an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 4, March 2007, ISSN
1552-5112
Hans Haacke, or the Museum as Degenerate Utopia
To control a museum means precisely to control the
representations
of a community and its highest values and truths.
Carol Duncan, “The
Art Museum as Ritual”[1]
Since the early 1970s, much of Hans Haacke’s work has
focused on demystifying the relationship between museums and corporations. Museums present themselves to the public as the
autonomous realm of the aesthetic, as the purveyors and protectors of cultural
artifacts, while corporations present themselves as enlightened
benefactors—patrons--truly interested in the cultural well-being of the
community-at-large. In this sense, these
two realms—cultural and corporate—do not hide their relations. In fact, most museums display the names of
their corporate sponsors proudly on bronze plaques that imply the permanence of
a grave marker, as if a symbiotic relationship has always existed between the
Metropolitan Museum of Art and Bank of America, along with a host of other
global corporations. Haacke’s work
relies upon the strategies through which museums and corporations naturalize
their interdependent relationships with each other.
For Haacke, this relationship between museums and
their corporate sponsors is one of
exchange and not simply one of patronage.
He writes, “…it is important to distinguish between the traditional
notion of patronage and the public relations maneuvers parading as patronage
today. […] The American term sponsoring more accurately reflects that
what we have here is really an exchange of capital: financial capital on the
part of the sponsors and symbolic capital on the part of the sponsored.”[2] This shift from
traditional patronage to sponsorship is a relatively recent development, one
that emerged from the global capitalism which has characterized our cultural,
social, and economic milieu for at
least the past thirty years. As it goes
in capitalism, gains in capital are directly proportionate to gains in
power. As museums gain financial
capital, they are more readily able to expand their cultural
respectability. More financial capital
means bigger shows (the “blockbuster” exhibitions which have characterized the
past few decades) and in turn, a larger audience. And as Pierre Bourdieu writes, “Museums need
cultural respectability to be able to influence their sponsors.”[3] This
respectability translates into symbolic capital for sponsors, who gain it in exchange
for financial capital. Thus we have yet
another circular model of capitalist exchange.
In this system of exchange, art becomes commodity,
however much the museum – and the corporation, albeit to an arguably lesser
extent -- would like to conceal it.
Haacke’s work focuses on the system of exchange between the museum and
the corporation and the commodification of art that takes place within this
circulation. Given that this system of
relations between museums and corporations is a fairly recent development,
should it change our conception of the space of the museum, from a space
devoted to the timeless spiritual qualities of the aesthetic to a space devoted
to capitalist exchange? It seems that
the two are incommensurable, a dialectical clash between the sacred and the
profane. In order to maintain their
status as the protectors of beauty and culture, museums sublimate the exchange
that takes place within their hallowed walls.
Using Haacke’s work as an entry point into this system, as a critical rupture
within the system, I will analyze this exchange and how it could, perhaps
should, alter our conception of the museum from that of a space of aesthetic
autonomy to a space devoted to capitalist exchange and commodity fetishism. In other words, what Louis Marin calls a
“degenerate utopia.”[4] But before I
explore this notion further, a brief examination of some of Haacke’s work
within the historical context of corporate sponsorship is necessary to better
understand its critical position in my argument.
Art as Social Grease
Since the 1970s, corporate sponsorship of the arts
has increased dramatically. The reasons
for this expansion are many and complex, having to do with the desire on the
part of museums to produce ever-more ambitious exhibition programs, the
changing political climate during the 1970s and 1980s, and not least, the
changing nature of global capitalism. As
Haacke explained in his 1986 essay, “Museums, Managers of Consciousness,”
In an ever-advancing spiral the public was made to
believe that only Hollywood-style extravaganzas were worth seeing and that only
they could give an accurate sense of the world of art. The resulting box-office pressure made the
museums still more dependent on corporate funding. Then came the recessions of the 1970s and
1980s. Many individual donors could no
longer contribute at the accustomed rate, and inflation eroded the purchasing
power of funds. To compound the
financial problems, many governments, facing huge deficits—often due to sizable
expansions of military budgets—cut their support for social services as well as
their arts funding. Again museums felt
they had no choice but to turn to corporation for a bail-out.[5]
What at the beginning may have been seen as corporate
“bail-out” soon became the norm of arts funding, a part of the Neoliberal
corporatization of the American city and its traditionally non-corporate
institutions. And while both museums and
corporations may have been at first hesitant about their relationships with
each other, both quickly saw the benefits to be reaped from their newly
acquired status as bedfellows.
As
corporate sponsorship of the arts developed, so did a specific rhetoric melding
funding of the arts with good business practice. One work of Haacke’s which highlights this
rhetoric is On Social Grease (1975,
Collection of the Gilman Paper Company,
From
an economic standpoint, such involvement in the arts can mean direct and
tangible benefits. It can provide a
company with extensive publicity and advertising, a brighter public reputation,
and an improved corporate image. It can
build better customer relations, a readier acceptance of company products, and
a superior appraisal of their quality.
Promotion of the arts can improve the morale of employees and help
attract qualified personnel.[7]
Rockefeller’s words speak directly to the exchange of
financial capital for symbolic capital enacted between museums and
corporations. Perhaps more striking is that
corporate sponsorship of culture can have an anesthetizing effect on the public
and its perceptions of corporations, quelling critique and even—in a sort of
public relations placebo effect—producing “superior appraisal” of a company’s
products. To put it simply, art has the
potential to expand commodity exchange and also deaden the critique of
capitalism as a system of domination.
Another
quotation, the one from which Haacke takes this work’s title, is from Robert
Kingsley, then a manager in Exxon’s Department of Public Affairs. “Exxon’s support of the arts serves the arts
as a social lubricant. And if business
is to continue in big cities, it needs a more lubricated environment.”[8] What exactly
is social lubricant? It first seems
humorously appropriate that an oil company manager would use this
metaphor. But far more harrowing is the
notion that art, or at least sponsorship of the arts, can be used to pacify
society, to make corporate expansion and proliferation go on with
indifference. Sponsorship of the arts
provides the lube necessary for corporations to more easily fuck the public.
Another
work of Haacke’s that deals more directly with the museum’s use of this
rhetoric, but also the mystification of corporate practices is MetroMobilitan (1985, Owned by Hans
Haacke).[9] Here Haacke
utilized the now proliferate practice of displaying large banners advertising
exhibitions at the entrance to the museum.
This practice began at the Metropolitan Museum of Art under the
directorship of Thomas Hoving (1966-1977), who is credited with being one of
the first museum directors to court corporations and their money.[10] The work
implicates the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Mobil Corporation, which
sponsored an exhibition of ancient Nigerian art at the museum and has provided
numerous other grants and support to the Metropolitan.
At
the time when Mobil sponsored the exhibition of ancient Nigerian art, it was
selling oil to
Above
the banners is a fiberglass mockup of an entablature, echoing the Beaux-Arts
classicism of the
Many public relations opportunities are available
through the sponsorship of programs, special exhibitions and services. These can often provide a creative and cost
effective answer to a specific marketing objective, particularly where
international, governmental or consumer relations may be a fundamental concern.
Haacke has excerpted this passage from a pamphlet
distributed by the
In
combining these rhetorical elements with the photomural, Haacke lays bare the
process of mystification that takes place with corporate sponsorship. He shows that these seemingly disparate
elements—violence in South Africa and an exhibition in New York—are related to
one another vis-à-vis the financial
ties of the corporation to the Apartheid government as well the Metropolitan
Museum. It also shows that while culture
may be the superstructural expression of a social order, at its base is the
economic reality of domination, colonization, and bloodshed. The museum, however, assures a positive
image for the corporation that would otherwise be seen badly for its
involvement with
Relations and the Space of the Museum
Put
most simply, Haacke’s work is one of institutional critique. As can be seen in the above examples of his
work, at the heart of Haacke’s project is the critique of institutional
practices, practices that mystify the “true” nature of institutions’ relations
to one another. Here it is helpful to
use Michel de Certeau’s and Henri Lefebvre’s terms of strategy and tactics. De Certeau defines strategy as the mastery of
space; strategy defines space so that actors within that space can pursue
objectives through the accumulation of advantages, allowing for the further
expansion of strategy; strategy has imperialistic undertones. Tactics, on the other hand, are isolated
actions that advantageously use the gaps within a strategic system in order to
generate differing outcomes in the hopes of disrupting such a system.[13] Museums and
corporations strategically mystify
their relations in order to expand those relations. Strategy, according to Lefebvre, is what
institutions use to maintain power.[14] Therefore,
Haacke’s work is tactical in that it
demystifies their power, finding the points of correspondence and connection
within a network that would otherwise go unnoticed due to their concealment by
the institutional strategy. Whereas the
strategy of the museum is to appear culturally autonomous, and that of the corporation
is to appear as artistic patron, Haacke’s tactics of demystification show that neither is the case.
The
space of the museum is created by the relations enacted within it, embodied
within it, as is the case with any other social space.[15] For Lefebvre,
“…any space implies, contains and dissimulates social relationships—and this
despite the fact that a space is not a thing but rather a set of relations
between things…”[16] He calls for
a new form of spatial analysis not dependent upon the notion of space as
thing-in-itself which only serves to isolate space in abstraction, keeping us
from true analysis that “uncovers the social relations imbedded within
[space].”[17] The “networks
and pathways”, the rhizomatic
structure--to borrow a term from Deleuze and Guattari--of relations bring what
would otherwise be an abstract concept of space into “real existence.”[18] The social
relations of the space of the museum not only include those of the museum to
its corporate sponsors, but also the audience that enters the museum and
partakes in the “aesthetic ritual,” the artists whose work is displayed there,
the network of buying and selling works of art, etc., all interpenetrating and
superimposing one another. There are in any social space, according to
Lefebvre, “a host of [social relationships] that analysis can potentially
disclose,”[19] a host of relationships that far exceeds the
simplification of my analysis.
To
see the museum as simply the autonomous realm of culture is to maintain the
abstract notion of the museum as thing in itself, or space in itself. Haacke’s work denies both the cultural
autonomy of the museum and the autonomy of aesthetic experience; an idea that
has its origins in Kant’s aesthetics, which examines the work of art as a sort
of ding-an-sich and the aesthetic
experience as disinterested and separate from the everyday world of practice.[20] As Fredric
Jameson writes, “With Haacke’s installations…we approach an extreme point in
which it is no longer clear at all that the rapt attention ideally bestowed on
a traditional art ‘masterpiece’—whether Holbein or Cezanne—any longer comes
into play.”[21] After viewing
one of Haacke’s installations, the commodity-nature of a traditional work of
art is highlighted. Perhaps on first
encounter, Haacke’s work denies us the privileged aesthetic experience through
its matter of fact, appropriation of the typically non-aesthetic—whether
advertising banners, corporate plaques, or, as in the case of some works,
advertising images and fact sheets—but it then more importantly dissolves the
illusion of the barrier between the autonomous space of culture and, for lack
of a better term, everything else. For
Jameson,
What
happens here…--and here we anticipate the other dimension of this work that has
to do with the critique of institutions—is that the elements of the former work
of art now enter the ‘real’ object world around them; they enter a space which
is no less narrowly specified and spatially and institutionally differentiated
than the living room of the middle-class family: that is, of course, the
museum.[22]
That the museum is denied its status as autonomous is
paramount in Haacke’s work. Denied its
“institutional differentiation,” the museum becomes yet another relational
space of everyday life.
As with
much Conceptual art, Haacke’s work is often viewed as the inheritor of the
Duchampian ready-made tradition. However, an important distinction must be
drawn here between Duchamp’s intent and Haacke’s. In fact, Haacke’s work, although formally
indebted to Duchamp’s appropriations, actually inverts the conceptual framework behind Duchamp’s use of the
ready-made. Duchamp’s Fountain, for example, to the chagrin of
his critics, actually serves to legitimize the aesthetic context of art. His placement of an everyday object in the
gallery or museum changes the object’s function; it no longer exists in the
world of use value, but is now elevated to the realm of the aesthetic, where it
is imbued with all of the symbolic value of any traditional work of art. Art, as Duchamp brought to our attention, is
not about precious materials, artistic genius, originality, etc., but about the
context into which it is placed, that of the aesthetic.
Haacke,
however, shows us that the legitimacy of the autonomous aesthetic realm only
exists if we cling to the illusion that the museum is a space in itself, set aside and apart from the spaces of everyday
exchange. He not only brings the objects
of everyday life into the aesthetic context, but also the processes of the
everyday, the exchanges that take place within this supposedly autonomous realm
that are normally considered outside from it.
Duchamp reifies the object, empowering it with the aura of the
aesthetic; Haacke brings to our attention the fact that the aura is illusory. Furthermore, Haacke demonstrates that the
aura of the aesthetic is not only illusory, but that it is used strategically
by institutions—both the museum and the corporation—to maintain their power and
to sublimate the reality of their relations.
Transaestheticization
We
can come to a similar conclusion about the autonomy of the aesthetic through
very different means. If Haacke’s work
opens up the space of the museum to critique by tactically exposing its covert
relationships with other institutions—the network of activities covered up by
institutional strategies—it is to show that aesthetic autonomy is but an
illusion that suppresses the actuality of its relations. If these networks of exchange have always existed,
whether or not they have always existed between museums and corporations, then
one would begin to think that aesthetic autonomy is and has never been anything
more than an ideological construct. But
what if the autonomy of the aesthetic is not destroyed by capitalist relations
but proliferated by them to the point that the autonomy itself no longer exists
because everything, even the
everyday, has become aestheticized.
Whereas Haacke’s work speaks to the corporatization of the museum, of
the interpenetration of its aesthetic autonomy by the forces of global capital,
perhaps we should examine the antithesis and think in terms of the
museafication of the corporate, of the aestheticization of capitalist
exchange. This would be a strange
inversion of Jameson’s thought as cited above, in which the museum is no longer
anymore differentiated than the living room, not because of a loss of the
aesthetic, but because the living room is now just as much the realm of the
aesthetic as the museum was before. The primary
loss is the loss of the museum’s privileged position as the sole realm of the
aesthetic.
In
order to conceptualize this antithesis, we need not look further than another
of Jameson’s texts, Postmodernism or, the
Cultural logic of Late Capitalism.
In Jameson’s seminal analysis, transaestheticization is one of the
characteristics of Postmodernism, otherwise known as Late or Global
Capitalism. He writes,
What has happened is that aesthetic production today
has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic
urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods (from
clothing to airplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an
increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation
and experimentation. Such economic
necessities then find recognition in the varied kinds of institutional support
available for the newer art, from foundations and grants to museums and other
forms of patronage.[23]
What is key to Jameson’s analysis is the notion that with
Postmodernism we have experienced an unforeseen expansion of global capital
into realms that it had never before colonized—among them, according to
Jameson, is the aesthetic.
The
aesthetic has become a powerful tool of the corporate world, not only in the
production of more aesthetic commodities, as Jameson remarks, but also in the
idea of aesthetic judgment, in the realm of taste associated with high culture
and the world of fine art. David Harvey
has analyzed how both the aesthetic, and in a broader sense, the consciousness
industry are utilized by corporate
Corporations
must make a foothold in the cultural realm simply because that is where
financial capital is. But perhaps more
importantly, aside from gaining financial capital from the cultural realm,
corporations gain hoards of symbolic capital there as well.
There is much to achieve, for example, by appeals to
fashion (interestingly, being a centre of fashion is one way for cities to
accumulate considerable collective symbolic capital). Capitalists are well-aware of this and must
therefore wade into the culture wars, as well as into the thickets of
multiculturalism, fashion and aesthetics [emphasis
added], because it is precisely through such means that monopoly rent is always
an object of capitalist desire, and the means of gaining it through
interventions in the field of culture, history, heritage, aesthetics and
meanings must necessarily be of great import for capitalists of any sort.[25]
In
For
Baudrillard, Duchamp initiated this end of the aesthetic through
transaestheticization. With Duchamp’s
introduction of the readymade, the banal object is transformed into an
aesthetic one, which “turns the entire world into a readymade.” Starting with Duchamp, “all the banality of
the world passes into aesthetics, and inversely, all aesthetics becomes banal:
a commutation takes place between the two fields of banality and aesthetics,
one that truly brings aesthetics in the traditional sense to an end.”[28] Perhaps it was Duchamp’s gesture and the
aestheticization of the object world that have led inversely to the
commodification of art. However, art has
tried to escape this by clinging to its privileged status as the realm of the
aesthetic, the spiritual; hence the museum’s mystification of its relationships
with the corporation. When art becomes
commodity, it becomes important for its value: its monetary value, but more
importantly, its symbolic value. In this
shift towards the art commodity, it is ever more vital for the museum to
maintain its status as the autonomous realm of the aesthetic. Arthur C. Danto has explained the reasoning
behind this insistence on “purity:”
The museum’s spiritual authority is essential if the
corporation is to enjoy any of the economic [and symbolic] benefits of its
investment in culture. Small wonder that
museum directors and curators must insist on the purity of their institutions! Small wonder the museum must represent itself
as the shrine of “objects of pure creativity”!
It could not serve the end of crassness if it were perceived as crass in
its own right.[29]
According to Danto, the museum places evermore stress
on its supposed aesthetic autonomy, “requiring the ideology of
disinterestedness,” in order to preclude the fact that the museum “has been
transformed into a showroom for classy investments.”[30]
Disneyfication and Degenerate Utopias
What
happens in this process of transaestheticization is that, according to
Baudrillard, “art substituted itself for life in the form of a generalized
aesthetics that finally led to a ‘Disneyfication’ of the world: a Disney-form
capable of atoning for everything by transforming it into Disneyland…”[31] And while
Baudrillard’s conclusion that the whole world is “Disneyfied”—made into one
great image simulacrum--may seem extreme, one place thoroughly implicated in
this “Disneyfication” is the museum. As
Rosalind Krauss writes, “it…does not stretch the imagination too much to realize
that this industrialized museum will have much more in common with other
industrialized areas of leisure—
In
his book Utopics: Spatial Play, Louis
Marin analyzes these spaces of exchange and how they relate to hegemonic
ideology. In his analysis of the
“degenerate utopia,” Marin first establishes what exactly a utopia is. A Utopia serves as a discursive space in
which ideology is played out; “it is a stage for ideological
representation.” Ideology is also the
representation of how social actors imagine their relationships against the
“their real conditions of existence.”
For Marin, “a degenerate utopia is ideology changed into the form of a
myth.” Myth develops from ideology that
serves to mollify and resolve “formally a fundamental social contradiction.” [33] While a
utopia is ideology enacted spatially, it becomes degenerate when there is at
its ideological basis the desire to exclude, conceal, sublimate some sort of
contradiction or difference that would serve to compromise the hegemony of the
given dominant ideology. Marin’s intent
is to show how utopia degenerates, “how the utopic representation can be
entirely caught in a dominant system of ideas and values and, thus, be changed
into a myth or a collective fantasy.”[34]
Marin’s
model for a degenerate utopia is
Using
Marin’s model, Harvey writes that a degenerative utopia is “a supposedly happy,
harmonious, and non-conflictual space set aside from the ‘real’ world ‘outside’
in such a way as to soothe and mollify, to entertain, to invent history and to
cultivate a nostalgia from some mythical past, to perpetuate the fetish of
commodity culture rather than to critique it.”[37] The
degenerate utopia is a place where “the dialectic is repressed” and difference
and conflict are sublimated in an ahistorical
spatial organization. It certainly does
not offer a critique to capitalist exchange, and allows no room for such
critique to come into play. It is a
space singularly devoted to commodity fetishism.
The Museum as Degenerate Utopia
As
much as it would like to, the museum does not escape categorization as a
capitalist degenerate utopia. Recalling
Baudrillard’s and Danto’s comments above, the museum maintains its status as
the pure, autonomous realm of aesthetic, spiritual, and transcendent artistic
value, although in reality it has become the realm of capitalist exchange. Rather than valuing the aesthetic for its own
sake, museums value it for the financial capital gained through art’s symbolic
capital, traded off to corporation in order to increase the museum’s financial
capital. Thus the ideology of aesthetic
autonomy perpetuated by the museum becomes myth, “resolving” the contradictions
raised by the real conditions of its relations with the corporate. The museum stages this myth within its walls
where visitors perform and enact it through the aesthetic ritual of a history
of art that has no grounding in social conflict and domination, but only in the
conflicts between contemporaneous artistic trends and the dominations of one
style over another.
It is important to museums and their corporate
sponsors to maintain this myth in order to maintain the perpetuation of
capitalist expansion. To return to
Haacke’s work, art serves as social
grease; art offers to corporations the possibility of mystifying the
treachery and exploitation at the heart of global capitalist domination. The museum visitor only sees what the
hegemonic ideology wants them to see, that the museum is a pure institution and
that the corporation is a politically and economically disinterested
patron. They see the corporation’s name
on the large, colorful banner outside the entrance and on the bronze plaque
inside, represented to them as benevolent patrons, and they most likely pay
little heed to the symbolic power embodied in the bronze plaque. After all, the public is at the museum to
enact the aesthetic ritual, to contemplate truth and beauty in a space set
aside specifically for this purpose; an almost sacred space devoted to
preserving great and timeless works of art.
an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 4, March 2007, ISSN
1552-5112
Notes