Hans Haacke in New York

Shortly after the “MoMA Poll”, Haacke faced more trouble over his insti­tu­tional critique when his solo exhi­bi­tion at the Guggen­heim museum was canceled over “Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Hold­ings, A Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971”, a piece exposing the machi­na­tions behind real-estate hold­ings owned by New York’s most famous slum-lords Harry Shapolsky and others. Thomas Messer, then director at the Guggen­heim, canceled Haacke’s show only six weeks before opening because the artist refused to get censored by the museum and take out the three related artworks as requested by Messer.

Since then, Hans Haacke has not left the path of insti­tu­tional crit­i­cism, even though it has cost him dearly: It would be around 15 years before the artist would be exhib­ited in a US museum again.

Paula Cooper, who founded the Paula Cooper Gallery in 1968, remem­bers meeting Haacke for the first time already in 1969 “when he came to install his work for “Number 7”, a group show curated by Lucy Lippard in my first gallery on the third floor at 96 Prince Street. I vividly remember his piece–an envi­ron­mental work on a pedestal that used a fan to redi­rect the flow of air. He was showing with Howard Wise Gallery at the time, and I knew of him but did not yet know him person­ally.”

She and Haacke crossed path multiple times while trav­el­ling to visit the big Euro­pean group shows like the docu­menta in Kassel where Haacke presented his work on more than one occa­sion, including in docu­menta 5 (1972) where he put together the “Docu­menta-Besucher­profil”, a ques­tion­naire with 10 demo­graphic and 10 opinion based ques­tions around current socio-polit­ical prob­lems. Ques­tions included “Are you in favor of abor­tion?” or “Would you be willing to pay higher taxes and higher prices to protect and restore our envi­ron­ment?” Cooper recalls that she “was very impressed by the range of his art, from the pieces exploring natural systems to those exam­ining social, polit­ical and economic struc­tures; the work was some­times ephemeral and some­times very phys­i­cally present.”

ART CLUB2000 remem­bers: “Hans was a great teacher! […] He intro­duced us to Insti­tu­tional Critique, in how he directed our thinking in class and through our studying his work at the time. It may have been because of one of the show announce­ments he posted that we went to see Andrea Fraser’s perfor­mance ‘May I Help You’ at Amer­ican Fine Arts, Co., which was pivotal in how we started to think about making art. ART CLUB2000 may not have existed had it not been for Hans.”

Aside from intro­ducing alter­na­tive thinkers to his students and inviting artists to his class room like Mark Dion, Lorna Simpson, Dorothea Rock­bourne, or Fred Wilson, “Haacke also stopped giving assign­ments after second year, which forced his students to find their own voice as a crit­ical part of the creative process,” the collective adds. “Haacke as a professor not only taught tech­nical skills and artistic methods but also instilled a sense of social respon­si­bility, crit­ical thinking, and courage to ques­tion the status quo.” They remem­ber him as a “big pres­ence but quiet, thoughtful. He usually rode an old-style city bike to school. We would see him cycling around the Lower East Side.”