German Parliament Approves Haacke Installation - Brief Article

Art in America, May, 2000 by Christopher Phillips

On Apr. 5 the German parliament, the Bundestag, voted narrowly to confirm Hans Haacke's invitation to carry out a hotly contested new installation in the Reichstag building in Berlin. The 260-to-258 vote brought to a conclusion a dispute that had flared up at precisely the same moment that Haacke's contribution to the Whitney Biennial was rasing the hackles of the work's target, New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

The controversy began in January, when the German legislature's art advisory panel invited Haacke to create a piece for the Reichstag, as part of a public-art project that has already seen a number of contemporary paintings and sculptures placed in the building [see A.i.A., Feb. '00]. When the details of Haacke's proposal were announced, however, members of the conservative Christian Democratic Union circulated a petition denouncing the planned work, prompting a full parliamentary debate on its merit.

What triggered this heated reaction was doubtless the work's skeptical allusion to "blood and soil"--a phrase associated with the Third Reich--in regard to present-day German identity. Haacke's proposal calls for a large wooden trough to be placed in an atrium of the Reichstag and filled with samples of earth from each of the country's 328 electoral districts. From this soil bed will grow an intentionally wild, uncultivated mix of vegetation--a symbolic counter to the Nazi dream of a homogeneous, eugenically bred German race. Above the trough, Haacke envisions a neon sign whose letters read "Der Bevolkerung" (To the Population)--words meant to play off the inscription chiseled above the Reichstag entranceway, "Dem deutschen Volk" (To the German People). Haacke says that his phrase offers a purposely dry and statistical alternative to the still-powerful idea that the German people, or Volk, is a community based primarily on blood kinship--a notion that the artist regards as outdated in a modern nation with a large immigrant population.

Artistically, the proposed work recalls Haacke's earliest process-art pieces, such as the mound of sprouting earth that he showed in a museum gallery at Cornell in 1969 under the title Grass Grows. It is also a clear successor to the artist's prize-winning installation at the 1993 Venice Biennale, where the stone floor of the German pavilion was broken up as a way of questioning the country's revived nationalist fervor. However, with the question of the legal status of immigrants currently a hot-button issue in Germany, and with the reference to "blood and soil" triggering uncomfortable memories of the Nazi era, Haacke's proposed work was criticized by some German commentators, including cultural minister Michael Naumann, as an unwarranted political provocation. Yet as one former member of the parliamentary art commission drily observed, "When you order a Haacke, you shouldn't be surprised when you get a Haacke."