Hans Haake – Working Conditions, The Writings of Hans Haake (MIT Writing Art Series)
Hans Haake’s shopping lists must be amazing. He has a way of putting things down on a single A4 sheet that makes them stick on the walls of art student digs and then adhere all the way through to their mature studio spaces and beyond. He’s right up there, along with Dieter Roth.
His statements veer between the completely distilled and the wide open and suggestive. For instance one untitled piece from the early 1960s that provides the exact crosshair position of contemporary avant garde art, next to the ‘why don’t you switch off your television set go off and do something less boring instead’ pieces (I’m sure he would have approved).
After Duchamp, after Fluxus, this is a game and the pieces on the board move. Duchamp was a great chess player, running several simultaneous international games by post from his flat. Haake understands that this is now the territory and as Lyotard explained everything is a move in a game, but if there are no rules, there is no game. Haake is a master player of the new ruleless game.
But Haake’s ‘game’ isn’t the international art career he has. The pieces in this book the writing corresponds to are livid, anti-capitalist, through and through.
Documenta, which Haake is so associated with, came out of need to revive the avant garde after the Nazis destroyed it. Haake then goes on to make the most furious political, informed pieces, persistently, and persistently with humour, for the rest of his career, something that is little short of miraculous. No postmodern bubbles for Haake.
This is a book you can live in. When Haake writes ‘articulate something natural’ those three words contain the whole philosophical understanding that art is not nature, that articulation is language, visual or otherwise. Three words by Haake are that good. They are worth a thousand by lesser artists and writers.
These instruction-based pieces are the counterpoints to the micro-manifesto style writing. In fact on second thoughts, Hans Haake’s shopping lists are probably just shopping lists.
In this spirit, surely Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt took some inspiration from Hans Haake when putting Oblique Strategies together?
‘Just carry on.’
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