Page 47 - Studio International - December 1970

chosen uniquely for its 'cultural impact' and Thermostat Art. Nature is no longer caught in a This can be discussed on two levels : (1) The
the artist gets his salary for maintaining a flow static condition (the pile of stones), but in ready-made taken from nature or society does
of new forms which will increase demand by a movement. In the case of Hans Haacke, for not differ basically from the ordinary ready-
constant and effective change in styling. Thus example, his works have for some time now made. Signing a river, a mountain, a herd
we see increasing integration of the artist into depended upon the action of nature itself. It of horses or any natural 'system' is no more
the industrial process both as designer and has given us the opportunity to appreciate the than repeating on a large scale what Duchamp
publicity merchant. As the number of ill- fundamental inter-dependence of all natural was doing half a century ago when he chal-
starred painters rapidly decreases, so the phenomena. He created open works which were lenged aestheticism or the exquisite taste of the
number of prosperous graphic artists mounts in permanent dialogue with environment and artists, and the continuing practice of aestheti-
up. As Marx said, 'The greater the ruling which were constantly affected and changed cizing ; (2) The introduction of natural
class's ability to call upon the most talented by the aleatory intervention of reality—some- phenomena in art has been undertaken by
members of the exploited class, the more times including the spectator— which, in short, such artists as Vantongerloo and Takis who,
solidly based and the more dangerous is its were made from the very stuff of nature caught in the late fifties, broadly developed the inter-
power.' up in its unending renewal. connected triple theme of the invisible, the
Both Beuys and Richard Long, at the centre of But this gestation was isolated in an enclosed real and energy. Going further in this direction
the Funk Art movement, are the very embodi- space and its expansion deliberately circum- is now inconceivable without the dialectic
ment of nostalgia. The first is developing his scribed by a closed circuit. We were shown life, extension of the works of these pioneers. It is
individual folklore based upon rottenness, but life in a glass cage. Everything internal to no coincidence that a painter like David
anxiety and guilt, a cathartic symbolism not the work was transformed under pressure Medalla, while starting out from the same
unconnected with the German conscience. from the external world, but not much outside premises, should reject the ultimate develop-
One can see the piles of human hair, the lamp- was; there was no noticeable reciprocal change ment of his works in soap, mud and sand to
shades of human skin and the tablets of soap in the external world caused by the action of the devote himself to forming a collective, the
from human flesh, the dissecting instruments, work. Exploding Galaxy4, in which he has attempted
the whips and flails of Auschwitz whence Had Haacke maintained the promise of this to incorporate his aesthetic propositions inside
Beuys derives his folklore. With the exception first stage, he could have developed in either of group inter-personal relationships and to
of a few surrealist pieces (the packaged piano) two directions. He could have escaped from improve the action of that group upon society.
he dwells upon the concentration camp theme; the Perspex cage, the cultural environment, Haacke himself, in two of his very last mani-
hence his reluctance to exhibit in the USA in, from self-contained art, and gone on to effect festations, developed his work in a direction
for example, the MOMA glasshouse. To see large-scale ecological changes in nature itself that can be considered as opening a new way
Beuys in perspective, we must compare his and — a logical development—on the human out of his 'ecological ready-made'. For the
works with the memories of the death camps level. Rather than record the balance of large exhibition called 'Information' (MOMA,
which still linger in European minds. Beuys nature, he could have influenced things, taken New York, Summer 1970) he showed trans-
doesn't buy his ready-mades in the super- an active part and, by his activities, helped to parent ballot boxes, 'one for each answer to an
markets. He picks them up in the huts of change this balance. The local character of either/or question referring to a current socio-
Treblinka. He shows us an aestheticized Dr these experiments could have been broadened political issue'. He put the question on the
Mengele, betraying an ambiguous attitude and universalized by a new dynamism taking boxes the day before the opening: 'Would the
which is perhaps the result of complacency. them beyond the physical and psychological fact that Governor Rockefeller 5 has not de-
However horrible the subject, Beuys too trans- limits inherent in them until now. But in most nounced President Nixon's Indochina policy
plants into the world of art a world that is dead of his work Haacke chose to see natural be a reason for you not to vote for him in
and gone. phenomena as so many 'systems' whose mere November?' A few weeks later, in the Maeght
Now Richard Long, following interesting existence was fascinating. He undertook to foundation, Saint-Paul, France, Haacke built
experiments in trick perspective, allusive space classify them in a series of self-occluded experi- a whole show on the commercial aspects of
and intangible volumes (a 16-part sculpture ments (air and light, water and heat, grass and that gallery—whose directors like to insist on
spread over 3000 square kilometres, 1967), is light, etc.). The works are not cut off from life their candid purity about business. (The same
increasingly secluding himself in a romanti- as in Funk Art, which isolates static materials directors tried to stop the show and Haacke's
cism of the useless, of non-significant activity and separates them from the living world by demonstration. But it was too late.)
such as the Kilimanjaro sculpture, the main tucking them away in a museum. They are cut In both cases it was for the first time an
point of which is, he says, the somewhat off more subtly and on another level. These attempt not to reproduce an ecological or
laborious climb to the summit. But, above all, works are alive but only in parenthesis. They social 'system' but to disturb it strongly. It was
he directs his main efforts to creating images are impotent and have no repercussions on an attempt to bring back to reality the exquisite
impregnated with nostalgia and vestiges in the reality. atmosphere of bourgeois art with its favourite
process of disappearing. Thanks to good A recent step in his development was the vocabulary: objectivity, neutrality, contem-
photographic work (one thinks of a kind of exhibition of what he himself calls ready- plation, ready-made, non-intervention. A
rustic Atget), he produces an atmosphere mades2 and the signature of on-going natural vocabulary that we will find very often in the
reminiscent of those sad Antonioni panoramas processes. (For example, he exhibited as idealist counterpart of ' matterise funk: Con-
of the Po plain. The stroll, the long walk one of his works in New York the daily ceptual Art.
through the city of the tortured heroes of Cri meteorological chart.) In any case, the prin-
or l'Avventura0., the dismal trampling of the ciple of non-intervention remains the same.
freshly-turned soil, the 'obsessional' inclusion Things exist which one notes but does not 1 Raysse Beach, Dylaby, 1962, Amsterdam.
2 'The conscious acceptance in principle of the natural
of a remembered face in the rings of the pond, alter. It is not fortuitous that while attempting laws in sculpture obviously parallels Duchamp's
all make Richard Long the Caspar David recently to list facts connected with human setting his seal upon a ready-made object....' Haacke,
quoted in Art International, September 1969.
Friedrich of Funk Art. It is a private art, a society and not merely with the natural eco- 3 Ecology, the science of living organisms and their
melancholy art whose contact with the pulse logical balance,3 Haacke enumerated pre- environment, seems to have been rediscovered at the
right moment to avoid questions concerning the best-
of the times, its urgent needs and perils, is as cisely those events in process of disappearing known of these organisms, man in contemporary
difficult to sense as is its attitude to our chang- (the results of the German elections) which are society.
4 This is not the place to discuss its orientalized
ing world. already so closely integrated into recent philosophy.
Another current variety of Anti-Form is history that they can be no more than noted. 5 The Rockefeller family practically leads the MOMA.