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Culture and Contestation in the New Century
By Marc James Léger Intellect Ltd
Copyright © 2011 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84150-450-6
CHAPTER 1
Hans Haacke and the Art of Not Being Governed Quite So Much
Rosalyn Deutsche
For nearly four decades, Hans Haacke has put his art at the service of extending and deepening democracy – broadly defined not only as a form of government but also as a form of society in which it is possible to question power and engage in contests over the social order. According to the political philosopher Claude Lefort, the democratic possibility emerges when, with the French and American declarations of the rights of man at the end of the eighteenth century, the power of the state is no longer attributed to a transcendent source, such as nature or divine law. Power is located inside the social world; it derives from 'the people'. But they, too, have no transcendent or substantial identity. So democracy gives rise to public space, a realm of political interaction that appears when the basic understanding of people becomes uncertain – in the deep sense of lacking a proper foundation – and is therefore open to debate. Less a site than a process, the public sphere, the condition of democratic politics, sets in motion what Etienne Balibar calls 'a universal right to politics', the right of all to both constitute the social order and put it at risk. Michel Foucault, who theorized what he saw as modern society's proliferation of techniques to govern individuals and society, techniques that exceed but also include those of the state, might have defined this democratic right as equal freedom to raise the perpetual question of 'how not to be governed'. Not how not to be governed at all but 'how not to be governed quite so much', how, that is, to limit and transform government: 'how not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of those principles, with such and such an objective in mind and by means of such procedures, not like that, not for that, not by them'. Haacke asserts the primacy of the nongovernmental aspect of democratic politics more colloquially: 'One should never leave politics to the politicians.'
Since 1969, Haacke has persistently attempted to universalize the 'art of not being governed quite so much', the art, that is, of critique, by expanding his audience's capacity for public life and encouraging the appearance of a public sphere. Although, so far as I am aware, no critic has theorized this attempt as the unifying principle of Haacke's oeuvre, 'democracy' and related terms appear frequently in texts on, and by, the artist. Conversing with his like-minded colleague, the radical sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, Haacke has said: 'A democratic society must promote critical thinking, including a constant critique of itself. Without it, democracy will not survive.' Art historian Walter Grasskamp mentions Haacke's 'democratic earnestness', which he fears 'is beginning to sound old-fashioned in some circles'.
It would be a grave error to treat Haacke's passion for democracy as out of date, for today, democracy's survival is indeed in question and the freedom of critical speech, as Judith Butler puts it, is in a 'sorry' state. We live in the age of protected democracy, of, according to Giorgio Agamben, a permanent state of exception. Technically, a state of exception is a state-declared suspension of democratic law, with the supposed aim of protecting democracy. The founding modern example occurred in 1933, when, on the day after the Reichstag fire, Hitler convinced President Hindenburg to sign a decree 'for the Protection of the People and the State', which restricted the individual and civil liberties guaranteed by the Weimar Constitution. Agamben argues that since then, the creation of a permanent state of exception, even when it is not declared in a technical sense, has become an essential practice of democratic states, although the tendency in western democracies is to replace an official state of exception with a prioritization of security as the technique of government. Instead of declaring states of exception, governments issue exceptional laws. In the United States, for instance, soon after the attack on the World Trade Center, which, needless to say, has escalated the 'protection' of democracy, President Bush issued a military order that authorized 'indefinite detention' and trial by 'military commissions' of non-citizens suspected of terrorist activities. The order created a new category of individuals: detainees, who, like Jews in Nazi concentration camps, are neither prisoners nor persons accused but who have lost all legal status and have no rights.
The erosion of rights in the current period of protected democracy poses a threat to cultural institutions that declare a right to politics. One example, closely tied to the creation of detainees, since both are legitimated by the war on terror, is the cancellation in 2005 of plans to relocate New York City's Drawing Center to the World Trade Center memorial complex, a position for which it had been selected in June 2004 by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. Under the leadership of its director, Catherine de Zegher, the Drawing Center had long excelled at the democratic art of critique. A salvo of anti-terrorist rhetoric set off the campaign against the Drawing Center when a Daily News headline announced that the presence at Ground Zero of a museum that had shown art critical of the Bush administration would 'violate' the public 'again'. The newspaper thus defined art that instantiates democracy as, in the words of Yates McKee, itself a kind of terror – 'aesthetic terror'. The following day New York Governor Pataki, adopting the newspaper's vocabulary of aesthetic violence and violation, proclaimed: 'We will not tolerate anything on that site that denigrates America ... or freedom.' In the name of protecting freedom, Pataki pronounced Ground Zero a site where the freedom of critical speech is suspended. 'We would never be able to accept censorship,' responded De Zegher, a defence of freedom of expression that she reiterated a month later when the Drawing Center's forthcoming exhibition, 'Persistent Vestiges: Drawing from the American-Vietnam War', became controversial, no doubt due, at least in part, to the similarities between its theme and the war in Iraq. In March 2006, de Zegher resigned her position, ostensibly because the Drawing Center's board decided that she was not suited to fund-raising. It seems clear, however, that the board was unwilling 'to play hardball', as Haacke has suggested art institutions must, to support her unequivocal defence of the critical independence of art.
Haacke sometimes uses a meteorological metaphor to underscore the inseparability of art and society: Art is a particular 'geographical' area in a general social climate, which decides the direction a society will take. Today, the art world is a micro-region in a climate of antidemocratic ideology. In 1950, adopting the same metaphor, Theodor Adorno worried that such a climate entailed 'the danger of a large-scale following of antidemocratic movements if they should get under way'. To fight against this potential, he called for 'decisive changes of that cultural climate which makes for the over-all pattern'. The current urgency of such changes gives new relevance to Haacke's early democratic works, inviting us to reconsider their significance in light of democratic theory instead of the systems and social science theories with which they have been historically, and by no means incorrectly, associated.
Haacke began the process of forming the art audience into a democratic public, one that thinks and acts politically, in 1969, not in his native Germany but in the United States. Radically shifting aesthetic direction rather than, as is often claimed, merely taking the 'natural' or 'inevitable' step of extending his previous interest in biological and physical systems to social systems, he began conducting polls and surveys of visitors to museums, galleries, and other exhibition spaces. A few years later, he installed polls in Krefeld, Kassel and Hannover, but his first five took place or were proposed in the United States. However, Haacke's experience of German Fascism – the economic and political opponent of democratic relations and freedoms – led him to keep his ear to the ground in order to detect the presence or approach of anti-democratic tendencies within democracies. In Germany, he had circulated among various artistic groups concerned with forging a democratic culture in a post-fascist country. In the early 1960s, as Grasskamp points out, he identified with the Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel's interest in making art accessible to those without art historical training, an attempt that was understood as democratization. But it was with the polls (and despite the fact that he has never been influenced by Adorno) that Haacke's art began to overtly follow Adorno's 'new categorical imperative ... imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen'.
Haacke's first poll, and his first work of institutional critique, Gallery-Goers' Birthplace and Residence Profile, took place at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York City. On the gallery walls, the artist hung maps of Manhattan, the five boroughs of New York City, the New York metropolitan area, the United States and the world, along with a text that issued instructions to visitors: 'Indicate your birthplace with red pin, permanent residence with blue pin.' Residence Profile was Haacke's first work to take the social world as its object of study. But the poll inaugurated an equally important change in the form of Haacke's art. Previously, he had experimented with a variety of methods to include the audience in his work, for example, using materials that reflected the viewer, as in A8 – 61 (1961), or making objects that registered, and sometimes altered with, the presence of viewers, as in Photoelectric Viewer-Controlled Coordinate System (1966–68). Influenced by minimalism, he had tried throughout the 1960s to open up his works to their exhibition contexts. The polls implemented a new tactic: direct address. Haacke's instructions spoke to the gallery-goer in a type of sentence – the direct imperative – that issues a command or, in Haacke's case, makes a request: 'Indicate.' A subject in the second person – 'you' – is always understood as the addressee of a verb in the imperative mood. In subsequent polls, Haacke addressed viewers both imperatively and interrogatively. The first time he asked direct questions was in a proposal for a poll to be conducted at the Jewish Museum's Software exhibition in 1970, when he planned to introduce a new polling method – the multiple-choice questionnaire. Visitors would have been directed to answer computer-generated demographic and, in another shift, sociopolitical questions, such as, 'In your opinion is the moral fabric of this country strengthened or weakened by the US involvement in Indochina?' and 'Is the use of the American flag for the expression of political beliefs, e.g. on hard-hats and in dissident art exhibitions, a legitimate exercise of free speech?' At the end of the exhibition, they would have been offered printouts of the processed answers in the form of continuously updated statistical profiles of the museum audience. Because of equipment failure, the Software poll never materialized, but all later polls took the form of multiple-choice questions whose content was tailored to the country and the historical moment in which they were shown and whose answers were tabulated either manually or by machine. If, as Haacke has noted, Marcel Duchamp was the first artist to reveal 'the symbolic power of the context', and if he did this by, as Rosalind Krauss writes, redefining the making of art as 'the speculative act of posing questions', then Haacke literalized Duchamp's interrogative heritage. Works that asked questions include the following: MOMA-Poll, installed at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1970; the poll that Haacke proposed for a one-person exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in 1971 and that was partially responsible for the museum Director Thomas Messer's cancellation of the show; and polls conducted at the Milwaukee Art Center (1971), the Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld (1972), Documenta 5 in Kassel (1972), the John Weber Gallery in New York (John Weber Gallery Visitors' Profile 1 and 2, 1972 and 1973) and the Kunstverein Hannover (1973). Haacke always exhibited the tabulated results in the form of either printouts or, as in the John Weber Gallery Visitors' Profiles, bar graphs and charts. All polls used the apparatus – that is, ballots, ballot boxes, key punch cards and questionnaires from some of the core institutions of representative democracy including voting, demographic studies and opinion surveys – to foster the growth of direct democracy.
In 'The Constituency', an essay written in 1976 and published in 1977, Haacke analyzes the data he gleaned from the John Weber Gallery Visitors' Profile 1 and 2. The polls, he says, showed that the audience for art comes from the college-educated middle and upper-middle classes. In this way, they challenged the idealist notion of aesthetic universality, a notion promoted by art institutions – or, to use Peter Bürger's term for a more dispersed aesthetic apparatus, 'art as institution' – which, as a consequence, withdraw art from social life. But, coupled with the polls' data, the use of direct address also disrupted the discourse of the gallery and museum. Acknowledging the presence of viewers, direct address countered the then-dominant doctrine of American formalist critics like Michael Fried, who a few years earlier, in his essay Art and Objecthood', had insisted that a work of art must turn its back on the viewing subject in order to maintain its ability to cohere as a self-contained totality, an entity whose meaning remains constant despite changing circumstances. Direct address, as I have argued elsewhere, announces that a work of art is not such an entity but, rather, a social relationship with a context that includes a viewer, or, more accurately, an object whose meaning arises in social relationships. Direct address brings art and art institutions down from the heavens – from, that is, the abstract realm in which they are placed by doctrines of aesthetic transcendence – and sets them in the social world. It also brings the spectator down to earth, countering the abstract subjectivity constructed by the museum. Haacke's 'you' is not some universal citizen of art or phenomenological spectator standing outside class, race, gender and history. Rather, she is a concrete subject located in time – the implied present of the 'I' who speaks to 'you' – and, what is more, in social space, which is the explicit subject matter of Gallery-Goers' Profile.
Even while describing the polls as participatory, art historians tend to neglect the manner in which Haacke spoke to the viewer, and, as a result, they sometimes characterize Gallery-Goers' Profile as simply a positivist sociological project or 'mere data collection' because the activity it asked viewers to perform required no decision-making and had no explicit political content. It is true that in this and other polls Haacke used sociological methods, like the politico-scientific survey, that have been subject to critique for a number of reasons: they fail to take into account their own mediating effect on the supposedly independently existing data they gather; they present us with an imaginary plenitude – 'the voice of the people' – while in reality limiting what is politically thinkable; and they function as technocratic instruments, constructing a 'political discourse produced by experts rather than the dominated classes, who have no control over their political "tongue"'. Bracketing concrete inequalities, including unequal access to the right to speak, polls, in Bourdieu's words, recognize only 'the electoral imperative of formal equality before the questionnaire'. It is also true that Haacke drew important conclusions about the art-world population from the data he collected in Gallery-Goers' Profile and the other polls. Yet to restrict the works' meaning to their supposedly straightforward sociological methodology and to the face value of their data is to play down the fact that bringing the sociological into the space of the aesthetic was an interventionist gesture that modified the identity of both fields. As far back as 1975, sociologists Howard S. Becker and John Walton noted that the resemblance between social science research and Haacke's work is superficial, though to be sure they also took him seriously as a social scientist studying power. They argued that because 'Haacke works in the same social space as those his work describes,' his art 'differs profoundly from social studies of the powerful' and even has greater power. Drawing attention, visually and textually, via maps and instructions, to the fact that the spectator and gallery are situated, Gallery-Goers' Profile made clear that the art institution is a material rather than transcendental site, one whose identity, far from autonomous, is constructed as pure by excluding other sites. Eroding art-as- institution's aura of isolation, it engaged in a politics of space that investigated the way in which purportedly self-contained spaces are actually produced by a gesture of exclusion, an investigation sharpened in 1971 in the artist's real-estate pieces. By simply insisting on the fact of spatial location, then, Haacke performed a democratic action that Bertolt Brecht describes in his 1933–34 essay 'Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties': he withdrew support from 'a great many lies'. Brecht's essay has inspired the artist since he read it in a high-school anthology when he was eighteen years old, and its influence pervades the polls. Truth, says Brecht, is not 'a lofty and ambiguous generality'. Often, it is 'something practical, factual, undeniable, something to the point ... something statistical'. It takes away the 'rotten, mystical implications' of words. Haacke had sought to demystify the word 'art' prior to his first poll, which confronted the lofty claims of the art institution with, precisely, something practical and dry: concrete location, a fact that poses questions about the art world's relation to the broader organization of social space. Brecht's notion of withdrawing support from lies is akin to Foucault's 'politics of truth', a practice in which the subject questions the truths promulgated by powerful institutions.
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Excerpted from Culture and Contestation in the New Century by Marc James Léger. Copyright © 2011 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
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