented on the MOMA-Poll in her review of the show as follows: "One may wonder at the humor (propriety obviously is too archaic a concept even to consider) of such poll-taking in a museum founded by the governor's mother, headed now by his brother, and served by himself and other members of his family in important capacities since its founding forty years ago." The reviewer succinctly provided the necessary background information for the understanding of the socio-political field for which this work was designed.
"Naturally, it would have been politically naive to assume that this poll-taking could affect the outcome of the 1970 gubernational elections, in which Nelson Rockefeller enjoyed solid conservative support."
[..]
"In the case of this particular situation, the Museum pedestal not only failed to emasculate the work but endowed it with social power that it did not enjoy in the studio."
Ah.. yes.. The Museum, & the well-funded Art World in general, as a potentially influential platform for socio-political perception. While it might be "politically naive to assume that this poll-taking could affect the outcome of the 1970 gubernational elections", it might not be politically naive to think that the MOMA-poll might, at least, call greater attn to an issue. & that seems to me to be highly valuable in & of itself.
Unfortunately, the academic environment that supports Haacke thrives on its position of 'objectivity'. Haacke doesn't. Nonetheless, Mia san mia has an essay by Heidemarie Uhl entitled "The Stratifications of Austrian Memory Locating the New Memorial Culture within the Historic Awareness of the Second Republic" in wch she writes:
"The amnesiac orientation of modernism solely towards the future was superseded in the eighties by a new historicism"
"If one is to characterize this obsession with memory, as did Andreas Huyssen, as post-modernist, then clearly historical scholarship becomes linked with epistemological reflections on its hitherto unquestioned subject."
"The rapid career of the guiding principle of "memory" offers an insight into the fascination of this new perspective and its associated dismissal of a modernism so certain of the future and so optimistic about progress. Eric Hobsbawn in his programmatic essay on the "inventions of tradition" identified the relationship with history not as an antithesis to modernism but as a genuinely modern phenomenon, from which the young nation states of the nineteenth century derived their legitimation."
"Now, the "collapse of civilization marked by Auschwitz" was no longer considered merely as a central event in Nazism, but also in the history of modernism."
"But now the question was put, in various national variants, initially in the Western European countries, and then, after 1989, also in the nations of the former Eastern bloc, regarding the involvement of one's own society in the National Socialist machinery of terror. Commonly remembered highlights in the development of the argument are marked as catch-phrases such as Bitburg (the German military cemetary where both Chancellor Kohl and President Reagan honored members of the SS in a joint attendance)"
What I'm objecting to in these quotes are 2 main things:
1. The pose of 'objectivity' taken by the author. This 'objectivity' is the position that all academic writers are expected to take as emblematic of their 'authority' & expertise. Their personal position in the society under discussion is hidden in order to make what are ultimately just their opinions seeming to come from a higher authority of unimpeachable 'knowledge'. It's the Art World's equivalent to speaking from a 'Divine Rights' position.
2. The idea that it was thru post-modernism that memory came to be at the cultural forefront is completely ridiculous, IMO. As for "the involvement of one's own society in the National Socialist machinery of terror" & an analysis thereof?! Such analysis was ongoing before Nazism, during it, & after it by people all over the world. Just reading Heinrich Mann's 1918 "Der Untertan" might be a good place to start (see my review here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/442159.Man_of_Straw ). I quote from a scene in Stanley Kramer's 1961 movie "Judgment at Nuremberg":
Defense Attorney: "Your honor, it is my duty.. to defend Ernst Janning.. &, yet, Ernst Janning has said he's guilty. There's no doubt.. he feels his guilt. He made a great error in going along with the nazi movement, hoping it would be good for his country. But, if he is to be found guilty. there are others who also went along, who also must be found guilty. Ernst Janning said: 'We succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.' Why did we succeed, your honor? What about the rest of the world? Did it not know the intentions of the Third Reich? Did it not hear the words of Hitler broadcast all over the world? Did it not read his intentions in Mein Kampf, published in every corner of the world. Where's the responsibility of the Soviet Union, who signed in 1939 the pact with Hitler, enabled him to make war. Are we not to find Russia guilty? Where's the responsibility of the Vatican? - who signed in 1933 the concordance with Hitler - giving him his 1st tremendous prestige. Are we not to find the Vatican guilty? Where's the responsibility of the world leader Winston Churchill? - who sent in an open letter to the London Times in 1938 - nineteen - thirty-eight! your honor! Were England to suffer a national disaster should pray to god to send a man of the strength of mind & will of an Adolf Hitler! Are we not to find Winston Churchill guilty? Where is the responsibility of those American industrialists who helped Hitler to rebuild the government & profited by the [word not understood]? Are we not to find the American industrialists guilty?! No, your honor, NO!! Germany alone is not guilty. The WHOLE WORLD is responsible for Hitler's Germany! It is an easy thing to condemn one man in the dock. It is easy to condemn the German people, to speak of the basic flaw in the German character that allowed Hitler to rise to power & at the same time, [word not understood], ignore the basic flaw of character that made the Russians sign pacts with him, Winston Churchill praise him, American industrialists profit by him.."
Is this "modernism" or "post-modernism"? I'd argue that it's neither - it's just an intelligent look at business-as-usual that any anarchist, at least, wd've been long since aware of.
In this bk, Christian Kravagna writes: "Since the seventies Hans Haacke has made the suppression of historical memories in a "culture of forgetting" - as Benjamin Buchloh called the postwar years in Germany - the theme of a series of works." & Haacke does it very, very well. One of the main projects presented in this bk is explained as follows:
"DER BEVOLKERUNG (TO THE POPULATION) starts from a similar question. On the occasion of the redesigning of the Reichstag building and before the German Bundestag relocated there, Haacke, along with other artists, was invited by the Arts Advisory Committee in 1998 to submit a project proposal. the proposal led to one of the biggest discussions of a work of art that had ever taken place in the Federal Republic of Germany. This could only happen because the work raises questions of representative democracy at the very center of its praxis. Since 1916 the Reichstag is dedicated to DEM DEUTSCHEN VOLKE (To The German People) by an inscription over the portal. Haacke's project derives from a supposition which is becoming increasingly obvious - that a significant portion of the people who live in Germany are excluded from political representation. In addition, the term "Deutsches Volk" (The German People) is by no means historically unencumbered. In his work in the north light-well, Haacke amplifies the dedication - which is inappropriate in light of the demographic circumstances - with the words DER BEVOLKERUNG, individual parliamentarians are invited to transform a trough (initially empty but for the neon letters) into a field of uncontrolled growth of all kinds of plants by emptying a sack of earth from their electoral districts into it."
AB-SO-LUTE-LY BRILLIANT! By this simple statement of inclusiveness of, eg, gästarbeiters (guest workers - ie: the German equivalent to Mexican laborers in the US), Haacke undermines the strategy of statelessness that the Nazis & their predecessors & successors use(d) to enable crimes of the highest atrocity. I quote from page 102 of Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem - A Report on the Banality of Evil on the use of statelessness in Nazi Germany:
"The legal experts drew up the necessary legislation for making the victims stateless, which was important on two counts: it made it impossible for any country to inquire into their fate, and it enabled the state in which they were resident to confiscate their property. The Ministry of Finance and the Reichsbank prepared facilities to receive the huge loot from all over Europe, down to watches and gold teeth, all of which was sorted out in the Reichsbank and then sent on to the Prussian State Mint. The Ministry of Transport provided the necessary railroad cars, usually freight cars, even in times of great scarcity of rolling stock, and they saw to it that the schedule of the deportation trains did not conflict with other timetables."
Later on in Heidemarie Uhl's essay she writes:
"While the monuments for the memory of the fallen "heroes of the Fatherland" could thus rely on a broad consensus, the establishment of memorial places for the resistance led to all manner of conflicts in Austria of the fifties and sixties. In 1955, for example, immediately after the signing of the Staatsvertrag, (the treaty inaugurating the post-war Austrian state), a memorial plaque originally unveiled in 1946 outside the Inssbruck Lanhause (seat of the provincial government) in memory of the Tyrolean resistance fighter Franz Mair had to be "toned down" again. Apparently its reference to the "seven years of suppression" Austria had to endure under the Nazis was now being considered "scandalous." In 1961, the erection of the International Memorial over a mass grave at Graz central cemetery for 2,500 victims of the Nazi regime who had largely been the subjects of hostage-killings in former Yugoslavia, caused a public uproar. And in 1963 the Lower-Austrian ex-servicemen's association refused to participate in the consecration of a joint memorial site in the town of Maria Langegg, commemorating priests who had either fallen as soldiers or been murdered in concentration camps. The reason given was that "the honest soldier, who wore the priestly cloth, honored his soldier's oath and died as a consequence of it," should not be placed on an equal footing alongside "those many different kinds of individuals of a contrary persuasion." This boycott corresponded quite clearly to the commonly held view of history in which resistance fighters were considered as back-stabbers. "We battlefront soldiers have nothing, really nothing whatsoever, in common with those of our compatriots, who, weapon in hand, killed, battered to death, or betrayed our own fellow soldiers," noted a contribution in the association's journal, Der Kamerad, in 1964."
& Haacke is certainly an artist accustomed to facing such issues. Uhl goes on to discuss Alfred Hrdlicka's Memorial against War and Fascism in Vienna. She writes: "The stone of contention, however, was the figure of the crouching Jew, engaged in scrubbing the roads. This image refers back to the pogrom-like excesses of March, 1938, when Viennese Jews were forced by the German type of fascists to clean away Austrian fascist slogans. Jewish critics were not alone in viewing this representation as a "perpetual repetition of the original degradation." Uhl goes on to explain that "Rachel Whitehead's monument design for Judenplatz was no longer simply an anti-thesis to "forgetting," but as a response to the experiences with the Hrdlicka monument. The initial impulse for this new monument had come from Simon Wiesenthal, who raised the argument that the monument of the road-washing Jew was a "memorial to degradation." Thus the concept for the new monument opted for an abstract design, since "no figural representation could do justice to the enormity of the offense."
I find such issues continuingly important & I don't think that the answer lies w/ either figuration or abstraction or any other either-or type decision.
Back to Haacke: In his text about his partial recreation of the "And You Were Victorious After All" 1938 Nazi monument, Haacke explains: "The only difference from the original was an inscription around the base. Listed white on black in the Fractura typeface preferred by the Nazis, were "The Vanquished of Styria: 300 Gypsies killed, 2,500 Jews killed, 8,000 political prisoners killed or died in detention, 9,000 civilians killed in the war, 12,000 missing, 27,900 soldiers killed.""
Sabine Breitwieser, in her essay "Hans Haacke: An Exhibition in Austria", writes that in Haacke's rejected proposal for a Memorial to the Victims of National Socialism at the Military Target Practice Range "Feliferhof" in Graz there was to be a list of the victims of a particular massacre based on remains exhumed from the Feliferhof mass grave: 116 in civilian clothes, 10 in Hungarian uniform, 4 in German Wehrmachts uniform, 3 in French uniform, 3 in Russian uniform, 2 naked women, 2 naked men, 1 in American uniform, 1 in SS uniform. For me, that's quite an evocative list. Did the Nazis kill the 5 members of the German military? Presumably so. Otherwise, I doubt that their bodies wd've been put in a mass grave. Haacke's proposed memorial is described by Uhl thusly:
"The aura of the place is to be felt in the reconstruction of the mass grave, a horizontal shaft 25 meters in length by 2.50 meters in width, with perpendicular side panels rising three meters high, above it only sky. This can be viewed from an underground passageway. An appellative inscription has been omitted, but a historical photograph of exhumations and the simple language of the information about the finding of the 142 murdered causes the viewer to experience an emphatic projection into the fate of the victims. the intensity of the communion with the crimes that occurred here is also physically conveyed by the arrangement of the space, from which the symbolic burial place can be viewed. The anxiety generated by the crampedness of the space and the deafening blasts of the "shooting activity" and the smell of fresh earth, "could heighten one's psychological sensitivity to such an extent that, for one moment at least, a personal and initially unthinking identification may be possible with the people whom the National Socialists murdered at Feliferhof.""
The main piece that the title of this bk refers to, "Mia san mia", is an installation in wch Haacke reworks the ad of an Austrian Carinthian politician in connection w/ prior nazi Heimat (homeland) propaganda. Haacke writes about the original political poster that he's critiquing:
"The poster carries no imprint as the law on media requires. The publisher and the advertising agency remain anonymous. The Carinthia logo is a trademark owned by the Kärnten Werbung, the state office in charge of promoting tourism in Carinthia. That office did not grant permission to use the logo on the poster.
"In the news magazine Profil and the daily newspaper Der Standard, suspicions were aired that the poster, as well as the campaign of which it is part, were developed by Kärntner Medien Service, an advertising agency of the Freedom Party of Carinthia which has its offices in the party's headquarters. According to Der Standard, inquiries with the Chamber of Commerce of Carinthia revealed that this agency does not have a business permit and is not listed in the registry of companies."
Haacke's work is commonly associated w/ Concept(ual) Art. His work is the result of a close study of how images & language & history are used to set the stage for political machinations hidden behind the smoke & mirrors of cultural production's pretty face. He THINKS about how to make a work that enables people to think & feel past the bullshit in as direct & strong a way as possible. May he have many worthy successors.… (plus d'informations)
Hans Haacke's Mia san mia
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - April 4, 2012
My original review of this is too long for GoodReads restrictions. B/c of this, I've placed the longer version in my "Writing" section here:
http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/297435-mia-san-mia-review
When I think of the artists whose work I think of as Concept(ual) Art that I respect, Hans Haacke is one of the artists that I immediately think of. But even w/ Haacke, I end up w/ the same problem that I have w/ almost every Concept(ual) Artist: Is "Concept(ual) Art" the best umbrella term or are there others more accurately descriptive? In Haacke's case, I think of him as, 1st & foremost, a political artist, as a practitioner of Institutional Critique.
Despite my strong liking for Haacke's work, I've done very little to follow it. As such, I decided it was about time to learn more about recent activities. Hence, I got 2 Haacke bks & read this one 1st as the earliest of the 2. It hasn't disappointed me. By the time of the bk's title piece, Haacke was in his mid-60s. He's still a very sharp & thoughtful social analyst.
"Mia san mia" means "We are what we are." To me, that implies a vague fatalism or avoidance of responsibility along the lines of: 'Well, yes, something fucked-up happened, but we are what we are so such things are inevitable.' In this case, it's the name of an installation that Haacke made in Austria as a way of addressing social memory & the significance of its framing - particularly in relation to Austria & Nazism.
An essay of Haacke's reflecting on his 1970 MoMA (NYC) poll appears near the end of this bk. Here's an excerpt:
"Here is a modest example of a work I produced for a given socio-political situation. In response to an invitation to participate in the Information show held by the New York Museum of Modern Art in the summer of 1970, I entered two transparent ballot boxes, each equipped with automatic counting devices, into which visitors to the exhibition were invited to drop ballots signifying their response to a yes-no question. The question was: 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? By the end of the exhibition, the counter of the YES-box had made 25,566 registrations, the NO-box had a tally of 11,563. For a number of reasons, the result has to be taken with a grain of salt, although the general trend seems to be trustworthy.
"Emily Genauer commented on the MOMA-Poll in her review of the show as follows: "One may wonder at the humor (propriety obviously is too archaic a concept even to consider) of such poll-taking in a museum founded by the governor's mother, headed now by his brother, and served by himself and other members of his family in important capacities since its founding forty years ago." The reviewer succinctly provided the necessary background information for the understanding of the socio-political field for which this work was designed.
"Naturally, it would have been politically naive to assume that this poll-taking could affect the outcome of the 1970 gubernational elections, in which Nelson Rockefeller enjoyed solid conservative support."
[..]
"In the case of this particular situation, the Museum pedestal not only failed to emasculate the work but endowed it with social power that it did not enjoy in the studio."
Ah.. yes.. The Museum, & the well-funded Art World in general, as a potentially influential platform for socio-political perception. While it might be "politically naive to assume that this poll-taking could affect the outcome of the 1970 gubernational elections", it might not be politically naive to think that the MOMA-poll might, at least, call greater attn to an issue. & that seems to me to be highly valuable in & of itself.
Unfortunately, the academic environment that supports Haacke thrives on its position of 'objectivity'. Haacke doesn't. Nonetheless, Mia san mia has an essay by Heidemarie Uhl entitled "The Stratifications of Austrian Memory Locating the New Memorial Culture within the Historic Awareness of the Second Republic" in wch she writes:
"The amnesiac orientation of modernism solely towards the future was superseded in the eighties by a new historicism"
"If one is to characterize this obsession with memory, as did Andreas Huyssen, as post-modernist, then clearly historical scholarship becomes linked with epistemological reflections on its hitherto unquestioned subject."
"The rapid career of the guiding principle of "memory" offers an insight into the fascination of this new perspective and its associated dismissal of a modernism so certain of the future and so optimistic about progress. Eric Hobsbawn in his programmatic essay on the "inventions of tradition" identified the relationship with history not as an antithesis to modernism but as a genuinely modern phenomenon, from which the young nation states of the nineteenth century derived their legitimation."
"Now, the "collapse of civilization marked by Auschwitz" was no longer considered merely as a central event in Nazism, but also in the history of modernism."
"But now the question was put, in various national variants, initially in the Western European countries, and then, after 1989, also in the nations of the former Eastern bloc, regarding the involvement of one's own society in the National Socialist machinery of terror. Commonly remembered highlights in the development of the argument are marked as catch-phrases such as Bitburg (the German military cemetary where both Chancellor Kohl and President Reagan honored members of the SS in a joint attendance)"
What I'm objecting to in these quotes are 2 main things:
1. The pose of 'objectivity' taken by the author. This 'objectivity' is the position that all academic writers are expected to take as emblematic of their 'authority' & expertise. Their personal position in the society under discussion is hidden in order to make what are ultimately just their opinions seeming to come from a higher authority of unimpeachable 'knowledge'. It's the Art World's equivalent to speaking from a 'Divine Rights' position.
2. The idea that it was thru post-modernism that memory came to be at the cultural forefront is completely ridiculous, IMO. As for "the involvement of one's own society in the National Socialist machinery of terror" & an analysis thereof?! Such analysis was ongoing before Nazism, during it, & after it by people all over the world. Just reading Heinrich Mann's 1918 "Der Untertan" might be a good place to start (see my review here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/442159.Man_of_Straw ). I quote from a scene in Stanley Kramer's 1961 movie "Judgment at Nuremberg":
Defense Attorney: "Your honor, it is my duty.. to defend Ernst Janning.. &, yet, Ernst Janning has said he's guilty. There's no doubt.. he feels his guilt. He made a great error in going along with the nazi movement, hoping it would be good for his country. But, if he is to be found guilty. there are others who also went along, who also must be found guilty. Ernst Janning said: 'We succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.' Why did we succeed, your honor? What about the rest of the world? Did it not know the intentions of the Third Reich? Did it not hear the words of Hitler broadcast all over the world? Did it not read his intentions in Mein Kampf, published in every corner of the world. Where's the responsibility of the Soviet Union, who signed in 1939 the pact with Hitler, enabled him to make war. Are we not to find Russia guilty? Where's the responsibility of the Vatican? - who signed in 1933 the concordance with Hitler - giving him his 1st tremendous prestige. Are we not to find the Vatican guilty? Where's the responsibility of the world leader Winston Churchill? - who sent in an open letter to the London Times in 1938 - nineteen - thirty-eight! your honor! Were England to suffer a national disaster should pray to god to send a man of the strength of mind & will of an Adolf Hitler! Are we not to find Winston Churchill guilty? Where is the responsibility of those American industrialists who helped Hitler to rebuild the government & profited by the [word not understood]? Are we not to find the American industrialists guilty?! No, your honor, NO!! Germany alone is not guilty. The WHOLE WORLD is responsible for Hitler's Germany! It is an easy thing to condemn one man in the dock. It is easy to condemn the German people, to speak of the basic flaw in the German character that allowed Hitler to rise to power & at the same time, [word not understood], ignore the basic flaw of character that made the Russians sign pacts with him, Winston Churchill praise him, American industrialists profit by him.."
Is this "modernism" or "post-modernism"? I'd argue that it's neither - it's just an intelligent look at business-as-usual that any anarchist, at least, wd've been long since aware of.
In this bk, Christian Kravagna writes: "Since the seventies Hans Haacke has made the suppression of historical memories in a "culture of forgetting" - as Benjamin Buchloh called the postwar years in Germany - the theme of a series of works." & Haacke does it very, very well. One of the main projects presented in this bk is explained as follows:
"DER BEVOLKERUNG (TO THE POPULATION) starts from a similar question. On the occasion of the redesigning of the Reichstag building and before the German Bundestag relocated there, Haacke, along with other artists, was invited by the Arts Advisory Committee in 1998 to submit a project proposal. the proposal led to one of the biggest discussions of a work of art that had ever taken place in the Federal Republic of Germany. This could only happen because the work raises questions of representative democracy at the very center of its praxis. Since 1916 the Reichstag is dedicated to DEM DEUTSCHEN VOLKE (To The German People) by an inscription over the portal. Haacke's project derives from a supposition which is becoming increasingly obvious - that a significant portion of the people who live in Germany are excluded from political representation. In addition, the term "Deutsches Volk" (The German People) is by no means historically unencumbered. In his work in the north light-well, Haacke amplifies the dedication - which is inappropriate in light of the demographic circumstances - with the words DER BEVOLKERUNG, individual parliamentarians are invited to transform a trough (initially empty but for the neon letters) into a field of uncontrolled growth of all kinds of plants by emptying a sack of earth from their electoral districts into it."
AB-SO-LUTE-LY BRILLIANT! By this simple statement of inclusiveness of, eg, gästarbeiters (guest workers - ie: the German equivalent to Mexican laborers in the US), Haacke undermines the strategy of statelessness that the Nazis & their predecessors & successors use(d) to enable crimes of the highest atrocity. I quote from page 102 of Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem - A Report on the Banality of Evil on the use of statelessness in Nazi Germany:
"The legal experts drew up the necessary legislation for making the victims stateless, which was important on two counts: it made it impossible for any country to inquire into their fate, and it enabled the state in which they were resident to confiscate their property. The Ministry of Finance and the Reichsbank prepared facilities to receive the huge loot from all over Europe, down to watches and gold teeth, all of which was sorted out in the Reichsbank and then sent on to the Prussian State Mint. The Ministry of Transport provided the necessary railroad cars, usually freight cars, even in times of great scarcity of rolling stock, and they saw to it that the schedule of the deportation trains did not conflict with other timetables."
Later on in Heidemarie Uhl's essay she writes:
"While the monuments for the memory of the fallen "heroes of the Fatherland" could thus rely on a broad consensus, the establishment of memorial places for the resistance led to all manner of conflicts in Austria of the fifties and sixties. In 1955, for example, immediately after the signing of the Staatsvertrag, (the treaty inaugurating the post-war Austrian state), a memorial plaque originally unveiled in 1946 outside the Inssbruck Lanhause (seat of the provincial government) in memory of the Tyrolean resistance fighter Franz Mair had to be "toned down" again. Apparently its reference to the "seven years of suppression" Austria had to endure under the Nazis was now being considered "scandalous." In 1961, the erection of the International Memorial over a mass grave at Graz central cemetery for 2,500 victims of the Nazi regime who had largely been the subjects of hostage-killings in former Yugoslavia, caused a public uproar. And in 1963 the Lower-Austrian ex-servicemen's association refused to participate in the consecration of a joint memorial site in the town of Maria Langegg, commemorating priests who had either fallen as soldiers or been murdered in concentration camps. The reason given was that "the honest soldier, who wore the priestly cloth, honored his soldier's oath and died as a consequence of it," should not be placed on an equal footing alongside "those many different kinds of individuals of a contrary persuasion." This boycott corresponded quite clearly to the commonly held view of history in which resistance fighters were considered as back-stabbers. "We battlefront soldiers have nothing, really nothing whatsoever, in common with those of our compatriots, who, weapon in hand, killed, battered to death, or betrayed our own fellow soldiers," noted a contribution in the association's journal, Der Kamerad, in 1964."
& Haacke is certainly an artist accustomed to facing such issues. Uhl goes on to discuss Alfred Hrdlicka's Memorial against War and Fascism in Vienna. She writes: "The stone of contention, however, was the figure of the crouching Jew, engaged in scrubbing the roads. This image refers back to the pogrom-like excesses of March, 1938, when Viennese Jews were forced by the German type of fascists to clean away Austrian fascist slogans. Jewish critics were not alone in viewing this representation as a "perpetual repetition of the original degradation." Uhl goes on to explain that "Rachel Whitehead's monument design for Judenplatz was no longer simply an anti-thesis to "forgetting," but as a response to the experiences with the Hrdlicka monument. The initial impulse for this new monument had come from Simon Wiesenthal, who raised the argument that the monument of the road-washing Jew was a "memorial to degradation." Thus the concept for the new monument opted for an abstract design, since "no figural representation could do justice to the enormity of the offense."
I find such issues continuingly important & I don't think that the answer lies w/ either figuration or abstraction or any other either-or type decision.
Back to Haacke: In his text about his partial recreation of the "And You Were Victorious After All" 1938 Nazi monument, Haacke explains: "The only difference from the original was an inscription around the base. Listed white on black in the Fractura typeface preferred by the Nazis, were "The Vanquished of Styria: 300 Gypsies killed, 2,500 Jews killed, 8,000 political prisoners killed or died in detention, 9,000 civilians killed in the war, 12,000 missing, 27,900 soldiers killed.""
Sabine Breitwieser, in her essay "Hans Haacke: An Exhibition in Austria", writes that in Haacke's rejected proposal for a Memorial to the Victims of National Socialism at the Military Target Practice Range "Feliferhof" in Graz there was to be a list of the victims of a particular massacre based on remains exhumed from the Feliferhof mass grave: 116 in civilian clothes, 10 in Hungarian uniform, 4 in German Wehrmachts uniform, 3 in French uniform, 3 in Russian uniform, 2 naked women, 2 naked men, 1 in American uniform, 1 in SS uniform. For me, that's quite an evocative list. Did the Nazis kill the 5 members of the German military? Presumably so. Otherwise, I doubt that their bodies wd've been put in a mass grave. Haacke's proposed memorial is described by Uhl thusly:
"The aura of the place is to be felt in the reconstruction of the mass grave, a horizontal shaft 25 meters in length by 2.50 meters in width, with perpendicular side panels rising three meters high, above it only sky. This can be viewed from an underground passageway. An appellative inscription has been omitted, but a historical photograph of exhumations and the simple language of the information about the finding of the 142 murdered causes the viewer to experience an emphatic projection into the fate of the victims. the intensity of the communion with the crimes that occurred here is also physically conveyed by the arrangement of the space, from which the symbolic burial place can be viewed. The anxiety generated by the crampedness of the space and the deafening blasts of the "shooting activity" and the smell of fresh earth, "could heighten one's psychological sensitivity to such an extent that, for one moment at least, a personal and initially unthinking identification may be possible with the people whom the National Socialists murdered at Feliferhof.""
The main piece that the title of this bk refers to, "Mia san mia", is an installation in wch Haacke reworks the ad of an Austrian Carinthian politician in connection w/ prior nazi Heimat (homeland) propaganda. Haacke writes about the original political poster that he's critiquing:
"The poster carries no imprint as the law on media requires. The publisher and the advertising agency remain anonymous. The Carinthia logo is a trademark owned by the Kärnten Werbung, the state office in charge of promoting tourism in Carinthia. That office did not grant permission to use the logo on the poster.
"In the news magazine Profil and the daily newspaper Der Standard, suspicions were aired that the poster, as well as the campaign of which it is part, were developed by Kärntner Medien Service, an advertising agency of the Freedom Party of Carinthia which has its offices in the party's headquarters. According to Der Standard, inquiries with the Chamber of Commerce of Carinthia revealed that this agency does not have a business permit and is not listed in the registry of companies."
Haacke's work is commonly associated w/ Concept(ual) Art. His work is the result of a close study of how images & language & history are used to set the stage for political machinations hidden behind the smoke & mirrors of cultural production's pretty face. He THINKS about how to make a work that enables people to think & feel past the bullshit in as direct & strong a way as possible. May he have many worthy successors.… (plus d'informations)
Exhibition catalog for a show that ran May 3 through June 18, 1989. Text in French. Includes a few color illustrations and numerous black and white illustrations.
Illustrated stiff wrappers, 27 x 21 cms., 84 pp. text in English with b/w illustrations.
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