Mixed Messages

Hans Haacke interviewed by Patricia Bickers at the time of his exhibitions at the Serpentine Gallery and the Victoria & Albert Museum.

This interview was originally published in March 2001 / No 244, pp1-5. It is one of more than 70 interviews that have been gathered together to form the volume Talking Art: Interviews with Artists since 1976. See www.artmonthly.co.uk/interview book for more information.

Patricia Bickers: In the catalogue for 'Viewing Matters: Upstairs' the exhibition at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam that you curated in 1996 and that was a precursor of this present exhibition, you cited Marcel Duchamp's observation that the spectator 'adds something [to the work] that the artist never thought of, he not only adds, but also deforms, in his own way'. The importance of the active viewer has since become the trope of much contemporary art practice, or at least of discourse about it, but it has been a central concern of your own work at least since the kinetic work of the 60s.
Hans Haacke: In the 60s I wanted to get the viewers physically involved with my work. It was to break down the barrier between the viewer and the object and lead to a shift in attitude toward the art object. When viewers are allowed or even asked to handle an object, its institutional sanctity is no longer intact. It is off the altar.
The work I did for this show — I call it a work — is another attempt to get the viewers involved. It is to remind them that, in effect, they are the ones who produce the meaning of an artefact: it is a social product. In the normal museum exhibition the focus is chiefly on the discrete object which, presumably, acts as an autonomous signifier, independent of the social roles it has played in the past and those it performs today, as if it were endowed with inherent universal qualities. In this show I have tried to demonstrate that normal perceptions of an object — I am using the term 'perception' here both in the optical as well as in the figurative sense of the word — are not normal at all. The meaning an object has for us depends on the context in which we encounter it and, while its physical qualities guide us to a certain degree, we, in fact, generate its meaning.

PB: In recent years the ideology of museum display has shifted away from the chronological, overtly didactic hang towards an ahistorical, thematic and contextual approach (I am thinking of the recent displays at the Pompidou Centre, the Museum of Modern Art, New York and Tate Modern). In the latter sense, the museum sector could be said to be catching up with you. What are your views on this development?
HH: I can speak only about the three-part sequel 'Modern Starts' at MoMA. In its first instalment, 'People, Places, Things', I was pleasantly surprised to see paintings and sculptures together with items that are generally not seen as belonging to the so-called fine arts, among them, reportage photographs, including Atget's, that gave a sense of the period in which the paintings and sculptures had been produced. The odd effect was that many 'avant-garde' paintings, particularly those from Paris, looked a bit staid and smelt of the well-appointed drawing room. That was surprising. Since the artworks were not arranged according to school or style, but rather following thematic categories, I got a better sense of the different approaches to traditional themes. Many of my friends were very critical of the show. On the whole, this first instalment intrigued me.
I missed the second instalment because I didn't want to cross the picket line of the Museum staff who were on strike at the time.
The part of the last instalment that I did get to see (I didn't manage to see the whole) was disappointing, in particular the presentation of the works of the 1960s and early 70s that had been made with a deliberate political intention. All the sharp edges were rounded off. It looked very polite, as if made for the collector's home. People who had not been around at the time could not get a sense that these works had been offensive to what was then called the establishment, that they played a role in the cultural and political turmoil of the period, and that the Museum of Modern Art itself had been under attack. The Vietnam War, racial conflict in the US, the cultural if not political revolutions that swept most of the countries of the Western world, all these conflicts that deeply affected my generation had effectively been sanitised.

PB: Is this not an inevitable consequence of institutionalisation?
HH: It is, of course, inevitable that everything loses its freshness and urgency with time, not only such socially and politically intentioned works. If things survive, not only physically but also in the sense that people pay attention to them, they cannot possibly continue playing the role they did at the time when they were made. I do believe, however, that one could present them in such a way that the viewer can understand the context in which they were produced, the raw nerves that they touched, and so get a better sense of their 'performance'. They were not made for the white cube. I have seen exhibitions that do accomplish this.

PB: Is there a sense in which you, and your critique of such institutions, are being co-opted, in this case by the V&A and the Serpentine, in the same way that once offensive work can become 'sanitised' in the context of a museum?
HH: Thanks to a variety of pressures, including decades of institutional critique and other critical approaches to the role of museums in our society, there is now a certain willingness by some to look at the ways they function. After all, there are curators and administrators today who participated in the cultural revolution of the 60s and read the same books as we did. Of course, there are limits to how far they are ready to expose themselves in front of the world. Like their predecessors they are dependent on the goodwill of governmental, and now corporate, forces and need to consider the interests of their trustees. But to the more adventurous among them it is not as problematic as it once was to extend an invitation to me. In turn, I do not consider myself automatically as being co-opted when that happens.
Some people, who have looked at earlier works of mine, are wondering whether I have mellowed. Maybe so. But perhaps they have a somewhat one-dimensional view of me. In the show at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen and also in this work here at the Serpentine, I am not primarily interested in looking at today's power structures in and behind the institutions (not that this is no longer of interest to me). Instead
I am focusing on the artefacts in the collection, their presentation, the institution of the museum and the institution of art history. The production of meaning intrigues me as much as looking at who funds the institution and what they get in return. To a degree, of course, they are linked.

PB: Sometimes the softer, more mellow, approach can work on the consciousness in slower, more telling ways. For me the juxtaposition, in Rotterdam, of images from Goya's 'Disasters of War' series, with Duchamp's late drawings from 'The Lovers' series, made at the time that he was secretly working on Étant Donnés, itself a highly ambiguous work in terms of both its violence and eroticism, was especially arresting. By means of this 'exhibition of exhibition', as you have called it, you make this process of manipulation obvious to the viewer.
HH: I apparently enjoy 'manipulating'. In effect, everyone who presents something to the public engages in manipulation, whether they are aware of it or not. Every selection, and every arrangement of such a selection, inevitably gives the material a spin. I hope I succeeded in making the viewer aware of my manipulation so that I am not suspected of having pulled a fast one. This approach is not political in the immediate sense, but it may lead people to recognise why or how they respond to images and that this has ideological implications and by extension also political consequences.

PB: In the past you faced constant institutional opposition from MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art and so on, but today doors are more likely toopen for you. You were able, for instance, partially to destroy the German Pavilion for the Venice Biennale in 1993 — it even won the Leone d'Oro prize — and to see through your Reichstag project in Berlin. It has been a long hard battle, but is your present status an advantage or is it in some ways a hindrance to your work?
HH: Surviving these troubles, thanks to the help of a lot of courageous and enterprising people, has given me a thick skin. And, as you say, my status as a veteran has indeed created opportunities I would not have had otherwise. But there are many institutions that would rather not deal with me. Name recognition has its downside. Some among the older museum people in the Netherlands were aghast at what I did in Rotterdam. Particularly after my 'Sanitation' of the Whitney Museum last year, I seem to have regained the status of an untouchable in some quarters of New York. The work in Berlin is still controversial today. But if doors do open it would be hypocritical to pretend they are closed. One should go through them and use the situation for whatever it is worth.

PB: You can certainly be said to have opened doors for other artists. In fact, your work seems especially pertinent to us now in Britain because many artists, as well as critics and curators, look to you and to the art of the 60s and 70s with a kind of nostalgia for some kind of golden age of direct political engagement. Have the rules of (political) engagement changed for you since the 60s?
HH: As the political scene in general has changed so have the 'rules of engagement'. More specifically, in Europe, the quasi take-over of public institutions by private interests has advanced tremendously. It began in the 70s. The US served as an example to emulate. As the East used to look to Moscow, so the Europeans looked to the US for guidance. In both cases, it amounted to a sell-out. In Britain this process accelerated during the Thatcher years. Labour did not stop it. In fact, practically all social democratic parties in Europe embraced the notion that cuts in cultural funding are necessary and that they could be offset by funds from corporate sponsors. Neither the politicians nor the press, nor a generally uniformed public, thought much about the consequences of this de facto privatisation of institutions whose budget nevertheless continues to be underwritten by the taxpayers. In this neo-liberal hall of mirrors, people seem to think they can get something for nothing which, of course, is rarely the case. Train-wrecks are no longer recognised as such. It may take an economic or political catastrophe to change currently prevailing attitudes (I don't hope for such catastrophes to happen).

PB: In 1978 you wrote that formalism had rendered art a 'socially irrelevant phenomenon' a situation your own practice has always sought to redress. In the same article you argued for the contingent, or relative, nature of aesthetic value in contradistinction to the liberal myth of the ideological neutrality of beauty. Your rearrangement of museum collections directly addresses both these issues.
HH: One of the journalists I spoke to at the Serpentine was surprised that I used the word 'beautiful' with a positive connotation. In Rotterdam and also in London I included artefacts I personally consider beautiful, next to others that I think are silly, ugly or even despicable because of what they stand for. These value judgements reveal my 'habitus', that is: my background, my acculturation, and how the world I live in (personally, professionally as well as a political being) has shaped me. I may share some or even many of these views with visitors of the show, who happen to come from a similar mould. Through strategic arrangements and the scrambling of categories I tried to promote an awareness of this contingency.
At the V&A a crucifix is neatly separated from Buddha statues, and so are Islamic prayer rugs from Jewish religious artefacts like a Torah mantle. In the central gallery of the Serpentine they are brought together and face each other. And, depending on how one looks at this constellation, they surround with empathy or could have reason to be challenged by the presence of a huge male nude in their midst (a plaster cast of Michelangelo's Dying Slave in the Louvre). Even though the young man appears to be in his death throes, at least according to the title and its original destination (the tomb of Pope Julius II), the posture of his body and the expression on his face could also be understood as conveying religious — or erotic — ecstasy: a tangle of 'mixed messages'.

PB: You have cited, among others, Duchamp and Lautréamont, as precursors of your critique of the museum and of aesthetic value (the latter's proposed encounter between a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table having as much logic apparently as some of your own juxtapositions), while the potted palms at the entrance to 'Mixed Messages' at the Serpentine Gallery deftly reference Marcel Broodthaers' own 'museum' project. However, the display as a whole, with its witty reference to the Great Exhibition of 1851 in the form of the two rather vulgar vases depicting Victoria and Albert, unambiguously signals the exhibition's underlying theme: the legacies of empire. You have literally, and metaphorically, held up a mirror to the viewer. Was it inevitable, this being the centenary year of Victoria's death, that this would be your central theme?
HH: I was not aware of this anniversary. As you know, the V&A was founded under Victoria's reign, with Albert's express support. The Museum has its roots in the Great Exhibition. I was told that the vases — on their backs are images of the Crystal Palace — were the first items in the Museum's collection. Established at the height of the empire, many of the non-European objects in the collection originate in those parts of the world that belonged to the empire. The imagery of a good number of them is a testimony specifically to the formerly British, or generally Western, domination of the world. In the same vein, in the Rotterdam collection, I came across many traces of the Dutch West and East India companies which were powerful rivals of Britain's colonial ambitions.

PB:Which, of all the exhibits you encountered at the V&A, was for you the most telling?
HH: There were many. Just to speak of one: when I saw the aquatints from Calcutta (after James Baille Fraser, 1826), I was struck by the oppressive presence of an enormous triumphal arch, Imperial palaces and massive steepled churches in the middle of what amounted to an Indian village. Indigenous labourers are seen scurrying through unpaved streets, diligently stepping aside when a horse-drawn carriage of their colonial masters passes.
I juxtaposed these images with a large painting by Henry Courtney Selous, celebrating the opening of the Great Exhibition. Victoria and Albert and the Royal entourage occupy the centre. They are surrounded by representatives of the Church of England, the British aristocracy and delegations of European potentates. Behind the Royal company we see the iconic palm tree.
To round out this ensemble, in front of the official State painting I positioned a sculpture, made in 1990 by Viet-Hong Lieu, a 10-year old Vietnamese boy in London. I found it in the Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green (a branch of the V&A). Out of wood he had made two brightly painted cut-out figures: a white child with a lollipop in his hand, crying bitterly and, standing behind him, an older boy with darker skin and black hair. The older boy is throwing up his hands in horror at the turd the screaming kid had deposited behind himself.

PB: Extraordinary! Was there one exhibit that you would like to have included that you were unable to, for whatever reason?
HH: Yes, a beautiful 18th-century Indian chintz with images of Indians and Dutch traders. I found it on display in the Indian galleries. The textile conservators considered it too fragile for a move up the road to Kensington Gardens. As a replacement, I was offered an Indian petticoat piecegoods fabric, also of the 18th Century. Along its borders are Indian depictions of Europeans having tea. But that was also eventually nixed. It could only be displayed in a case. Aside from the problem that the budget did not allow for a case, I was opposed to putting it into a glass coffin. It would not have been possible to see it with all the reflections, and would have been robbed of all its sensuality and tactile qualities. It also could not have served as a backdrop, as intended, for a silver epergne with palm trees, the proverbial Indian elephant and exotic figures (commissioned in Bengal by a British client).

PB: This is one of the effects of institutionalisation that you referred to earlier and it is the subject of Louise Lawler's Glass Cage, 1991-93, a black and white photograph of Degas' sculpture, The Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, that you included in 'Viewing Matters'.
HH: Yes. I was very happy not to have been obliged to put her in a glass cage as seen on Lawler's photo from the Boston Museum. In Rotterdam she was resolutely holding her own, exposed, with both feet on the ground, and facing Rodin's amputated Man Walking. Had the conservators of the Boijmans been as squeamish as their colleagues at the V&A, this confrontation would not have been possible.

PB: It must be a tremendous responsibility, taking on these institutions on the one hand, but also working not only with the work of other artists from the past, but with that of contemporary artists.
HH: I hope my colleagues understand it as a tribute to their works rather than as misuse. Putting the whole thing together was extremely exhausting, with long stretches of frustration and anxiety, but also of great joy working with these 'ready-mades.'
Originally, I was to have prepared a solo show of my own works. I was not really in the mood for that, particularly since I had already had a show at the Tate Gallery in the 1980s. It was a fortunate coincidence that Lisa Corrin, the curator, and Julia Peyton-Jones, the director of the Serpentine, had already opened a dialogue with the V&A regarding a collaborative project inside the museum. My venture expanded that collaboration in the other direction, up Exhibition Road into Kensington Gardens, where exactly 150 years earlier the Great Exhibition had been held.

Mixed Messages was at the Serpentine Gallery and Give & Take was at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London from January 30 to April 1, 2001.

Patricia Bickers is Editor of Art Monthly.