9/14/2023 0 Comments Hans haacke horse sketchThe retrospective provides an invaluable measure of how the art world has changed since the ’70s, and the extent to which the models for critical engagement that Haacke proposed remain viable. Born in Germany but based in New York since 1965, Haacke has made museum directors nervous for more than five decades precisely because he insists on paying attention to who’s footing the bill for culture. His critical approach to institutions grew out of an interest in understanding the world in terms of interconnectivity. “All Connected” features thirty works Haacke has made since the late 1960s, with a much-needed emphasis on the artist’s early forays into the study of systems of all kinds, including natural ecologies. Kanders’s role at the museum sparked intense protest because his company Safariland manufactured some of the tear gas used by the US military and police forces against protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, and Standing Rock, North Dakota against asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border and at other sites of unrest around the world. Kanders quit his position as vice chair of the board of trustees of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. In June, Yana Peel, the chief executive of the Serpentine Gallery in London, stepped down under pressure after it was revealed that her husband’s investment firm had a majority stake in a tech firm that was supplying spyware to authoritarian regimes. Since February, activists have also staged periodic occupations of the British Museum in London to protest its long-standing sponsorship by the oil giant BP. As a result of PAIN’s actions, these museums, along with the Louvre in Paris, and the Tate and the National Portrait Gallery in London, declared that they would reject further donations from the Sacklers and the foundations they control, including the Sackler Trust. The Sacklers own Purdue Pharma, which manufactured and aggressively marketed Ox圜ontin, the opiate largely responsible for the current addiction crisis in the United States. Over the past twelve months, Nan Goldin and her group Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (PAIN) have demonstrated at the Guggenheim and the Metropolitan Museum of Art to urge those institutions to stop accepting funds from the Sackler family. “All Connected” arrives near the end of a year in the art world marked by protests that not only drew attention to the morally fraught business practices of prominent arts patrons, but also instigated significant change. “Hans Haacke: All Connected,” a retrospective organized by Gary Carrion-Murayari and Massimiliano Gioni at the New Museum-an institution that very recently made a deal with its unionizing workers after an arduous battle-offers an opportunity to reassess the artist’s attempts to make visible the material, social, and economic systems within which art circulates. Art institutions were being challenged by groups like the Guerrilla Art Action Group, the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, and the Art Workers’ Coalition-the last of which Haacke was a founding member-to account for their role as conduits of economic and political power.Īt a time when artists and activists are once again demanding that museums account for their connections to unethical businesses and donors, Haacke’s work has become the focus of renewed attention. Sensitivities around such gestures were high at that historical juncture. It seems the mere acknowledgment of predatory capitalism within the walls of the museum was enough to goad Messer into an act of censorship. The aggressiveness of Messer’s response fueled rumors that Guggenheim trustees were implicated in Shapolsky’s transactions, though Haacke’s research produced no evidence of such a connection. Citing the Guggenheim’s policy that the art it showed must “exclude active engagement toward social and political ends,” Messer decided to cancel the exhibition six weeks before its scheduled opening. However, Thomas Messer, the museum’s director, infamously objected to Shapolsky et al., as well as two other works Haacke planned to exhibit: a separate piece analyzing a property-holding business ( Sol Goldman and Alex DiLorenzo Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971), and one of the artist’s museum polls that asked visitors for various kinds of demographic and personal information, including their political opinions. The artist made the piece for a planned solo show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
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