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Three-dimensional | |
Metacrilat i aigua | |
76 x 76 x 76 cm | |
Ed.5 | |
Col·lecció MACBA. Fundació Museu d´Art Contemporani de Barcelona (Donació National Comitee and Board of Trustees Whitney Museum of American Art) | |
Reg. 1523 |
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Haacke, Hans | |
Colònia, Alemanya
01/01/1936 | | | |
Condensation Cube,
1963 |
Hans Haacke was born in 1936 in Cologne, Germany. From 1956-60 he studied at the Staatliche Werkakademie in Kassel and then spent a year at Stanley William Hayter's "Atelier 17" in Paris before relocating to Philadelphia under the auspices of a Fulbright Grant in 1961. Permanently moving to New York in 1965, Haacke's early work at that time demonstrates his interest in the biological, ecological and the cybernetic. In particular, the writing of biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy and his book General Systems Theory (1968) had a profound effect on the artist's thinking. Haacke's 1969 Recording of Climate in Art Exhibition marks this interest in the physical climate of art's presentation, an interest that he translated into his critical and controversial works, documenting the historical, social, and economic circumstances surrounding art. This shift is marked by a mode of work that exploits the assumptions of sociological positivism by presenting data through statistics, graphs, and surveys. For example, Haacke's 1970 MOMA Poll for the inauguration of the Information exhibition implicated the spectators by asking the question: "Would the fact that Governor Rockefeller has not denounced President Nixon's Indochina be a reason for you not to vote for him in November?" Haacke's development thus constitutes an explicit rejection of modernist pure visuality while participating in the ideational practices of his contemporaries within Conceptual Art. However, Haacke does not practice art as tautology but renounces lingering autonomy and self-referentiality by emphasizing the "functional dimension of the aesthetic construct" and by taking "the relations of power as the subject of his constructs". [1] Exhibited at Documenta X in Kassel, his work Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time System as of May 1, 1971 includes a map of the Lower East Side and Harlem, 142 data sheets attached to photos of urban properties, and 6 charts on business transactions. The work exploited the evidentiary character of documentary while tracing the owners of these slum properties to members of the Guggenheim Museum Board of Directors. This resulted in the cancellation of his solo exhibition at that institution by the director Thomas Messer and is today regarded as a critical instance of a mode of art practice subsequently labeled as institutional critique.
In 1962, Haacke began to make works such as Condensation Cube, which incorporate pexiglass containers filled with water in order to instantiate natural processes. The focus on natural processes such as condensation and evaporation reflects his early affiliation with the German "Group Zero" and their experimentation with abstract form modified by phenomena such as light, shadow, reflection, and motion. The work's cubic shape additionally points to Haacke's encounter with Minimalism, yet he departs from the industrial vocabulary of its materials. As Benjamin Buchloh explains, the viewer of "Condensation Cube" is "no longer exclusively, or even primarily linked to the work through perceptual interaction, but rather observes the traces and texture of physiological and physical processes generated within the work, which operates in relative independence from the viewing subject". [2]
[1] Benjamin Buchloh, "Hans Haacke: Memory and Instrumental Reason," Art in America, no. 2 (February 1988), pp. 9 -108, 157-159.
[2] Benjamin Buchloh, "Hans Haacke: The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment" Obra Social: Hans Haacke (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1995), p. 48. | | | | - | | Travelling of the work | | |
Political/Minimal 18/06/2009 - 30/08/2009
Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz/ Poland |
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Political Minimalism 08/11/2008 - 19/01/2009
Kunstwerke, Berlin |
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The MACBA at the Frankfurter Kunstverein 09/10/2007 - 13/01/2008
Frankfurter Kunstverein |
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Feedback 21/03/2007 - 21/06/2007
Laboral Art Centre  |
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