Old Business

John Haber
in New York City

Hans Haacke and Melanie Baker

More than thirty years ago, the New Museum afforded Hans Haacke a retrospective, as "Unfinished Business" in 1986. It was brave then, when a more prominent museum had already backed down.

Its title seems all the more pertinent today, when Haacke's actions have has taken on, as he puts it, a "new topicality." His personal and political agenda has held up very well indeed. I am not half as certain about America—or indeed his art. Who then, in the corridors of power, is in charge? Melanie Baker is reluctant to say, even in the face of Donald J. Trump's acquittal in the Senate, because so are they. Besides, right-thinking Americans much like Haacke are there to pronounce what it all means.

Sparks fly

The New Museum has sure grown since 1986, and Haacke has every floor of its home on the Bowery, curated by Gary Carrion-Murayari and Massimiliano Gioni. How could he not have the education center, for an artist on a mission of public education? He has another floor for just three works, to introduce three stages of an angry and still challenging career, as "All Connected."In one, air and water circulates through tubes on the floor, like a living emblem of urban and ocean currents. Back in the 1960s, he had much in common with Minimalism and earthworks, but, as he puts it, "I was concerned with change." For him, it is all well and good to celebrate entropy, light, and space, but political or climate change can sweep entire peoples away.

An equestrian monument for London's Trafalgar Square in 2014 brings Haacke into the present. It becomes a skeleton without a rider, because the only thing that its proud stride carries forward is a stock ticker. The third and last piece cost him an earlier retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum back in 1971. Its photos and text document Shapolsky et al.'s Manhattan real-estate holdings, as a "real-time social system." Defending his own Frank Lloyd Wright real estate, the Guggenheim's director dismissed it as an "alien substance." For an awful lot of artists hanging in there downtown or in Harlem, it could well have been the stuff of life.

Haacke knew perfectly well what he was provoking. He wanted the provocation far more than a retrospective, and nothing since has registered in quite the same way. Still, he sounds as surprised as anyone by his new topicality, and he is not one to boast. He means it when he says that there is no correct or incorrect way to engage an early environmental work, a painting of foil strips. He has also engaged viewers not just to hector them, but by asking them to take part in polls. You can still play along.

The museum's education center has one, asking for your politics as well as your age and wealth. Rest assured that visitors to the New Museum are overwhelmingly progressive, much like visitors to Haacke's Soho gallery in a poll in 1973. Born in 1936, he found himself and fellow students in Germany rearranging works of Abstract Expressionism according to their mentor's obsessions. It taught him, he says, that curators were first and foremost promoting rankings and prices. The lesson, though, took a full decade to penetrate his art. It took a 1969 poll to mark a breakthrough.

In his earlier work, sparks fly, but only literal sparks in a long vacuum tube. Water condenses, an ice column melts, and a light blue sail flies in the currents of an electric fan. Grass grows in a mound of earth, but the entire floor is like watching grass grow. It treats nature as a human construct, but little more. And then he had the idea of asking midtown gallery-goers where they lived by marking a map, leading him to two years of urban exploration and hundreds of photographs. Need he or I explain that collectors then lived pretty decently, artists and arts professionals not so well?

Haacke has a habit of telling you what you already know and, he would add, may hesitate to admit. The show's busiest floor spans the forty years of political art since his first teletype machine in 1969, also on view at the New Museum in "The Last Newspaper" in 2001. News travels faster now since it first spilled out in paper onto the floor. Every so often, work wades into hot-button human issues, like the photograph of a "desert generation"—the West Bank in the "twenty-seventh year of occupation." Far more often, it deals with politically incorrect funding for the arts. And, yes, it has taken on new relevance.

Politics in real time

Real estate sure has thanks to monster towers and to Trump—and a new work riffs on Trump, with a gold-plated golf club and other memorabilia. So has pairing a photo by Walker Evans with one of George H. W. Bush and his wife worried about their property in 1992. Bush's son rubbed the point home despite himself after Hurricane Katrina. Last, Thank You, Paine Webber from 1979 pairs a familiar display of wealth with another photograph from the Depression. Haacke could not have predicted the financial bailouts in 2007. He could not have predicted either Paine Webber's merger with USB and their stake in supporting MoMA.

He could not have predicted, for that matter, artist protests at the 2019 Whitney Biennial over a board member's investment in tear gas. He does, though, get the last word on the Guggenheim in 1974 with a silkscreen of its trustees. He picks up on the Met's banners in 1985, when Mobile sponsored the art of ancient Nigeria while funding the South African military. He notes funding for apartheid by the makers of Jaguar and Land Rover as well. He quotes chief executives on what they have to gain from supporting the arts, and he traces the owners of a work by Georges Seurat all the way to 1975. Suffice it to say that it passed through the hands of anarchists, wealth, Nazis, and a museum.

Other work branches out a bit, on behalf of immigrants and people of color. Haacke proposed to have "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" in Arabic outside France's Bourbon Palace. He called Rudy Giuliani a Nazi back in the 2000 Whitney Biennial and asked to dedicate the Reichstag to "the population" rather than the ethnically "German people." He papers museum windows with a plea in a dozen languages that we are (all) the people. The Guggenheim notwithstanding, there is no saying "that's not art," because anything can be art, so long as art provides its context. Still, for all his sincerity, one can ask what happens when he makes it so.

Political art is never easy. You can express visceral horrors like Francisco de Goya or heroics like Diego Rivera—or both, as with José Clemente Orozco. Either way, you may end up beautifying them in the name of both politics and art. Even worse, what if you do not? You may end up simplifying the divisions, like blaming starving artists for Manhattan real estate. You may also end up refusing your own best resources as an artist—and beating people on their head until they start making excuses or no longer respond.

Haacke can be all too obvious. When the "invisible hand of the marketplace" waves perpetually or the American flag is torn in half, as State of the Union, I get it, really. He can be hard to penetrate at the very same time—like a painting of Margaret Thatcher in the style of an unfinished state portrait. Trust him that Charles Saatchi, the ad exec, has supported both the Young British Artists and her. Not that Haacke would consider the need for wall text a problem. He wants to get you reading and thinking, and mostly he does.

Still, Haacke cannot get around his need to control every last second. Nor, too, can he avoid the impression that he never needed a retrospective in the first place. Would it not have been just as well to publish a book—or to go online? Maybe then it would feel closer after all to a "real-time social system," and maybe, too, one could ask whether his examples are scandalous or typical. It might be more up to date as well, now that art draws a public, with all that entails. It might begin to explore the price that artists and museums pay for their art.

They have their backs

Who seizes the microphone, and who cuts the deals? Melanie Baker insists only that it is a white male—or rather a clique of white males who resist letting anyone else in. In fact, she sees everything in black and white, in charcoal and on an impressive scale. It is a virtuoso display of men who very much have each other's backs, but do not ask to see their faces. Do not ask either just what they have to say. You may share with them the space of the gallery, but not their conversation.

You may recognize some of them anyway, or you may think you do, for Baker is not above tinkering with their images to bring out their careless malevolence. You may suspect that the taller man in Pomp and Sycophants is G. H. W. Bush, but the man with his back to the viewer blocks everything but the very top of his head. You can hardly fail to recognize the man at the microphone as Donald J. Trump, as Mouthpiece, from his hair alone. Besides, sadly, he still commands the presidential podium. But then all her subjects have outrageous hair, big ears, white shirts, and their gender. That may be all that unites the close-knit circle in Assembly of Elders, and nothing else is anywhere near as crisp as their collars.

Robert Longo has his politics and his large charcoals, too, but her darting strokes and smudges set her apart. As just recently in Chelsea, or in "Proof" at the Brooklyn Museum two years before, Longo takes photographs from the news and reproduces them with photographic clarity. Where he wants to knock you off your feet, Baker wants to set you thinking. And where he could be chiding you for having overlooked them in the first place, she stops just short of letting you in on the game. She depicts not titanic events, but private events with titanic implications. Even Trump, in the end, mostly addresses his base.

You may not be able to match a sketchy detail to the larger work, even after you have seen them both. You will, though, be aware of her efforts at composition. A red curtain makes the elders pop, much as a red cloak enhances John the Baptist for Caravaggio, while reducing the window frame to a tall cross. Apparently Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not Mitch McConnell's. You may take longer to notice the sole other spots of color in this small show, vulva-like reds to either side of (perhaps) the elder Bush—and longer still to make sense of the decorative detail or its gender. The official seals with them look like mushroom clouds.

Baker's slow pace reflects a refusal to load the dice. (You may hate those outrageous ears, but she modeled them after her husband's.) Still, much is as obvious as the punning titles. The show as a whole, "The Optimates," refers to a conservative clique in ancient Rome, but surely women and people of color have entered the House and Senate, if not as Republicans—and surely individuals still leave their mark, maybe even voters. The two men face to face remind me of LBJ's leaning over fellow senators to give them "the treatment," but here the pomp and the sycophant are all but interchangeable. Then again, that is half her point—that there is always another oligarch in the waiting.

While you are waiting, you can get a start on the Declaration of Independence, with When in the Course of Human Events. Those few words appear on a scroll that descends from the wall to the floor, like a royal carpet for the Virgin Mary by Jan van Eyck—or many an example of tapestry as art today. But then the cries for justice grow shorter and wilder, long after the stately tone of the Declaration ends and its grievances fail to appear. Annabel Daou writes in White-Out on black, leaving in doubt what counts as a voice rather than an erasure. You may wonder if even she knows where her sympathies lie, but those like Haacke who prefer the grass roots to electoral victories will relish the chaos.

Hans Haacke ran at the New Museum through January 26, 2020, Melanie Baker at Cristin Tierney through February 22, Robert Longo at Metro Pictures through January 18, and Annabel Daou at Signs and Symbols, through February 9. A related review caught up with Haacke and political art in 2010.