Hans Haacke: A look at political art at its finest

Hans Haacke was born in Cologne in 1936 and lives there part-time, but since 1962 he has also had a well-used permanent residence in New York.

Haacke is among the crème de la crème of internationally renowned conceptual artists . The artist, who is as insightful as he is unsettling in his criticism of democratic absurdities, has frequently caused a stir throughout his career; almost always it was the political aspects of his work that caused the unrest.

Hans Haacke currently ranks 215th in the world ranking of art , but only achieved this illustrious rank as a result of the exhibitions and public honors surrounding his 75th birthday.

As recently as 2005, he was ranked some 350 places lower, "a bit behind" considering the artist's long and prolific career and his consistently attention-grabbing art. A look at Hans Haacke's not always subtly restrained art suggests that his critical political engagement plays a significant role in his success

Art by Hans Haacke

Haacke addressed systems and processes in his earliest works as a conceptual artist; as a young artist, he initially devoted himself to interactions of physical and biological systems, “installing” animals and plants, water and wind.

The “Condensation Cube” (condensation cube), made of plexiglass with water, 76 x 76 x 76 cm, was created in 1965: Open image from Flickr .

An approximation of nature's endless water cycle, which continues unabated even when sealed in plexiglass . An approximation, too, of the art's viewer, as the condensation cube reacts to light, air currents, and temperature. It even reacts to body temperature; after all, the body of a single person emits around 100 watts (regardless of power consumption).

For comparison: Radiators in houses with normal insulation according to today's standards are designed for an output of 100 watts per square meter. The more visitors, the warmer the museum and thus also the interior of the cube (if the museum's building technicians have been instructed to switch off temperature-compensating heating thermostats) – the more evaporation, condensation, and precipitation occur in the "Condensation Cube".

This is supposed to be art? Your physics teacher explained the water cycle to you? Yes, indeed, the “Condensation Cube” is art simply because Hans Haacke created it as art; however, its recognition as a work of art is hardly controversial because it undeniably possesses an aesthetic, mysterious, and artistic aura.

Turning a physical natural phenomenon into art fits with Hans Haacke's conception of art, who later expressed himself as follows:

“I believe that a rational, almost positivist approach can actually be taken to a point where it blossoms into something very poetic, weightless, and irrational.” ( postwar.hausderkunst.de/ ).

But that wasn't Haacke's only intention. With the Cube, he also wanted to shake up the usual practices in the world of art presentation: The museum visitor, who observes and thereby influences the physical phenomenon, becomes a cultural phenomenon along with the art.

The constantly changing condensation cube is one of the first works of art that do not wait statically for the visitor's gaze like normal, conservative sculpture, but involve the visitor, stimulate his senses, and make him curious through transformation.

Art that involves the visitor developed “in all directions” in the 1960s: as Cybernetic Art, Process Art, Conceptual Art , Systems Art or Systemic Art (closely related to, emerging from, overlapping with Anti-Form Movement, Generative Systems, Systems Aesthetic, Systemic Painting and Systems Sculptures ).

Some of these art styles play with the material , the idea of ​​art and/or the viewer ( conceptual art , the process art that emerged from performance art), while others are limited to a technical but completely new approach to the material (kinetic art, which for many found its pinnacle in the friendly hell machines of Jean Tinguely).

The “Condensation Cube” has become so famous that it was resurrected Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona

Haacke is one of the conceptual artists who have ambitious plans for materials and the viewer of art, but his idea of ​​art was to develop in a crucial way: The critical interest shown early on in the conditions under which art is produced and exhibited was not limited to art, but he soon turned his attention to society as a whole and thus to politics and its critique.

Before that, Haacke experimented a bit with some approaches in the direction of “Land Art .” In “Land Art,” the landscape becomes art , as in Haacke’s “Grass Grows” (1967–1969, open image of Grass Grows ), but with his indoor-growing grass mound, Haacke hadn’t quite left civilization behind…

Other Land Art artists enter into a somewhat deeper contact with nature; Andy Goldsworthy, for example, brings branches and pebbles in the riverbed into order ( kurzelinks.de/h38x ), brings the stars out of the ice ( open image ) and makes trees' feet warm ( open image ).

Hans Haacke quickly returned to the city full-time and just as quickly turned his attention to politics and society, initially through a critical examination of economics, politics, and art .

In 1971, a solo exhibition dedicated to Hans Haacke was scheduled to take place at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York . Hans Haacke presented the installation “Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971,” in which he addressed real estate ownership and speculation by one of the most important players in New York.

The work, in a meticulous, photographic documentation, reveals the questionable transactions surrounding Harry Shapolsky's real estate company between 1951 and 1971. Haacke also addresses the recurring speculations about the involvement of individual trustees of the Guggenheim Museum in the documented real estate deals.

Six weeks before the opening, the exhibition was cancelled by the then director of the Guggenheim Museum because the installation presented by Haacke was not appropriate art for the Guggenheim Museum; it was a social study and a clear statement by the artist and not “neutral art”.

Neutral art? With this statement, the director of one of the world's most important museums made his position clear regarding artistic freedom and freedom of expression; Haacke's scorned work became an icon of political conceptual art and a historical landmark , which, for example, was exhibited again in 2007 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Here is a partial view of the installation at that exhibition: Open image .

Edward F. Fry, the curator of the exhibition, sided with Haacke and was dismissed; director Thomas M. Messer remained director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation until 1988.

After the trouble with the Guggenheim and New York, Haacke turned to Europe and his home country of Germany, where his work was accepted more and more frequently.

But here, too, the artist caused controversy: In 1974, Haacke documented the provenance of Édouard Manet 's "Asparagus Still Life" . This included its purchase for the Cologne collection, which was initiated by the then chairman of the sponsoring association, and the role of this chairman (Hermann Josef Abs) in the Third Reich.

In the late 1980s, Hans Haacke expanded his range once again; he began with large sculptural installations and increasingly worked in the field of painting .

What also didn't remain peaceful for long: In 1990, Haacke painted "Cowboy with Cigarette" with charcoal and ink on pastel paper (open image ). The transformation of a classic Picasso into a cigarette advertisement was Haacke's reaction to the financial support of the Cubism exhibition "Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism" at MoMA by the tobacco company Philip Morris and stirred up some unrest.

In 1990, even in the newly reunified Germany, things were heating up. Hans Haacke captured the zeitgeist and the leading protagonists of the reunification in the multiple “Silberblick” : A photographic portrait of Helmut Kohl with 1 DM and 2 East German marks on his glasses and the perfectly matching “chubby grin” on his lips: Open image .

A work of art that still offends many Germans today, regardless of their roots in East or West; especially when they think about how “fiduciarily” some Treuhand employees did their job and that most perpetrators went unpunished or were not even charged (documentary “Gold Rush – The History of the Treuhand”, last broadcast on October 6, 2016 on SWR).

In 1993, Haacke presented the installation "Germania" in the German Pavilion at the 45th Venice Biennale . The installation precisely recreates the atmosphere of Hitler's horrific architecture: [open image] and was intended to remind visitors of the Biennale's roots in the cultural policies of fascist Italy.

Haacke had broken up the marble floor of the German pavilion in the Giardini of Venice, which had been designed by the Nazis, and left it as shown in the photo… Haacke (together with Nam June Paik) was awarded the Golden Lion .

In 2000, Hans Haacke's art project "To the Population" installed in the German Reichstag building. Since then, a box has stood in the northern atrium, into which members of the Bundestag filled soil from their constituencies, and now various plants sprout from randomly landed seeds.

In the center of the box, the inscription "DER BEPÖKKERUNG" (To the Population) shines, visible from all floors of the Bundestag. Hans Haacke is referring here to the famous inscription "DEM DEUTSCHEN VOLKE" (To the German People) on the Reichstag.

Haacke clarifies the difference in meaning between Volk and Bevölkerung: The “Volk”, actually no longer just the state people made up of all state citizens, last appeared in Germany as a national community by thoughtlessly and mercilessly committing crimes for a self-appointed leader.

Germans with both intellect and compassion have long recognized the horror within the German people, and will continue to do so. Hans Haacke, for example, was inspired by a quote from Brecht: “Whoever in our time says ‘population’ instead of ‘people’ […] already rejects many lies.”

Because they recognize the true intention of politicians who – present on all channels – invoke the German people, instead of solving the problems of the German population through painstaking, unspectacular, and meticulous work, as most politicians do.

Even if the intention is to conceal their own lies, their inability to solve any problems, through the invention of a "lying press." Whenever things get a little complicated, lies simply stand in the way of simple solutions, and politicians of this ilk wouldn't know writers like Bertolt Brecht anyway; their writing is too complex for them.

The most beautiful photo of the art project was taken by Markus Tressel, a Green Party member of the Bundestag from Saarland. On the project's website, derbevoelkerung.de, you can view the artwork's daily appearance; at the time of writing (November 2016), this included nearly 12,000 images (the webcam installed in the Reichstag courtyard takes a picture daily at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m.).

In 2006, for the work “Kein schöner Land. Weil sie nicht deutsch gesehenen” (No beautiful country. Because they didn't look German), the windows of the facade of the Academy of Arts in Berlin temporarily covered with posters depicting the fates of the 46 victims of right-wing extremist, violent xenophobia in the Federal Republic of Germany since 1990: kurzelinks.de/8fp3 .

"Gift Horse" stood on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, London. You can learn more about the Fourth Plinth in the article "Munich invites you on an art walk: 'A Space Called Public – Hopefully Public'" . The "Gift Horse" references aristocratic equestrian statues; the "nation's horse artist," can also be seen right next door in the National Gallery.

Haacke's bronze horse, however, has already wasted away to a skeleton because today's high-ranking gentlemen have no interest in real life with horses, dogs and people, but only eyes for the live ticker with the stock prices (which the "Gift Horse" therefore also wears draped around its foreleg like a "gift ribbon").

Nevertheless, a work of unconditional aesthetics; and if the press criticizes Hans Haacke's warning against the overpowering influence of money in London for lacking bite, the respective author could have contributed a suggestion on how to loudly proclaim to the world how to better correct recognizable lies by populists with minimal effort.

Should the truth have been shouted even louder? Perhaps, just perhaps, the British would have avoided Brexit (which is currently being commented "Really Good" open image ).

And perhaps Hans Haacke is already working on a sufficiently biting sculpture of the new American hero – who, in reality, is not the hero of many Americans. The true supporters of this ideologically driven revival of the Manchester capitalist, limited to a defiant counter-movement, are the white industrial proletariat left behind by the brave new world of work, uninterested men of advanced age who can neither muster the energy for reorientation nor for networking and advocacy for their own interests.

These are just a few tragic figures; the rest simply installed a non-politician in front of the dysfunctional political establishment, instead of acting as democratic citizens and ensuring that the political establishment functions properly again. Just like the British, who "simply" turned their backs on the EU out of anger at their own government, with already noticeable disastrous consequences, especially for the most vocal segments of the population.

It would be about as logical and efficient to replace the high-performance drivers at the next Formula 1 World Championship with the "better-driving and more knowledgeable" spectators in the front rows. It would probably be similarly dangerous: the probability of novice drivers crashing 900-horsepower cars into the stands is just as calculable as the probability of a government assembled by a political novice driving the USA into the ground.

The new leading figure of the Americans believes in human selective breeding through the mating of “suitable specimens” and counts himself among the “quality people worthy of breeding”, with five proven successes.

This fact alone provides enough material for biting art; further ideas could be generated by the initials reminiscent of Stephen King's "Dark Tower" series – after all, the fantasy saga deals with precisely the post-apocalyptic world into which America could mutate through this election (the bit about breeding is not a joke, but can be read, for example, in Deutschlandfunk Kultur: Who votes for Donald Trump – and why? ).

Hans Haacke's path to art

Hans Haacke studied art from 1956 to 1960 at the State Academy of Fine Arts Kassel (from 1960 State Academy of Fine Arts Kassel).

After passing the first state examination, he received a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service in Paris in 1960.

From 1961 to 1962, Haacke studied as a Fulbright scholar at the Tyler School of Art of Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

The American Fulbright Program has been awarding scholarships for study, research, and teaching in the USA since 1946. Its origins lie in the initiative of US Senator James William Fulbright, who had studied in Great Britain before 1945 on a Rhodes Scholarship and, after World War II, wanted to promote understanding between the USA and other nations through academic and cultural exchange; initial funding came from the sale of surplus US war materiel.

The Fulbright program has become one of the most prestigious scholarship programs worldwide; since its inception, it has supported over 318,000 scholarship recipients globally, with outstanding achievements: 10 Fulbright alumni have been elected to the US Congress, 31 have become heads of government or state, and 20 have become foreign ministers of their home countries.

54 Fulbright alumni from 14 countries received the Nobel Prize and 82 the Pulitzer Prize; Fulbright alumni Javier Solana became Secretary General of NATO and Fulbright alumni Boutros Boutros-Ghali became Secretary-General of the United Nations.

More than 180 countries worldwide are now parties to the US Fulbright Program, and currently, with approximately 8,000 scholarship recipients per year, more people than ever before are being supported. The Fulbright Program is governed by a multitude of bilateral treaties and agreements, proving for a remarkable 70 years that mutually beneficial agreements with the US are indeed possible.

Trade agreements like TTIP , commonplace between states for centuries, could certainly benefit the European signatories as well. As this article is written, TTIP is dying under the scrutiny of outraged citizens, primarily from Germany. The prevailing sentiment in almost every media report on TTIP's fate is: "Now we've really given it to those chlorinated chicken eaters!"

A closer examination of TTIP might have revealed less blatant attempts at exploitation by the US negotiating partners than the disgruntled citizens feared… and this anger of European/German citizens should perhaps have been directed first and foremost at their own elected representatives involved in the negotiations, and not at the contracting partner: The democratic shortcomings identified so far currently affect “Good Old Europe” (Germany to a considerable extent) and not the US side:

The European Commission negotiated secretly with the US Department of Commerce on behalf of Germany as well; our elected representatives were allowed to read the complicated legal texts of several thousand pages in a special reading room, without the possibility of copying them (this is an insult, not information); and the public (including the media) was not supposed to see the text of the agreement until after the negotiations had ended.

Meanwhile, the European Commission had finally agreed to be somewhat more transparent; in October 2015, Bundestag President Norbert Lammert, together with EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, officially demanded that every EU member state be granted access to the negotiating documents and made approval of TTIP contingent on this transparency; numerous TTIP texts were published via TTIP Leaks (Greenpeace: Trade Leaks by Greenpeace ) – all too late, the TTIP negotiations were suspended until after the presidential elections and, with the new presidential success in America, are now most likely dead for at least two years.

This is certainly a good thing with regard to the secret negotiations; in two years, even the last politician should have realized that secret knowledge of power can no longer be kept secret in the internet age.

The work of Hans Haacke has contributed to the fact that citizens living in their country and not against their country are now decisively demanding transparency about how they are governed… if we get on the right track and don't let right-wing populists lead the world back to outdated stages of civilization, which in extreme cases could degenerate into bombing back to pre-civilizational times.

Returning to Hans Haacke and his education: In 1973, Hans Haacke, who was already living in the USA at the time, received a second scholarship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, which gave him the opportunity to work completely freely as an artist for a period of time.

Haacke and Haacke art in public appearances

Haacke's first group exhibitions took place in 1962 at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (“NUL”), in 1963 at the Halfmannshof artists' colony in Gelsenkirchen, and in 1964 at the New Vision Centre in London. The 1963 and 1964 exhibitions already focused on the work of the Düsseldorf artists' group ZERO, in which Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, and Günther Uecker sought to liberate postwar art from its “excess of ballast.”

With ZERO , Hans Haacke embarked on his first tour of the international art world in 1964/1965, from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia to the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, Washington D.C., and then to Italy: Venice, Turin, Rome, and Brescia. His first solo exhibition , “Hans Haacke. Wind and Water,” at the Schmela Gallery in Düsseldorf, followed immediately in 1965.

In 1978, a solo exhibition of Haacke's work held at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford (featuring "A Breed Apart," documenta in Kassel in 1972 (Documenta 5), ​​1982 (Documenta 7), and 1987 (Documenta 8) .

In 1993, Haacke, together with Nam June Paik, Germany at the Venice Biennale; in 1984, he participated in the exhibition “From Here – Two Months of New German Art” in Düsseldorf; in 1988, he exhibited at the Tate Gallery in London (including the Thatcher portrait “Taking Stock,” with Maurice and Charles Saatchi , art patrons and political power brokers of Thatcher and the South African Prime Minister PW Botha, not exactly known for his delicate sensibilities), grinning on the small plates in the background; and in 2012, the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid honored him with a comprehensive retrospective.

Overall, Hans Haacke had 50 years of exhibition history behind him at this time, with around 30 solo exhibitions and around 350 group exhibitions.

That's a bit meager, considering Haacke's standing in the world's best art list. This world art ranking is compiled by Artfacts.Net Ltd .; an artist's public presence is evaluated using computer technology and thus remains free from the potentially biased judgments of art historians.

This approach seemed appropriate to the author within the framework of her aim for the most objective possible reporting; it would certainly also appeal to the democratically committed Hans Haacke.

Jackson Pollock (rank 212, around 550 exhibitions), Jean Michel Basquiat (rank 216, around 470 exhibitions) and the young Romanian artist Mircea Cantor (rank 217, around 300 exhibitions since 2000) are on the same level as Haacke (rank 215)

Emil Nolde 1867-1956 (ranked 213, around 700 exhibitions), Edgar Degas 1834-1917 (ranked 214, around 600 exhibitions) and Claude Monet 1840-1926 (ranked 218, around 600 exhibitions) stand out even more clearly, however, six decades to almost a century of post-human exhibition history are included in the comparison.

Be that as it may, it is noticeable. It is fitting that Hans Haacke has received only very limited recognition from the German state (2004 Peter Weiss Prize of the City of Bochum, 2006 Roland Prize of the Bremen Sculpture Prize Foundation for Art in Public Space); Wolf Vostell, ranked 20 places behind him, has, for example, received three times as many German awards.

However, the question of how much Hans Haacke's significantly lower exhibition presence/frequency of awards compared to artists of similar prominence has to do with the fact that new political inconveniences are to be expected from him with every new exhibition will hardly be clarifiable.

But “asking questions” is the beginning of every political decision-making process, and Hans Haacke’s questions continue to be asked. His exhibition history continues precisely in these exhibitions, both those already underway and those planned for the near future:

• Until January 8, 2017: “We call it Ludwig. The museum turns 40!”, Museum Ludwig Cologne
• from June 1st, 2017: “Macba Collection 31”, Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona
• From June 2, 2017: “Serial Formations. Frankfurt 1967 – Re-staging of the first German exhibition of international minimalist art”, Daimler Contemporary Berlin

Many more exhibitions featuring the art of Hans Haacke are certainly to be expected in the future. Provided, of course, that those individuals who refuse political participation, but then want right-wing populists to fix the resulting negative changes in their lives (who, as historical experience should have taught the Germans all too well, will be damned if they do), do not achieve further success.

They could seriously jeopardize our freedom and thus also the freedom of art; art exhibitions (especially with politically critical artists) would then be quickly and comprehensively restricted along with other civil liberties.

Works by Hans Haacke are (still) permanently available for viewing in the following 22 public collections, and are affordable for every citizen:

• Belgium : Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (SMAK), Ghent
• Germany : Reinking Collection Hamburg, Museum of Contemporary Art Siegen
• France : FRAC Bourgogne Dijon, FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais Dunkerque, Institut d'art contemporain Rhône-Alpes Villeurbanne
• Canada : National Gallery of Canada – Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, Ottawa, ON
• Croatia : Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb (MSU), Zagreb
• Austria : Museum of Modern Art, Salzburg
• Spain : Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona
• Sweden : Moderna Museet, Stockholm
• Switzerland : Photo Museum Winterthur
• United Kingdom : Tate Liverpool, Tate Britain London
• USA : List Visual Arts Center Cambridge MA, Los Angeles County Museum of Art CA, MOCA Grand Avenue Los Angeles CA, Museum of Modern Art + New Museum New York City NY, Allen Memorial Art Museum Oberlin OH, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art San Francisco CA, Broad Contemporary Art Museum Santa Monica CA

Hans Haacke's work – hopefully continues to have an impact

Through his work, the artist Hans Haacke provides us with inspiration and warnings for the future in several respects:

1. Scholarly knowledge of art

Hans Haacke began passing on his knowledge to the next generations at an early age. Between 1967 and 2002, Haacke was a professor of art at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City.

The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art is a privately run college in Lower Manhattan, New York City, founded in 1859. The Cooper Union is one of the few institutions of higher learning in the United States that offers tuition-free education.

By selecting applicants strictly based on talent, regardless of social background, and financed by donations from sponsors, Cooper Union has helped many graduates achieve success whose personal situation could not exactly be described as conducive to upward mobility:

For example, Emil Berliner (inventor of the gramophone), Thomas Alva Edison (inventor of, among other things, the light bulb), Bob Kane (creator and illustrator of Batman), Lee Krasner (famous American painter and collage artist and wife of “Action Painter” Jackson Pollock ), Daniel Libeskind (architect of, for example, the Memory Foundation, the master plan for the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site, and the Jewish Museum Berlin), Mike Mills (director of, for example, “Thumbsucker”, nominated for the Golden Bear at the 2005 Berlinale and the Grand Jury Prize at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, and “Beginners”, Gotham Award 2011, Oscar + Golden Globe Award for Christopher Plummer as best supporting actor 2012) and George Segal (American artist, who became known primarily for plaster figures) owe their careers to Cooper Union.

It can be assumed that Hans Haacke, who was interested in equal rights for all people, did not choose the Cooper Union for his teaching position by chance.

2. Point for discussion: Image rights on the internet

One of the first disputes over image rights on the internet was sparked by a work of art by Hans Haacke.

In August 2006, Haacke prohibited a blogger from displaying parts of the artwork on her website. A number of outraged citizens refused to grant the artist this claim to his copyright, arguing that the art project had been funded with public money. An interesting perspective, for example, would be free harvesting on any field for which a farmer receives subsidies.

Because the blogger only wanted to use the image of the copyrighted work on a private, non-commercial website. Aside from the fact that one could doubt the private, non-commercial intentions when, as in this case, it is the clearly political website of someone who has earned their living in politics for many years, this is also a highly interesting perspective: Ultimately, it means that every non-commercial individual can freely dispose of the value created by their fellow citizens; I don't think even Marx conceived of communism that broadly.

Because a corresponding sign was missing from the artwork; “If artists do not wish for photos of certain artworks to be published on the internet, this should also be clearly and unambiguously communicated ,” the politically active blogger, who is therefore actually familiar with the German legal system, is said to have objected.

Now the author finally understands the many signs that adorned supermarket shelves years ago (in illegibly small print): “We retailers do not wish for goods to be taken by customers without payment, and communicate this clearly and unambiguously ,” they probably said…

3. Mindfulness, long before it became a trend

Hans Haacke teaches us to perceive the world attentively, down to its smallest manifestations.

He practiced mindfulness in the conception and creation of his art and showed an interest in sustainability; decades before these terms became buzzwords of a society drowning in consumerism.

Hans Haacke's initially free and experimental, and then precise, scientific approach to the artistic process can serve as a much better model for us today than it did during most of the time when Haacke produced his art.

Until quite recently, Hans Haacke had to visit a library or find and pay a (possibly expensive) expert every time he wanted to delve deeper into a topic; all people who wanted to examine their world closely (whether inspired by Haacke or otherwise) had to contend with the same, infinitely time-consuming difficulty.

Today, all you need is an internet connection and enough education to distinguish sound information from mindless drivel. You can acquire this education online; you just have to stay away from strategically operating "dumbing-down" tactics that defame the difficult work of professional information providers as "fake news" so that their ignorant followers never become any wiser.

4. Democrats fight for democracy

Hans Haacke also teaches us what consequences inevitably arise from this attentive observation: Looking closely also means questioning; those who look closely notice where things are wrong; the foremost duty of the citizen in a democratic system is to take action against the apparent shortcomings of our democracy – and to do so before the individual citizen suffers from these shortcomings themselves. This is something that is sorely lacking at the moment; contemporary German society is "losing" citizens in a wide variety of areas

The number of people living (and dying) unprotected on Germany's streets is nearing one million. This number is too high, and many of these "bums" and "vagrants" are alcoholics or, for other reasons, simply refuse therapy or rehabilitation

Oh yes, there are very different figures (significantly, there are no official federal statistics), but even the lowest estimates run into the hundreds of thousands. And yes, there are severe alcoholics among the homeless – but this argument is of little use, because civilized societies don't let them die on the streets, but rather treat their illness.

There are also homeless people who, for other reasons, do not want to be treated or resocialized; if you look at this whole area more closely, you will find bureaucratic aid concepts and services that fail in practice, refusal to work and abuse of office, and a whole range of crimes that are not prosecuted by the state (against the homeless, not by them).

That was just one area; in Germany, tens of thousands of people also die every year from hospital germs, drug interactions, and medical errors because those working in the medical field – doctors, nurses, staff in administration, organization, and hygiene – are prevented from doing their jobs professionally and properly by profit-maximizing business leaders.

Job centers create frustration but no jobs; insurance companies prefer to collect money more often than they fulfill their obligations; courts end peaceful lives en masse (e.g., by taking children away or causing economic ruin through questionable expert opinions); and when the misconduct of state economic representatives touches upon criminal law, German public prosecutors remain conspicuously silent.

Did you know that Germany only ratified the 2005 UN Convention against Corruption

We only ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities of 2006 in February 2009, significantly later than the poorest countries such as Guinea, Kenya, Lesotho, Mali, Niger, Rwanda and Uganda, which the UN Human Development Index certifies as having “low human development”..

Things certainly weren't all better in the past. Thanks to the internet, a quantum leap in information dissemination, we simply learn much more precisely what is wrong and where; in all the areas just mentioned, there are already initial corrections or positive developments, BUT: The worst thing about the current negative developments is that many of those (not yet) affected simply suppress the perception of these detrimental trends.

It's convenient to blame the victims who have been robbed of their livelihood, health, and housing; after all, everyone else is acting so much smarter... we've been down this road before; back then, these people were called "followers." This is a boon for overworked civil servants who would otherwise have to fight for decent working conditions themselves; and a boon for uninhibited neoliberals, who thus have plenty of affluent opportunists left to exploit.

Others rebel, but actually manage to elect right-wing populists as their leaders, from whom not only negative effects on existence/health/housing can be expected; this is defiant flight and refusal to cooperate with the state in which these protesters live.

All of this creates an uneasy feeling, a kind of pervasive, off-key atmosphere that has settled About us the country. This will only change if more citizens decide to participate in democracy. The opportunities for this have never been better: since the arrival of the first refugees, incredible numbers of citizens have demonstrated what they can achieve independently, without the state; conceptually, it is only the logical next step to establish a state in which the entire government works for the benefit of society…

Simply accepting the facts is helpful in combating the diffuse, intangibly threatening atmosphere. Anyone who clearly understands that in a truly civilized country, not a single person dies on the street, from hospital germs or incorrect treatment, or is dispossessed, imprisoned, or robbed of their family without cause by the courts, will sooner or later be among those who feel capable of actively and critically participating in government.

What we can do today, unlike Haacke, is network, join forces, and form ever larger communities in more and more areas that work to correct the obvious deficiencies in democracy.

Let us hope for Hans Haacke, who turned 80 in 2016 (and who lamented the currently difficult conditions for provocative political art on the occasion of his birthday), that he will also live to see his 90th birthday and be able to see that the German citizens have reclaimed their state and their democracy.

Hans Haacke, short biography

• August 12, 1936 Hans Haacke is born in Cologne
• 1956 to 1960 Studies at the State Academy of Fine Arts Kassel
• 1960 Scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service in Paris
• 1961 to 1962 Fulbright Scholarship, Tyler School of Art, Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
• From 1967 to 2002, Haacke taught as a professor of art at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City
• In 1972, Haacke participated in Documenta 5 in Kassel
• In 1982, Haacke participated in Documenta 7 in Kassel
• In 1987, Haacke participated in Documenta 8 in Kassel
• In 1993, Haacke shared the Golden Lion with Nam June Paik for the design of the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale
• In 1998, the Bauhaus University Weimar awarded Hans Haacke an honorary doctorate
• The art project “To the Population” was created in the German Reichstag building in 1999
• In 2004, Haacke received the Peter Weiss Prize from the city of Bochum
• In 2006, Haacke was awarded the Roland Prize for Art in Public Spaces
• In 2012, the Museo Reina Sofía Madrid honored Haacke with a comprehensive retrospective
• From March 2015 to September 2016, Haacke adorned the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square with his “Gift Horse” sculpture