C91 Article

Hans Haacke: And you were victorious after all , 1988, Graz, Austria; courtesy Hans Haacke/VG Bild-Kunst

Complex relations bind art and audience. In this first essay from the Bursary in Visual Arts Criticism, Brian Hand discusses public art institutions and their audiences.

The absence of any rigid class structures [in Ireland] makes it much more natural and easy for the artist and those who serve the community in other ways to find a proper and mutually creative relationship. Charles J. Haughey ¹

So you see, the curator should be a criminal, just like the artist. We should learn to lie for art, adopting the fashionable, and thus fundable, language of our day. Patrick T. Murphy ²

The new audience?  

Readers of the current Arts Plan will find that a key policy objective of the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon is "to develop participation in and audiences for the arts." For those working in the arts it has recently been made clear that for the Council "audiences and audience development are becoming the mainstream of its activities" (my emphasis). ³ While some of the 'new' language of the Arts Plan has clear echoes and context through the historical development of arts policy in Ireland, the primacy of the concept of audience can be seen as a recent adoption. Indeed over a decade ago, if we take the example of the then government's White Paper on cultural policy, Access and Opportunity , the word 'audience' was not mentioned. Back in 1987 the Arts Council identified four areas of prime importance in the development of the arts and these were arts education, community arts, regional arts and arts centres. All these activities connect with an audience of one sort or another and yet the simple objective of the current plan above was not mentioned. So it seems that as the work of the Council has grown in scope its language has suitably broadened.

At present one could argue that this 'new' institutional arts policy, while promoting the idea that audiences are to be at the centre of a management philosophy and the measure of its success, has few co-ordinates from which to clearly see the subject of audiences. Predominantly this is because there is a widespread lack of research on Irish arts audiences. Audience development as it is traditionally understood divides its activities into two spheres: the increasing of audiences who already regularly attend the arts, and the initiation of new audiences. Hence research needs to be among both the attenders and the non-attenders. And amongst the attenders it must also recognise "that the performance of audiences often exceeds the time-space engagement [of the artwork or event] overflowing unpredictably into the process of living." ⁴ In this sense there are double or contradictory definitions encircling the term audience, implying qualities that are present and absent, potential and actual, sure and fickle. Within the Arts Plan there is a commitment to research on many levels, which is to be welcomed. However, there is no lexicon of terms to help the reader grasp the complexity of what is meant by an 'audience' for such a body as the Council. Although the chairman of the Council, Brian Farrell, explains in the Plan that "the proposed strategy...aims to go beyond a merely passive or purely market-driven concept of 'arts-consumers'," it would be fair to say that the those of us in the art community still have to work out what such a trajectory might be. Trying to establish a primary objective without major research up and running, combined with the lack of a definition of the terms, makes this Council's work difficult

While audience development as described above exists as a functional definition, elsewhere a widely accepted definition of the term 'audience' is very elusive. ⁵

Placing value in such an elusive concept is not the traditional occupation of institutional management and particularly not so for the hierarchical and grid-like structure of such bodies as the Arts Council. For example, arts audiences are not segregated into competing camps of opera, visual art, theatre, dance, film and music as the Council executive is structured. Audiences may be moved by the arts but they also move and slide within and around the arts, transgressing the rigid boundaries of competing art forms. Audiences can be nomadic. How then should audience development be managed within an Arts Council that is structured in relation to artistic power blocks and not audience power blocks? Will it mean more tiers of management that cross the artform divides? This logic of desegregation of the arts also applies to the fact that certain bodies of society are not audiences of the arts at all. Some choose to ignore, and others more usually feel excluded from the arts. In audience-development terms should the Arts Council fund approaches to these individuals with just one artform (e.g., 'low-brow' street theatre) or with all the arts (e.g., 'high-brow' contemporary music and literature)?

The imaginary audiences  

There are lessons from other fields. In the world of commercial audience research and development in mainstream film and television an intermediary system was developed between the media apparatus and their clients, the advertisers, and strict institutional control of audience statistics is manufactured by an agreed third-party agency. As Christian Metz observed, film and television need control of the audience as a mechanism of self-perpetuation. Commercial television is in essence an advertising medium interrupted by programming and, as one U.S. TV executive put it, all the research it does is in the "interest of delivering audiences to advertisers." ⁶ In this research a new concept of audience has been created, defined and tabulated, but this audience with its TAM ratings, audience shares, people meters, interviews and viewing diaries is not in any sense the complete or realistic picture of those who choose to watch (with their VCRs, remote controls etc.). It is an "imaginary entity" to quote Ien Ang, "an abstraction constructed from the vantage point of the institutions, in the interests of the institutions." ⁷

Such an 'imaginary entity' is considered vital in the economic logic of this environment driven by economic imperatives of share price, profit and production. The audience is synonymous with the market or a definable body of actual and potential consumers (in current marketing jargon 'target audience' now substitutes for 'customers'). Is this then the new logic of audience development within the arts, a practice to be clearly driven by economic imperatives? Partly this is self-evident with the increasing usage of such terms as the culture industry , the arts industry and the leisure industry . A recent example can be seen with the establishment in the Scottish Arts Council of an Audience and Sales Development Unit. Audience linked with sales development does seem to tilt the emphasis into the logic of economic imperative. ⁸ While I do not endorse the reduction of art making to such imperatives by institutions, I do find myself in agreement with others in recognising that such clarity of purpose can be salutary as it "cuts through the romantic clouds that envelop the often misleading and mythical notions widely held about the production, distribution and consumption of art." ⁹

Cultural and financial economies  

Recently I received an abstract for a lecture on audience development in England that sought to argue that audience development could be defined as the "science of increasing attendances." What this 'science' wants to achieve is a definable object of discourse, "the arts audience," analogous to 'the television audience' or more generally to that of 'the market'. Once a stable definition is established then techniques of measurement can be harnessed, norms defined and a new constituent subject or subjects produced, so that the whole positivistic process becomes audience development. The agenda of audience development on this island would seem at present to aim to avoid or a least be critical of such a reductivist and empirical approach to audience development. Nessa O'Mahony, Head of Public Affairs at the Arts Council, speaking at the Winning your Audience conference, outlined how "the quality of people's experience as an audience is in our view, arguably of greater importance than just the size of the audience, or the notion of the audience as 'cash cow'." The conference's plenary session was divided into the three areas of classic audience development (as outlined by the arts-marketing writer Heather Maitland): the artistic, the social and the financial. Although I presented a paper on the artistic perspective and Helen O'Donoghue from IMMA on the social, there was surprisingly no one to present the economic perspective. ¹⁰

The focus on quality over quantity, while commendable, can have a different effect when placed within the context of the conference and the lack of a public speaker willing to discuss arts economics; that is, it might fit with Pierre Bourdieu's assertion that "the denial of economic interest finds its favourite refuge in the domain of art and culture." ¹¹ By this Bourdieu means that not only is the world of the arts in denial about its role in 'vulgar' capitalist production but that the arts themselves are a protected inversion of the standard forms of capitalist exchange. Bourdieu believes it is possible to talk of a cultural economy and he employs the concept of 'cultural capital' to refer to the accumulation of symbolic wealth within the cultural sphere. As John Fiske has shown, cultural commodities can exist in both financial and cultural economies at the same time. In the former they take the form of a monetary value while in the latter their value is measured qualitatively in "meanings, pleasures and social identities." ¹² Fiske optimistically argues that audiences are such commodities, in that they are sold to advertisers but are also producers in that they make meanings, create pleasure and generate popular cultural capital, etc.  

Critical sociology  

Bourdieu's principal arguments are that all taste and value judgements are society determined, that there is nothing natural or pre-given about a person or social group's good or bad taste, and that there is nothing pre-given about the role of the artist as bohemian, beggar, saint or mythic hero. Put simply, he believes that "art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfil a social function of legitimating social differences ." (my italics) ¹³ Hence successful artists and art institutions are nervous to disclose for scrutiny the secretive art market that supports them, the exclusivity and sacredness of their environments for viewing art and the self-interestedness that links them to powerful élites who seek in exchange a confirmation of their taste and distinction. For example, he writes in collaboration with Alain Darbel of how sociology is

always suspected (by the art lover) of disputing the authenticity and sincerity of aesthetic pleasure by simply describing its conditions of existence. This is because, like any kind of love, the love of art is loath to acknowledge its origins and on the whole it prefers strange coincidences, which can be interpreted as predestined, to collective conditions and conditioning. ¹⁴

Bourdieu believes the scientific methods of sociology can demystify the sacred world of art. ¹⁵ Extensive empirical surveying and research of art audiences back up his opinions. Science for him "exerts a critical effect" in challenging the symbolic power of the patronage of the arts and of cultural consumption. Having established a fundamental overview of taste and power he sets out to unmask how the origins of cultural consumption arise. Bourdieu describes 'habitus', a sort of generational self-image of social groups that inculcates and coalesces in the subject at an early stage, creating a worldview as well as less cognitive forms like gesture, accent, deportment. There is no mind/body split as such. Importantly, the adoption of the habitus is unconscious or it is so "at least in the sense that the subject is involved in a forgetting of its socially constituted character." The habitus is "history turned into nature." ¹⁶ Thus beyond the general overview of the surveys, the more sophisticated concepts like the habitus allow for a greater understanding "of the complex meanings which underpin instances of consumption in specific situational contexts." ¹⁷ As Bourdieu writes, "patronage is a subtle form of domination that acts thanks to the fact that it is not perceived as such. All forms of symbolic domination operate on a basis of misrecognition , that is, with the complicity of those who are subjected to them" ¹⁸ (my emphasis).  

The business behind art  

Occasionally it doesn't take a sociologist to make clear revelations as to the practice of certain art institutions. Patrick Murphy, Director of the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, and former Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, writing in CIRCA 88, blithely drew refreshingly candid conclusions about the management of the arts in the U.S.:

Private money fuels public presentation. Museums and hence curators, depend on private donation and these donors are for the most part very knowledgeable about contemporary art. In accepting an artist, a gallerist must be able to gauge not only the aesthetic quality and content of a work but its collecting potential. Works enter into museum collections through private collections, whether by direct appeal for funds to purchase a work or through the long-term loan or gift of a work. The art media survives not on subscriptions of its readers but through the extent of its advertising. Those who advertise receive the bulk of the reviews. ¹⁹

This scenario almost totally excludes any active input of an audience that is not affluent or financially connected to the institution. It makes the outreach efforts of such institutions seem no more than lip service. What Murphy outlines is a model that seriously challenges free expression and free speech by artists, where power through sponsorship and property rights exerts within a public arena what Phillipe de Montebello, a former Director of MOMA, described as an "inherent, insidious, hidden form of censorship." ²⁰

While Murphy reasonably expresses the opinion that anything promoted under an Irish flag in the U.S. can be prone to "Oirish clichés," he proceeds to alarmingly warn us to "stay away from anything Irish-American" and, although not explicitly stated, he implies that this habitus possesses low cultural capital or symbolic value in the art world. (It is interesting to know how he expressed these opinions with the large Irish-American community in Philadelphia.) Murphy provides a recipe for those promoting art outside of Ireland (presumably with public money): to target the two hundred or so exclusive International collectors who are "constantly on the move" (real nomads), tracking their changing tastes as they steer the market at various art fairs, consecrating new styles and artists with their aristocratic patronage. So, as Iwona Blazwick has observed, the prioritised art-world audience becomes "an audience which tends to move from one disembodied white space to another, which shares a set of experiences but which is more or less oblivious to the fact that that space is Venice, Kassel or New York." ²¹ One artist has tracked the patterned preferences of collectors and their connections with museums in perhaps a different way than Murphy would appreciate. This is Hans Haacke.

Haacke's career and practice is a committed attempt to unmask the ideological imperatives of institutions by directly confronting issues of audience and aesthetics, patronage and power. Part of his fame and uniqueness as an artist is based on a series of high--profile exclusions and cancellations of exhibitions of his work by public (or semi-public) institutions. For example, in 1974 he was invited to participate in an international revue exhibition, PROJEKT '74, at the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne (now Wallraf-Richartz-Museum/Museum Ludwig) on the occasion of its 150 ^th birthday. Haacke proposed to make an installation, Manet-PROJEKT '74 , on the provenance of a painting, Manet's Bunch of Asparagus , belonging to the museum. In a neutral museum gallery Haacke proposed to present ten wall panels and the original Manet work on an easel. The information on the ten panels was simply a biography of social and economic details (all in the public domain) about the various owners of the work. Manet-PROJEKT '74 was site-specific on a number of levels: the occasion of the exhibition was a commemoration of the museum, the painting was recently acquired by the museum (1968), and the work fulfilled a similar function to text panels for museum visitors. Manet-PROJEKT '74 was rejected by the exhibition committee because of their 'loyalty' to the 'reputation' of the final collector mentioned in panels 8,9 and 10, Hermann J. Abs, the powerful financier who had helped them purchase the work.

The museum specifically outlined how details of Abs' nineteen positions on boards of directors could not be associated with details of the conglomerate of investors in the Friends of the Museum, who acted under his stewardship, in purchasing the painting. The then Director, Dr Horst Keller, also outlined in a letter to Haacke an identical set of relationships to the ones Patrick Murphy provided about private money funding public presentation, adding that "a museum knows nothing about economic power; it does indeed know something about spiritual power." ²²  

Unfinished business

Manet-PROJEKT '74 brought history fully into the work of Hans Haacke in contrast with the more positivist/empirical early work where he conducted polls and created surveys and statistical maps in participation with museum and gallery audiences. These works executed between 1969 and 1973 initially just collected data (although the data were related to systems aesthetics and cybernetics) and then gradually Haacke's art began to offer choices to the museum audience, to ask the audience political questions and questions of aesthetics over and above the political declaration of who they were, where they were born and where they now live. This was perhaps inevitable because the demographic information was very finite and museum attendance in itself presupposed a whole raft of privileged relationships on the behalf of the spectator. The critics' response was often that this work was sociology and not art. ²³ The extent of a social or sociological aspect to Haacke's work was largely determined by the political efficacy of such positivist tools, informational, textual, documentary etc., in the political activism of the sixties. The work was both careful and clever in negotiating and politicising an aesthetics of sociology or social research fashionable within conceptual art.

In 1971 Haacke's one-person exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum was cancelled. One of the three works that Haacke proposed, Shapolsky et al Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 , was a photo-text investigation of the slum landlord Harry Shapolsky and his family's real estate interests in Manhattan. As Gregory Sholette has pointed out, Shapolsky et al parodied in its presentation the conceptual-art visual style of artists like Joseph Kosuth, Adrian Piper and Mel Bochner. After cancelling Haacke's exhibition, the Guggenheim's Director Thomas Messer summed up his opposition to Shapolsky et al by saying that: "To the degree to which an artist deliberately pursues aims that lie beyond art, his very concentration upon ulterior ends stands in conflict with the intrinsic nature of the work as an end in itself." ²⁴ The audience for Shapolsky et al , when it was first shown in Milan in 1972, were clearly removed from the specific rent politics and property sleaze of New York, although the generalities of slum landlords apply in most urban environments. ²⁵ The contravention of Shapolsky et al was then not simply an exposé of a specific corrupt property monopoly but a challenge to the control of conceptual art and the shielding of economic relations within the museum. Shapolsky et al asked of the viewer to acknowledge a system of misrecognition, in to its attempt to distinguish visual style, the status of the artwork and the content it could contain in a neutralising institutional context. Haacke's work was a manipulation of public information in a form of private expression (i.e., conceptual art), exposing by parody the latent and contradictory acquiescence of the conceptual-art style in furthering the traditional market-oriented aims of the art institution. Aims, though disavowed, which were and are clearly akin to property speculation. The viewer faced with so many crumbling tenement facades, shabby windows and street people might have felt a need to reflect on what it means to be an audience inside the polished property of the museum building itself. ²⁶

This system of misrecognition activated by the audience expectations is taken further in Manet-PROJEKT '74 because the work is about the ideological condition of memory. The provenance of Bunch of Asparagus was painfully linked to German history, to Nazism and to what Benjamin Buchloh calls "the persistence of Nazi history within German reconstruction culture." ²⁷ The six previous owners of the painting were French and German Jewish collectors or descendants of collectors, Abs was a powerful banker in the Nazi era and was briefly imprisoned after the war and then 'de-nazified'. The work was not solely an uncovering or a lament for victims of fascism, but a dilemma for the audience as viewers and as subjects with forgotten memories in the neutralising context of the museum. Manet-PROJEKT '74 was a powerful allegory of Walter Benjamin's maxim from his Thesis on the Philosophy of History that "there is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism." ²⁸ In a number of simple steps which would have been easily graspable for the audience, Manet-PROJEKT '74 aimed to radically alter the museum environment by linking the ideology behind its desire for autonomy, disinterestedness and timelessness in the art object with the more intimate though potentially more catastrophic desire of an art audience to forget, reinvent or suppress the past.

Haacke's work has evolved from being initially aimed at an art-world audience to an engagement with a wider audience through public art projects. In this public artwork controversy has also followed, as with the vandalising of his work And You Were Victorious After All (1988) in Graz in Austria, or indeed with his decision not to take up a public commission for the new Reichstag in Berlin. ²⁹ Haacke's influence on the art world and his role as a teacher have provided inspiration for many younger artists to adopt a critical art practice. Specifically his influence can be seen in the work of New York based artist Andrea Fraser. Fraser's work has like Haacke's attempted to focus on audience and institutions. Some of this work has taken the form of humorous performances and videos of the artist as tour guide around museum collections, sculpture parks and historic sites. The work is a pointed critique of the mediation role of museums in the construction of heritage and taste.

In her work for the 1993 Whitney Biennial Fraser made audio-tour tapes for the exhibition in an exact copy of the museum's own audio-tour format. Fraser made her tour tapes from the results of interviews with the curators of the Biennial and the director of the museum. These individuals were asked to participate in a survey of four difficult questions:

Who do you think your audience is? What do you think a particular piece can provide that audience? What do you think that audience needs to know in order to gain access to that piece? What do you want the audience to get out of their experience with a particular piece?

As Fraser admits she perhaps naïvely thought that the tour might help the professional aims of these individuals who believed they were making an exhibition for their audience. She writes: " I didn't want to misrepresent them. I just wanted to represent things that are not necessarily consistent with maintaining authority as legitimate representative of that kind of institution. I thought that was consistent with their own intentions." ³⁰ Instead what Fraser's tapes revealed was an anxiety regarding public declaration and a conflict of different respondents.

Surveys are valued by institutions and audience surveys are promoted as good practice for feedback and democracy. But Fraser's audio tour revealed that surveys are very context-specific and that they could easily become subversive and revealing of institutional control. As Fraser concludes about the piece, "maybe all those social contradictions are just a little too much for five individuals to represent personally to an audience of thousands." ³¹ Fraser's work is not about her private expression but the politicisation of the spaces of private expression. The work deals with how relying on what people say is both complex and difficult and that observation is political. Like Haacke's, her technique is allegorical through a clever translation of positivist ideology that destabilises its power assumptions. That she was invited to make this work in the Biennial did not seem to make this piece any easier to realise. By concentrating on the contexts of audiences Fraser's practice could be seen to make critical space and meaning in what otherwise might be considered the professional terrain of a neutralising market or social research. As Haacke admits, "the symbolic qualities of contexts are often my most essential materials." ³²  

Audience as discourse  

This position of opening up the rationality of the institution to create a context-specific critique of power within the institution would also seem to go against some wider currents within the present art world, where a "bad positivism of meaninglessness [presents] an assiduous soldiering on just for the sake of it." ³³ Audience research and development by institutions should not become an empty juggling of positivist techniques; artists can play a key partnership role in research by creating audience-centred projects that analyse themselves, the audience, as well as museums or funding institutions. To be critical, such audience-centred work must acknowledge the implications of Bourdieu, Haacke and Fraser's projects in their incitement of the specifics of audience and aesthetics in terms of identification, memory, history, ideology and power.

Audience analysis can overcome the product- or-process, qualitative- or-quantitative debate by recognising the audience as discourse. From the institutional examinations of Michel Foucault we can understand discourse as an organisation of meaning which is prefigured in, determined by and existent in an assemblage of social, economic, textual (i.e., aesthetic) and material structures and processes. That these structures and processes are discursive in themselves creates a sort of contingent feedback loop rather than a cause- and-effect scenario. In subsequent essays this argument will be further explored. For now, the definition of audience as discursive engagement, and audience analysis as discourse analysis would necessitate us to ask: Who are the audience? What are the positions, choices and viewpoints from which they are an audience? Which are the institutions that create audiences and attempt to contain and distribute the knowledges and contexts of what an audience is? The artworks I have discussed offer model research strategies within the institution; that they can deliver this kind of relational explanation and discursive expression of both audience and researcher. They force us to seriously question the ethics, practices and structures that produce the artwork and its audience. Haacke's Real-Time Social Systems as of signifies an incompleteness or openendedness which parallels the difficulty in deciding when a person is in a relation of audience and when that relation ceases or what an engagement with those who maybe addressed but do not attend might be. As Deutsche writes, what prevails is

the belief that the work's meaning is always incomplete, changing 'as of' different temporal situations, that the work includes the responses it evokes and mutates according to the uses to which it is put, and finally, that this relativity of meaning depends on the position of the viewing subjects themselves contingent with history. ³⁴

A Nazi officer, so the story goes, visited Picasso's studio during the occupation of France; pointing to Guernica he asked, "Did you do that?" Picasso is said to have answered "No, you did." ³⁵  

¹ Charles J. Haughey, Art and the Majority (address to the Harvard Summer School Institute, Harvard University, July 12,1972), in The Spirit of the Nation : the speeches and statements of Charles J. Haughey (1957-1986), ed. Martin Mansergh, Cork: Mercier Press, 1986, p. 172.
² Patrick T. Murphy, On reading Jan Hoet's Essay ' Art after the death of God', in An EV+A Compendium, Kinsale: Gandon Editions, 1999, p. 111.
³ Nessa O'Mahony, Head of Public Affairs at the Arts Council, speaking at Winning your Audience , a one-day conference/seminar organised by Music Network and the Arts Council in Dublin, June 18, 1999.
⁴ Virginia Nightingale, Studying Audiences: The shock of the real, London: Routledge, 1996, p. 95.
⁵ Even reaching for Raymond Williams' Keywords published in 1976 will prove hopeless as he chose to avoid the word. This was surprising considering the emphasis of British Cultural Studies on reception theory and Marxism and because of the inescapably inter-discursive nature of the concept of audience as it lies at the crossroads of aesthetics, social theory, history and economics.
⁶ Ien Ang, Desperately Seeking the Audience, Routledge, London, 1991, p. ix.
⁷ Ibid, p. 2.
⁸ The response of the SAC to some queries about this unit was that it was set up in response to the rigid assessment criteria from the UK's National Lottery that asks for extensive audience research from applicants. Sales were included in this unit's title because that is how audience in the nonticketed visual arts are measured.
⁹ Hans Haacke, Managers of Consciousness in Hans Haacke, Unfinished Business, ed. Brian Wallis, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986, p. 60.
¹⁰ This is not because the conference was badly managed but simply that no one with expertise in this area was willing to present this perspective.
¹¹ Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of Theory and Practice , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977, p. 122.
¹² John Fiske, Television Culture , London: Methuen, p. 80.
¹³ Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: a Social Critique of Taste , Routledge, London 1989, p. 7.
¹⁴ Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel, The Love of Art , in Art in Modern Culture--An Anthology of Critical Texts, ed. F. Frascina and J. Harris, London: The Open University Press, 1992, p. 176.
¹⁵ Many of the critics of positivist research are unforgiving of what they see as the unequal power relations between researcher and subject and the presumption by the former that social reality or behaviour or artistic intention can be objectified and read unambiguously. There are arguments that Bourdieu's critique can equally be seen as expressing a new form of predestination or social determinism where artists, institutions and viewers become actors in a preordained script See Shaun Moores, Interpreting Audiences, The Ethnography of Media Consumption , London: Sage, 1993, pp. 117-140.
¹⁶ Bourdieu, op.cit. 1977, p. 78.
¹⁷ Bourdieu, op.cit. 1989, p. 4.
¹⁸ Pierre Bourdieu and Hans Haacke, Free Exchange, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1995, p. 72.
¹⁹ Patrick Murphy, Cheques and Balances , CIRCA, No. 88, Summer 1999, p. 35.
²⁰ Quoted in Douglas C. McGill, Art World subtly shifts to Corporate Patronage , The New York Times, February 5, 1985, p. C14.
²¹ Iwona Blazwick, in Serving Audiences--Iwona Blazwick, Susan Cahan, Andrea Fraser in conversation , October, No. 80, Spring 1997, p. 132.
²² Obra Social Hans Haacke (Exhibition Catalogue), Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 995, p. 79; see also pp. 78-91. Ironically a private gallery in Cologne proceeded to exhibit Manet-PROJEKT '74. Hence the work now added a further aspect of site, site as the defying censorship. Back at the Ludwig Museum there was further controversy: when Daniel Buren pasted a reduced-scale version of Haacke's work over his own work in the show, the museum reacted by pasting white paper over both works. Farcically perhaps, this censoring layer was then torn away to leave an even stronger image of the unveiling nature of Manet-PROJEKT '74 . Buren also attached a poster declaring 'Art Remains Politics', referring to the exhibition subtitle, 'Art Remains Art' ('Kunst bleibt Kunst', by Goethe, reused by Haacke in a later work on the demolished Berlin Wall) and containing quotations from his own writing translated into four languages for the audience.
²³ As a student in NCAD in the mid-80s I remember Haacke's work being disparaged by certain staff as visually ugly, boring, emotionless.
²⁴ Quoted in Gregory Sholette, News From Nowhere: Activist Art and After , Third Text, No. 45, Winter 1998-1999, p. 50. As Sholette comments in his article, "Defining what did lie beyond the art's 'intrinsic nature' was to become the central question for a new generation of activist artists."
²⁵ Shapolsky et al Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 was finally shown in New York at the New Museum in 1986-7.
²⁶ For an extended discussion of Shapolsky et al see Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics , Cambridge MIT Press, 19996, 159-195.
²⁷ Benjamin Buchloh, "Hans Haacke: The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment" in "Obra Social" Hans Haacke , Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, 1995, p. 52.
²⁸ Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, New York: Schocken Books, 1968, p. 256 .
²⁹ A temporary recreation of a Nazi memorial in the town square to the failed putsch in Vienna in 1934. Exhibition: Points of reference 38/88, a site-specific public art show curated by Werner Fenz, see Obra Social Hans Haacke, Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1995, pp. 45-49.
³⁰ Andrea Fraser, in Serving Audiences Iwona Blazwick, Susan Cahan, Andrea Fraser in conversation , October, No. 80, Spring 1997, p. 136.
³¹ Ibid., 136.
³² Pierre Bourdieu and Hans Haacke, op.cit., p. 91. Also worth mentioning is that the second of Haacke's three pieces to be excluded from the famous Guggenheim show in 1971 was to take the form of audience questionnaires, though this work was not cited by Messer in reaching his decision to cancel the show; see Deutsche op. cit., p. 168.
³³ Theodore Adorno, Commitment , in Aesthetics and Politics, Ernst Bloch et al. (eds.), London: NLB, 1977, p. 191. Or as Orla Ryan has commented in CIRCA 89 of Thomas Hirschorn's work: "an art practice that offers a constant reiteration of the already known as a means of 'showing what's really going on' is arguably the most acceptable one to an art cultural elite hungry for the 'political' as style because it is so successfully ineffectual." See Meaningful Instances and Laguna Lacunae in CIRCA, No. 89, Autumn 1999, p. 18.
³⁴ Deutsche, op. cit., p. 162.
³⁵ The story is recounted by Adorno, op. cit., p. 190.