ART REVIEW : BLENDING OF ART AND POLITICS IS OFTEN UNSETTLING

Hans Haacke is a private investigator, a public instigator, a demystifier--all in the service of his art. Bypassing the artist’s traditional tools of metaphor, symbolism and allegory, he creates works that name names and point fingers.

Haacke’s target is the “consciousness industry,” the confluence of political, economic and institutional forces that mold and channel public opinion. A dozen of his works dealing with this and related themes will be on view today through Sept. 27 at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art.

The show, titled “Unfinished Business,” was organized by the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York and spans 16 years of Haacke’s work, beginning with the controversial “Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971.” Using maps, charts, photographs and data sheets, Haacke documented the shady deals and slumlord practices of a New York real estate group. Made for a one-person show at the Guggenheim Museum, this piece and two others provoked a last-minute cancellation of the show by museum director Thomas Messer, who explained that including it would have involved the museum in “extra-artistic” issues.

Haacke claimed “ideological censorship” and has continued making art that recognizes no border between the artistic and the extra-artistic. He said in a recent interview in La Jolla that art has dealt with “religious issues, sometimes philosophical ones, other times power politics, building up the reputation of a particular class and so forth. It was almost anything, if you look at the history, so why shouldn’t it continue that way?”

The idea of art as pure and removed from ideological conflict is very new, he said. “A little bit of it may have been inspired by the ideas that surfaced in the art-for-art’s-sake movement of the 19th Century. But what played a much greater role more recently is the formalist agenda of Clement Greenberg,” he added. Critic Greenberg stressed the primacy of form over content in post-war American painting.

Haacke believes that such doctrine isolates art and perpetuates the myth that the art museum is a serene temple untouched by politics. By regarding museums as an integral part of the consciousness industry, Haacke challenges this presumed sanctity. His art aims to expose the museum’s firm entrenchment in a political, social and economic web.

Much of Haacke’s work focuses attention on the corporations that, since the late 1960s, have become major sponsors of museum exhibitions. This practice, he believes, projects a positive image for the corporation, but covers up and distracts from the reality of its own policies and activities.

“MetroMobiltan” (1985), a wall-sized reconstruction of the Metropolitan Museum’s imposing facade, exemplifies Haacke’s approach to this issue of corporate charades. On one of its three promotional banners, he has placed an image from a Mobil-sponsored exhibit of Nigerian art. Flanking this image are statements from Mobil justifying its sales of supplies to the South African police and military. Behind and partially concealed by the banners hangs an enlarged photograph of a funeral procession for black victims shot by the South African police.

In this, as in all of his work, Haacke lays out facts and evidence that must be read between the lines. “I don’t want to come off and tell everybody what to think,” he said. “They should have the experience of being confronted with certain types of information, and draw their own conclusions from it.”

In another work in the show, “Taking Stock (unfinished)” (1983-84), Haacke presents an image of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher sitting upright in a room furnished with clues to her identity--an image of Queen Victoria on her chair back, a sculpture of Pandora on the table, and numerous references to Maurice and Charles Saatchi, advertising moguls who ran her election campaign. Charles Saatchi is also especially active as a collector of contemporary art.

Such clues are not easily deciphered, but such is the case with all art, according to Haacke. “The viewer, indeed, should be working,” but most of the time this is not the case, he said. “Museums are not normally presenting the works on the walls as provocations to work. It’s more like going to a Jacuzzi.”

The enjoyment of art sounds very innocent, he said, “but in effect, that is the hedonistic taking in of something on the wall. I have nothing against pleasure in doing that. I take pleasure out of it myself. But there is much more that is usually brushed under the rug.”

Since Haacke left the “stifling political climate” of Cologne, West Germany, to live in New York in 1965, he has endeavored to expose what most artists and museums would rather conceal--connections, entanglements, contradictions.

“We are in a generally interconnected media-public opinion world,” he said. “What happens on Broadway has an effect on how people at CBS think, and the advertising agencies, and the politicians and so forth. So in a way that cannot be traced from A to B to Z, there is a general weather picture, one could say, which in a minor way, but nevertheless not a totally negligible way, is affected by what happens in the art world.

“If it were not so, then it would be absolutely ridiculous for Mobil, for instance, to get huffy about a work that I’ve done, or for that matter to spend so much money in wooing that very same public. It would be money thrown out the window.”

Corporate control over the consciousness industry is pervasive and debilitating, Haacke feels, and art can contribute to better understanding of the ramifications of the situation.

Haacke will be participating in a general discussion of his work today at 2 p.m. at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art. Admission is free to museum members, $1 for students and seniors, $2 for all others.