Vintage Haacke @ Paula Cooper / JAM @ MoMA
Two consequential exhibitions take me back to my first years in NYC
Be certain to stop by the 521 West 21st Street branch of the Paula Cooper Gallery before February 25 to see an essential selection of Hans Haacke’s works from between 1975 and 1985 including his breakthrough pieces “On Social Grease,” and the still remarkable provenance tracing of Seurat’s small version of “Les Poseuses” (both 1975). Also on display is the surprisingly traditional, or perhaps I should call it “conceptual” oil painting of Margaret Thatcher that gives the exhibition its title, “Taking Stock.” I mentioned Haacke’s canvas (unfinished, 1983-84) a couple months ago in an earlier blog post about Rick Lowe (found here). The real subject of his painting is the Saatchi brothers, who helped propel the “Iron Lady” to power in 1979. Implanted about the canvas is a prodigious amount of information about their their global corporate clients and they many prominent public art institutions they connect with, all presented in plain view along the spines of meticulously rendered books and several fallen documents resting at Maggie’s faux-regal feet. A conceptual painting it is.
This period of the artists’ long career (excellently documented in the book Framing and Being Framed) also intersects with my own studies under Haacke at The Cooper Union between 1977 and 1979, and I remember the fabrication of several of these works taking place in the school’s massive woodshop. And since I enrolled as a sculpture student, Haacke was my professor as one of a few faculty in this area of concentration. However, even before moving to Manhattan’s Lower East Side I encountered his early environmental systems pieces through my Bucks County Community College art professor, Charlotte Schatz in Pennsylvania. My own interest in natural science immediately drew me to Haacke’s art from the late 1960s and early 1970s that visually explored natural systems such as wind, ice, light, and even live animals and growing plant. But after leaving the suburbs of Philadelphia for NYC, I was abruptly brought up to date about the direction Haacke’s practice had towards in a decidedly political direction. It was both a shock and a revelation.
Despite having been a vocal opponent of the US war in Southeast Asia, and prepared to self-exile in Canada when the draft ended just prior to my 18th birthday, my initial response was conceptual confusion. The art I was making at the time was anything but “political.” I recall one day during sculpture class when I asked Hans why he does not simply become a journalist if he hopes to bring about actual social change? He responded calmly by describing my assessment of art’s social impact as far too mechanistic. It was also during Haacke’s class that students were provided a reading list of critical theory that included the writings of Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Walter Benjamin, and Roland Barthes among others. Gradually, I not only began to see in Haacke's work a way that my own political activism could intersect in my practice, but began the study of critical theory in earnest.
Two pieces using a plastic vacuum-forming technique produced during this same timeframe capture my shift towards political art most clearly: “Art of the Pentagon” (1979-1980), and “The Citi Never Sleeps, but Your Neighborhood May Be Put To Rest” (1979).
The first work, “Art of the Pentagon,” focused on the horrors of a potential nuclear weapons blast on the human body. It’s explicit approach was inspired by Peter Watkin’s 1965 pseudo-documentary film The War Game. After graduating from Cooper, Lucy Lippard selected “Art of the Pentagon” for the windows of Printed Matter Books, then on Lispenard Street. The second, piece “The Citi Never Sleeps, but Your Neighborhood May Be Put To Rest,” visually riffed-off-of Citibank’s 1979 slogan touting their brand new, 24 hour ATM banking system. But what my version presented was data about the mebabank’s corporate funding of the racist apartheid regime in South Africa all the while defunding poor black and brown people’s neighborhoods here in NYC through the practice of redlining. A decade later, Martha Rosler included this piece in her exhibition “If You Lived Here” at the Did Art Foundation in SoHO (high on the wall on the left).
But in 1979, I also transformed the plastic version The Citi Never Sleeps, But... (originally intended for the street) into an inexpensive photocopied booklet. I then “shop-dropped” these in various locations including a display of artists’ books organized by Martha Wilson for the Citibank headquarters near Wall Street. The work was also selected by ultra-Left Madame Binh Graphics Collective (MBGC) for a 1980 auction at Just Above Midtown gallery. The money being raises was for a women’s center in what was about to become Zimbabwe (formerly the white colonial settler nation of Rhodesia). Although this temporary event is not featured in the current MoMA exhibition Just Above Midtown: 1974 to the Present, I recommend catching this show that pivots on JAM founder and director Linda Goode Bryant before it closes on February 18th. But this JAM story footnote unfolded into a curious event as I recounted in my afterword to former MBGC member Mary Patten’s book Revolution as Eternal Dream: The Exemplary Failure of the Badam Binh Graphics Collective (Half Later Press: 2011)
Chortling by the auctioneer and some audience members was unsettling, revealing a split within the cultural Left.
What I remember most about that evening was the auctioneer trying to make sense of Carl Andre’s sculpture that consisted of nine small, thin metal squares packed inside a cigarette pack sized box. The pieces could be arranged into a miniature version of the famed minimalist full-size, floor-tile like works. In fact, the auctioneer was instructed to assemble Andre’s work at the start of the bid as a demonstration of what was being sold on the block. But as he completed this task, the auctioneer, with exaggerated embellishment, cleared his throat, inciting ripples of half-suppressed laughter around the gallery. For me, Andre was a significant figure in the art scene that I was becoming familiar with at the time. More than that, I knew his politics were aligned with those of MBGC’s JAM event, given he was once a member of the Art Workers’ Coalition, along with Hans Haacke and Lucy Lippard among many others. Therefore the chortling of some audience members and the auctioneer was unsettling, but it also revealed a clear cultural disconnect between the Left cultural position I identified with, let’s call it an academically informed perspective, and one held by social activists who preferred their art straight up with no chaser, such as the social realist paintings of Raphael Soyer, or maybe the expressionist works of Reuben Kadish, both included in the MBGC JAM auction.
Ultimately, as Mary Patten recollects, Andre’s miniature sculpture went unsold that evening and later vanished from the collective’s Brooklyn print workshop, years before it was raided by the NYPD over possible links to the Black Liberation Army. (Another story for another blog).
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