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    Danto - Haacke The Industry of Art

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    arthur c. danto essays the wake of art criticism, philosophy, and the ends of taste selected and with critical introduction gregg horowitz tom huhn Australia + Canada * China - France * Germany * India + Japan « Luxembourg ARTS hans haacke and 6 the industry of art arthur c. danto ‘THE ARTIST HANS HAACKE ACHIEVED A qualified martyrdom in an era generally supposed to have been one of total artis- tic permissiveness, at the hands of an institution hardly calculated to confer such status on an avant-garde artist seeking to press back the limits of art. Those inauspicious circumstances notwithstanding, an exhibition of Haacke’s work was canceled, on the grounds of artistic impropriety, six weeks before it was to have opened, in 1971, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. It was annulled by Thomas Messer, then as now director of the Guggenheim, who also discharged the curator, Edward Fry, for persisting in championing an art indexed as unsuitable. The work that chiefly offended was devoted to the activi- ties, over a twenty-year period, of a rapacious real estate operation in New York, and its repression demonstrates that even then, in 1971, real estate had replaced sex as the locus of dark practices and charged fantasy. Anything in the sexual line could be treated with artistic impunity (except perhaps as an advertisement in an art magazine), but it is a tribute to the precociousness of art that a desecration was perceived before it was recognized that housing had become sacred. Haacke {129} {130} HANS HAACKE AND THE INDUSTRY OF ART =| cE et Hans Haacke, Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real-Time Social ‘System, as of May 1, 1971. Courtesy Hans Haacke and John Weber Gallery, New York. had found his way to the heart of the future, and Messer intuited that the heart must be shielded. It hardly matters that the controversy was deflected onto the plane of aesthetics. Messer, who would have represented himself as defending the purity of art, was in reality defending the sanctity of an industry that was soon to transform the imagination in ways undreamt of by art. Haacke, who consistently represents himself as bringing to consciousness the fact that art had become commodified, failed to see that art and real estate had begun to replace one another in the general scheme. Artworks indeed have sunk to the level of commodities. Investing in art futures has become the truth of the 1980s. Its real estate that has taken the place art once knew. HANS HAACKE AND THE INDUSTRY OF ART ‘The banned work bore the flatly descriptive title Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971. And even though the “as of May 1, 1971” made an unmistakable revolutionary reference to May Day, the piece itself carried out the severely didactic and informational intentions of the title: it looked, when assembled, like a project executed by earnest students in partial fulfillment of a higher degree in urban studies or applied economics or managerial science. The bulk of the work consisted of 142 photographs of as many pieces of property in Harlem and on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, together with 142 “data sheets” giving the actual addresses of the photographed sites, block and lot numbers, lot size, building code, holding title, corporation address, date of acquisition, prior owner, mortgage and ‘assessed tax value, and the like. Two maps, showing the locations in Manhattan of the 142 pieces of property, completed the work, together with six charts collat- ing individual properties and proprietary corporate and individual owners. Those and only those corporations were displayed that included a member of the Shapolsky “clan” or that had relevant dealings with a member of that clan. The research was painstaking, culled from the New York County Clerk’s office, and absolute accuracy, while not guaranteed, was aimed at. It really was a “real- time social system,” and the Shapolsky Group was singled out for artistic cele- bration because in 1971 “it represented the largest concentration of real estate under the control ofa single group” in New York. The work has something of the quality of a Leporello from some shady agency, itemizing the acquisitive histories of a Don Giovanni of the Tenements; as with seductions, sheer quantity carries a legendary weight in the action of cat- aloguing, On aesthetic grounds I am uncertain whether the intensity of the work might not have dissipated in the rarefied Guggenheim spaces, The work would gain, it seems to me, when all 292 components are densely assembled, rather than spread out along the ramps or punctuated by the alcoves with which any exhibition at the Guggenheim must deal. Such considerations cannot be irrcle- vant to Shapolsky et al.: the use of the typewritten format for the data sheets, the use of the kinds of photographs an insurance representative might take, the absolute absence of comment or flourish, let alone of political slogan, convey a thetoric of objectivity, detachment, bureaucratic fidelity to fact. The work is as if {i3th {ij2) HANS HAACKE AND THE INDUSTRY OF ART it were destined for the boardroom of Shapolsky and Company, if it had a boardroom. Its dullness is part of its excitement. In the early 1970s, a number of artists were dealing in “systems theory.” Helen and Newton Harrison, for example, showed works at the Ronald Feldman Gallery which detailed the operation of a desert reclamation project. Haacke himself executed a “Rhine Water Purification Plant,” in which water from the polluted river was filtered and passed in and out of a tank of goldfish (the Har- risons too employed fish in their project). The characteristic systems-theory work aspired to scientific exactitude and often enlisted scientists as collabora- tors: what one saw in galleries would be mock-ups, flow charts, overlays on photographs, schematic drawings, diagrams. Any of this could have been shown without comment at the Guggenheim, It was the fact that Shapolsky et al. repre- sented the aggregated real estate holdings of a living owner that engendered the resistance and final prohibition on the part of Mr. Messer, whose recorded testi- mony emits inky clouds of metaphysical reasoning, as if by a philosophical squid, in defense against a perceived predator. The work was “not a self-con- tained creative object.” It suffered from “designating real people.” It had “an ulterior motive.” The director clearly found himself in the desperate and unac- customed position of formulating a philosophical theory to keep out of museum precincts a work that might be taken to call into question a corporate presence that, as Haacke was to recognize, constitutes the atmosphere of the museum today. Messer’s heroic act was to attempt to stifle a form of consciousness that Haacke had not yet understood it was his mission to awaken. It was a dramatic, moment in the history of recent art. It is difficult to know what the reception of the work would have been on the part of the troops of schoolchildren or tourists who visit the landmark museum on Fifth Avenue, but my guess is that the Guggenheim would have stood for the show’s duration, except by inadvertence. It would be a resolute aest indeed who sought in Haacke the pleasures one ordinarily hopes to find at Guggenheim. And it could hardly have startled the resident visitor, should have been any, that large-scale slumlords were abroad in the land, or that; the slumlords someone was the largest. Whatever the effect of viewing. the in 197, it could not be anything like what it is in 1987. The work may be HANS HAACKE AND THE INDUSTRY OF ART the first major retrospective accorded Hans Haacke in the United States—Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business, at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in SoHo. The show, consisting of eleven pieces, will travel to the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan; to the Museum of Contemporary Art in La Jolla, California; to the Lowe Art Museum in Coral Gables, Florida; and to the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York. But nothing will parallel the experience of viewing it a stone's throw, asit were, from the bulk of the buildings and sites Haacke documented sixteen years ago. It is impossible to see these houses on Eleventh Street or Third Street or Eighth Street as squalid today. Today the East Village is the Scene, and a nondescript apartment on any one of those streets is not to be had for less than 200K—with luck. Look at the price Shapolsky et al. paid! A few grand! Look at the interest rates—6 percent or less! It isa fairyland for the space-starved, and I saw couples looking longingly at buildings rendered delicious by what has happened in the Manhattan housing market in the years since 1971. Shapolsky et al. emerge as visionaries. At a time when the only question facing Harlem is when it is going to fulfill its destiny as a prime residential area, it is difficult to feel the sort of indignation the work was intended to inspire. Its ulterior intentions have been subverted by the times. One thinks of the opportunities missed, the houses to be had for a song. One might almost expect Shapolsky et al. to acquire Shapolsky et al. as evidence of its founder's sagacity (I see that of the edition of two, one is unsold), or even, as a corporation, to fund an exhibition of Haacke’s once contestataire artworks as a "gesture of self-celebration. ‘The ascension of real estate to its present position of cosmic glory may have Tobbed Shapolsky et al. of its original political point, but it helps dramatize a deeper point that has come to be central in Haacke’s evolving project. When business products elicit the attitudes appropriate to the appreciation of art, we May better perceive that art itself has increasingly become a business product, and that the museum, while still requiring the ideology of disinterestedness ‘Surators insist on, has been subtly transformed into a showroom for classy ents. It cannot be too heavily stressed that the concept of pure spiritual- is indispensable to the commodification of artworks. Haacke’s Manet-PRO- 74 (not exhibited here) was proposed for an international exhibition to be 4133) (3a) HANS HAACKE AND THE INDUSTRY OF ART held at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, West Germany. Manet’s exquisite Bunch of Asparagus, painted in 1880, one of the museum’s proud pos- sessions, was to be displayed on an easel, surrounded with placards describing its owners in sequence of acquisition until the work was purchased for the museum at the initiative of Hermann Abs, head of its Kuratorium (i.e. “Association of the Friends of the Museum”), in 1968, Abs's placard listed the nineteen boards of directors of which he was a member, and the project was turned down on the ground that Abs’s effort here was purely disinterested and that none of the facts listed on the placard, presented with the noncommittal directness of a reference work but thick with innuendo, should be allowed “to throw even the slightest shadow on it.” “A museum knows nothing about economic power,” the Wall- raf-Richartz director wrote in the manner of Thomas Messer: “It does, indeed, however, know something about spiritual power.” The final placard catalogued those who raised the purchase price (a steal at $250,000): some eighty-five banks, corporations, business enterprises and commercial institutions. The museum— any museum—

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