Art Theory by Cynthia Freeland

Author:Cynthia Freeland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2001-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

15. This membership brochure for the National Gallery of Australia traded on the controversy about the museum’s purchase of Jackson Pollock’s painting Blue Poles (1952). See also overleaf.

Haacke’s project, Voici Alcan in 1983, for example, juxtaposed images of the Alcan Corporation’s logo framing scenes of famous opera productions it had supported with a similar ‘ad-style’ image showing the graphic close-up face of the dead liberationist leader Stephen Biko in South Africa. Haacke’s plans for work that denounced a slum landlord with shady real estate dealings was cancelled six weeks before it was scheduled to be shown in 1971 at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. Speculation was that the property owner’s friends on the Board of Trustees arranged the cancellation of this planned exhibit.

The irony here again, as with McGee, is that the system often seeks to consume even its harshest critics. Benjamin Buchloch championed Haacke in a 16-page cover story for the glossy magazine Art in America in February 1988. In a lengthy footnote, Buchloch insisted that Haacke is ‘marginalized’ – despite the artist’s increasing prominence and marketability. One work of Haacke’s had recently sold in auction at Christie’s for what even Buchloch admitted was the ‘rather impressive price of slightly more than $90,000’! Setting these financial ironies aside (along with Buchloch’s laboured account of how the artist rejects ‘aesthetic autonomy and pleasure’), I simply find Haacke’s work too preachy and boring. It is also ephemeral, and risks losing its punch when the context alters. Visually stronger work like Goya’s The Executions of May 3, 1808 retains its power to disturb us long after the specific political scene has changed; it is not clear that Haacke’s didactic wall texts, shown in a uniform series of panels, will do this.

There are other models of how (not to) make money from art. American artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude make art that is deliberately transitory and cannot be sold. They travel the world, conceiving and executing huge landscape and environmental installation projects. Best known are their Running Fence (1972– 1976) in California, The Pont Neuf Wrapped in Paris (1975–1985), and the gaily skirted bright pink Surrounded Islands in Miami Bay (1980–1983). In their Umbrellas project (1984–1991), carried out both in Japan (with blue umbrellas) and California (with yellow umbrellas), the couple undertook to link the natural landscapes of river and mountains not only across the two nations but also to the artificial landscapes of freeways, by making the work visible across miles. Getting permission and collaborative support becomes part of the art project, and the pair derive no income from photographs, books, posters, postcards, and films. They pay all the expenses of the project with their own money coming from the sale of preparatory drawings, collages, scale models, all created before the completion of a project.

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