NOTORIOUS HANSHAACKE : Mysterious Artist Raises a Maelstrom of Questions

America hates a mystery. Oh, we like mystery stories as well as the next country; the telly is full of them. But when you get right down to it, Americans only like to flirt with the mysterious. We prefer the understandable. It’s OK with us if the country is inundated with immigrants as long as they quickly learn English, get a jogging suit and drive like everybody else. No double parking. No making right-hand turns from left-hand lanes. Behave in predictable fashion.

We like to understand and we like being understood. We are nice, reasonable folks, so it doesn’t make sense to us that there can be a whole country full of people who misunderstand us to the point of hatred. Take Iran. One of the biggest mysteries on the telly is pictures of black-shrouded women learning to shoot us with .45s and crowds of bearded guys telling us we are the Great Satan. There has to be some misunderstanding here that we can clear up by finding the moderate elements and sending them Bibles, cakes and missiles. Every time we try this, we get clobbered because we don’t want to deal with the idea that those folks are ineluctably mysterious.

Art used to be mysterious, and that drove people crazy. Why do these guys want to go around making art that no good American can understand? Anybody who would do that must have something to hide. Must be a mountebank or a commie. Why would anybody paint a picture that is a complete enigma no matter which way you hang it? Intolerable.

For the last 20 years or so, Americans have been working on making art understandable. They have had a lot more success with this project than with the Iranian caper. By now, art has been pretty well reduced to merchandise. Americans really understand merchandise because you can go shopping for it. Something you shop for is worth money, has a use and is therefore understandable. What a relief.

Art is useful because it is expensive luxury merchandise that confers social status on wealthy persons along with their cars, houses and tony spouses. It is useful because it comes complete with a social scene. It is a ticket to exclusive parties populated by flirtatiously mysterious exotics who are sometimes celebrities. If you buy enough, you too can become a celebrity and get your picture in People magazine or at least Town and Country. If you invest shrewdly, your purchase actually accrues in value and you can sell it and buy a condo in Paris. If, instead, you wait and bequeath your art to a museum, you become a Cultural Immortal and are hailed as a secular saint.

When something is that useful it must mean something and, come to think of it, who cares if it doesn’t?

Only a few grousers and malcontents like Hans Haacke.

Hans who?

Don’t be embarrassed if the name is vague. Haacke, who was born in Germany and lives in New York, has been a figure to contend with inside the art scene since the early ‘70s, when the Guggenheim Museum canceled a show they had promised him. Since then, his work has been seen mainly in commercial galleries and piecemeal in large international exhibitions like Germany’s Documenta. He has never had a major museum show on the West Coast for the simple reason he had never had one anywhere until last winter, when New York’s New Museum for Contemporary Art organized the traveling retrospective now visiting the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art until Sept. 27. Interested parties will not want to miss the event, particularly because it is bracketed with another revealing show, called “LA 2 DA,” which will be reviewed presently.

Haacke’s work kicks up a regular maelstrom of questions including the old one about whether or not it is art, but one thing is certain: It is not merchandise. A man who makes a tableau of a Met museum banner advertising “Treasures of Ancient Nigeria” sponsored by Mobil and also needling them about their South African interests is not out to kiss up to the big boys.

Haacke’s troubles and art-world notoriety began in 1971 in the wake of a wave of political activism among art folks, who were protesting everything from bad working conditions in museums to prejudice against women artists and excessive manipulation of the sphere by critics and dealers who were said to be artificially rigging waves of styles like Pop and Minimalism.

Haacke went a step further into the real world by making a piece for a proposed exhibition at the Guggenheim titled “Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971.” The work was a complex dossier of photographs, charts and notes documenting the holdings of one Harry Shapolsky, alleged Lower East Side slumlord convicted of rent gouging.

Thomas Messer, director of the Guggenheim, rejected the show as inappropriate to an art museum. Naturally a fuss and debate ensued. It was said that the show was neutralized because the crabbed documentation pointed to improper connections between Shapolsky and high city officials. It was said that crisscrossing webs of charted lines linked Shapolsky to corporations and individuals who were Guggenheim Museum patrons and even members of the board of trustees.

In fact, none of that was actually in the work, as Leo Steinberg points out in a catalogue essay. The point of the Shapolsky piece was a muddle of motives and influences as artists’ early works often tend to be. But Haacke was successful in setting out the parameters of his art. He would deal with reality, naming names, places and facts like an investigative journalist or sociologist. His facts would be marshalled in the direction of creating a mental image of the larger world that encompasses and influences the art sphere, almost certainly shaping it into a mirror image of the reigning Zeitgeist .

Some works are straight social exhortation. “Painting, Homage to Marcel Broodthaers” consists of an oil painting of Ronald Reagan looking imperial behind a velvet rope. On a facing wall is a huge photo blow-up showing a 1982 anti-nuclear rally attended by 500,000 people in New York. The artist places us viewers on a red carpet leading from the painting to the photo, in effect challenging us to choose between the polarities symbolized.

As long as we are left a choice--albeit the question is heavily begged--Haacke’s work is not straight propaganda. It can be entertained as an artistic statement of conscience and placed within the hallowed tradition of German art’s concern with narrative and the expression of moral values. Something of George Grosz’s sense of immediate social satire lives in Haacke as well as some of Holbein’s probing need for accuracy. It is sort of amusing to think of these works as updated versions of his portraits of the court of Henry VIII.

But Haacke is out for bigger game. He is trying to evoke a panoramic social portrait using a minimal version of the techniques of the documentary film maker. He buttonholes us in a dark corner and says: “There are certain facts of which you should be aware. It is not my purpose to talk you into anything but simply to apprise you of the situation so you can make up your own mind.”

Sometimes you can almost hear the dry, insinuating voice of the narrator on the PBS “Frontline” series. Haacke is on that turf and frequently he is co-opted by it. He lights out after a Belgian arms firm that sells weapons to both sides in Third World wars and has been cited for selling to governments with bad human-rights records. The sated mind of the expose reader just mumbles, “So what else is new?” About the only kick in the piece is the cheap irony of the firm’s slogan, “We believe in the power of the creative imagination.”

Too many pieces like “Buhrlesque” are visually incomprehensible until one reads the text and then the chronicle of shenanigans fails to jell into a mental picture anything like as compelling as a John le Carre novel or the old paranoid social-horrors satire film, “O Lucky Man!”

Not surprisingly, Haacke does best on the turf he knows best, the art world and the moneyed powers surrounding it. His funniest piece is “Tiffany Cares,” a metal-plated plaque of an ad the jewelry company ran in the New York Times in praise of the virtues of millionaires because they spend money and create jobs. “On Social Grease” is even more trenchant. It consists of a series of plaques recording statements by movers and shakers pointing out why it is good corporate business to sponsor art exhibitions. Metropolitan Museum president C. Douglas Dillon intones, “These projects can be tailored to a company’s specific business goals and can return dividends far out of proportion to the actual investment required.”

Haacke’s most effective social panorama seeps out of England, the land of “Vanity Fair,” in an allegorical portrait of Margaret Thatcher called “Taking Stock.” You have to read the text here, too, but when you do, a riveting image emerges linking the Thatcher government to the advertising firm of Saatchi and Saatchi and thence to the Saatchis’ art collection and their influential links to the Whitechapel and Tate Galleries, not to mention their subsidiaries in South Africa.

In a way, the accuracy of Haacke’s image is not at issue because he doesn’t really do much except say “such and such links exist between this and that.” What emerges is a classic stereotype of the upper levels of the social and political world with its formal corruptions, tangled influence peddling, power-mongering, conceit and venality. It is almost a doctrinaire Protestant image of a ring of Purgatory.

These days, if Hans Haacke did not exist, we would have to invent him. He is an absolute necessity as a specific against the excesses of the art world.

Give it up. What’s wrong with that? The Medici were hardly saints and they fostered great art. How does Haacke account for the biggest paradoxes of all, the saintly collector, the honorable artist and the moving aesthetic experiences produced for people at the top of this compost heap of worldly self interest?

That’s right. He has to live with that. He attacks an art world short on mystery and poetry by producing an art short on mystery and poetry.