N. 17 Dicembre 2017/Marzo 2018 a Painting by Hans Haacke
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n. 17 dicembre 2017/marzo 2018 A Painting by Hans Haacke : Dematerializing Labor di Andreas Petrossiants Artistic activity is a mode – a singular form – of labor power . Antonio Negri, 2008 1 To center an essay concerning the more - than - expansive discursive field denoted by «painting», on just one work by Hans Haacke, might at first glance seem misplaced. However, while Haacke’s work was surely instrumental for the shifts in Western artistic pra ctice comprising the «conceptual turn» of the 1960s and the parallel «dematerialization» of the art object, his painting Taking Stock (unfinished) (1983 - 1984 ) not only brings such broad period generalizations into question, but also examines the labor invo lved in producing (the value of) a painting [fig. 1]. Taking Stock (unfinished) , first exhibited at the Tate Gallery in 1984, depicts Margaret Thatcher in the style of Victorian portraiture, encoded with information concerning the careers and art collectio ns of Charles and Doris Saatchi, as well as their ties to Thatcher and her reactionary government. Referring specifically to the medium and style of the work, Haacke remarks that it was produced to cite and critique how Thatcher «expressly promotes Victori an values, nineteenth century conservative policies at the end of the twentieth century». He continues: « Thatcher would like to rule an imperial Britain. The Falklands War was typical of this mentality». 2 This essay proposes to displace and problematize the traditional discourses applied to historicizing conceptual art, and to describe how Haacke employs both physical «painterly» and immaterial conceptual labor to produce a material object. He fosters a str ategy mirroring the changes in the structure and critical position of the (art) worker 1 during the late 1960s. 3 As Isabelle Graw astutely remarks: painting «indeed seems to demonstrate how value is founded in something concrete, the living labor of the arti st». 4 It must also be noted that such a strategy responds explicitly to the market resurgence of painting in the 1980s through hyper - speculation and institutional market - shaping. W hen the insistence on materiality of ( neo ) expressionist painting — that text - b ased/conceptual practices ostensibly operated to make obsolete — returns through a series of market - oriented and hegemonic structures, Haacke’s work makes clear that the act , or perhaps even agency , established by so - called artistic «skill» may continue to c onstitute a critical or subversive mirroring s trategy. We might remember that, notwithstanding that Marx did of course acknowledge that art - working can become just another role in the capitalist division of labour, he was also hopeful for the potentiality of escape from the market via artistic skill. 5 The «living labor» performed by Haacke to create the painting, posited in the work/non - work dialectic, allows painterly skill to emerge as a subve rsive action — albeit in a manner somewhat tongue - in - cheek. The p rimary physical labor — mark - making — involved in the production of such a painting describes its final informational and aesthetic value: an index of signs, as Graw would rightly remark, that point towards information transmitted by Haacke. Douglas Crimp rem arked that the Thatcher painting, and an earlier work featuring a painting of Ronald Reagan — Oelgemaelde, Hommage à Marcel Broodthaers ( Oil Painting, Homage to Marcel Broodthaers [1982]) — «were presumably intended to comment on the relationship between these people’s reactionary politics and the current [1980s] revival of painting in a reactiona ry art - world situation» . 6 This revival of a specific type of painting was exactly the type of market manipulation that the Saatchi collection profited from; they colle cted «works by Baselitz, Chia, Clemente, Guston, Kiefer, Morely, Schnabel, and Stella». 7 Similarly coded into the work is that as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Whitechapel gallery (a public institution as Haacke reminds us), Saatchi «profited fr om inside information about exhibition plans of the Gallery, which allowed him to buy works, notably by Francesco Clemente and Malcolm Morely, at a favorable moment». 8 Interestingly, as this essay will describe, the traditional labor employed in the makin g of a painting — applying paint to a surface, for example — is augmented here. Firstly, by Haacke’s research practice — which Rosalind Krauss has described as his medium — and 2 secondly, in the labor undertaken to learn to paint in the style of Victorian portraitu re. Haacke is clearly not a painter, but in the case of Taking Stock (unfinished) , a painting was produced by his hand. Another reason for the form , remarks Haacke, was «to mess up the labels» after he had been «stamped a conceptualist». 9 We might be reminded of the American artist Louise Lawler’s common refrain that she is not a photographer, notwithstanding the fact that much, though surely not all, of her work is often installed or distributed as printed images — more appropriately, as re - iterations and re - performances of «pictures». There is a similar displacement of artist from medium found in the labor Haacke performed in making Taking Stock . The painting does not stand - in for the «liveliness» of a displaced artist, which Graw indicates to be specific to painting. 10 Instead, he displaces himself with indexed information and with feigned/performed «painterly» skill to disrupt the (institutional) system within which his work is shown. Rather than subversion in the traditional sense, this st rategy resembles what Lieven de Cauter has called «subversivity»: a strategy closer to cultural activism than political praxis. 11 To understand the two forms of work undertaken by Haacke, we must acknowledge the autonomist definition of immaterial labor: w ork carried out in post - Fordist/de - industrialized/late capitalist economies that produces material information and data, eschewing physical products. There is a clear temporal link between theorizations of the «dematerialization» of art and the immateriali zation of (art) labor. Antonio Negri has described this historical parallel, summarizing the relationship between periods of artistic activity and «forms of capitalist production and organization of labor». 12 In classical Marxist readings of modern art, Rea lism echoes the centralization of the class struggle, Impressionism mirrors the division and specialization of labor, abstract painting follows the abstraction of labor, and so on, culminating of course in the events of May 1968, which Negri considers «the end the mass worker». 13 It is also when explicit protest meets art production (Art Workers Coalition for example), and when the immaterial (art) worker confronts the dematerializing art object. Both the former and the latter are structures that model or re present abstracted materiality, and stem from the globalized late capitalist marketplace that developed in the post - war West. 14 As Negri and Michael Hardt write in their Empire : 3 The immediately social dimension of the exploitation of living immaterial labo r immerses labor in all the relational elements that define the social but also at the same time activate the critical elements that develop the potential of insubordination and revolt through the entire set of laboring practices. 15 Haacke had already acti vated this «critical element» in his art working by producing the landmark works MOMA - Poll (1970) and Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real - Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 (1971) [fig. 2 and fig. 3 ]. More than a decade later, Taking Stock (unfinished) adjusts this research/text - based strategy for the temporal context of the 1980s to comment on the market for specific styles of painting. Thus, Haacke acts as both painter and immaterial laborer, producing both painted object replete with symbolic imagery and information collected via research. In an interview with Paul Taylor , Haacke remarks: «I don’t engage in formal exploration for its own sake. I choose the medium that appears to be most useful for a particular occasio n or purpose» . 16 When asked if Taking Stock could have employed a photograph of Thatcher instead, Haacke answers with a definitive no, because «photography doesn’t have the aura of painting». 17 In this case, the aura clearly has to do with the specific socio - political re lations denoted by institutionally exhibited painting in the 80s. By inscribing this information into his work, Haacke can utilize various artistic forms to evoke the same critique. The medium is not the (entire) message, but is clearly the container for t he critique; the message is produced by the material/immater ial work constituting its form, and therefore producing its content. This painting emphasizes a particular shortcoming of terminology applied to historicizing the aforementioned conceptual turn; i n particular, we are reminded of Martha Buskirk’s problematizing of the term «dematerialization». In her book The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art , she argues that by displacing once - coveted (modern) artistic autonomy and the singular artwork’s presup posed authenticity, conceptual artists inevitably strengthen the interdependence between the artist and each iteration of an artwork. 18 Such a work, seeking to do away with authenticity, somewhat paradoxically, becomes progressively more contingent upon the artist’s «hand», which we might refer to as (conceptual) skill. As John Roberts notes of such a «reskilling» and «hand»: following the development of immaterial forms of production and the readymade’s becoming an artistic tradition, « the place and functio n of the hand changes 4 its role in art». 19 There emerges «a new set of cognitive relations between eye and hand», according to Roberts, and « skill reemerges as the craft of reproducibility and the craft of copying without copying, realigning the emergent totipotentiality of the hand with general social technique». 20 Placing, ordering, and selecting (Roberts) take the place of leaving a painted mark on the canvas — though Haacke does both the former and latte r in his painting : this dual - gesture fostering the crux of the work’s critical strength.