German Parliament Approves Haacke Installation - Brief Article

upon Apr. 5 the German parliament, the Bundestag, vot narrowly to confirm Hans Haacke's invitation to carry on the outside a hotly contested new installation in the Reichstag building in Berlin. The 260-to-258 promised brought to a conclusion a dispute that had flared up at precisely the same point of time that Haacke's contribution to the Whitney Biennial was rasing the hackles of the work's target, novel York mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

The discussion 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 cast that has already seen a number of contemporary paintings and statuarys 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 filled 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 made of wood 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 expand an intentionally wild, uncultivated mix of vegetation--a symbolic reckoner to the Nazi dream of a homogeneous, eugenically br German race. Above the long tray Haacke envisions a neon sign whose alphabetic characters read "Der Bevolkerung" (To the Population)--words meant to play not on the inscription chiseled above the Reichstag entranceway, "Dem deutschen Volk" (To the German People) Haacke says that his phrase proffers a purposely dry and statistical alternative to the still-powerful idea that the German family or Volk, is a community based primarily upon blood kinship--a notion that the artist regards as outdated in a present nation with a large immigrant population.

Artistically, the propos work recalls Haacke's earliest process-art pieces, of that kind as the mound of sprouting earth that he showed in a museum gallery at Cornell in 1969 beneath 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 rent up as a way of questioning the country's revived nationalist fervor. However, with the question of the legal status of immigrants publicly a hot-button issue in Germany, and with the regard to "blood and soil" triggering uncomfortable memories of the Nazi era, Haacke's propos work was criticized by means of some German commentators, including cultural minister Michael Naumann, as an unwarranted political provocation. still as one former member of the parliamentary art commission drily observ "When you order a Haacke, you shouldn't be surprised when you obtain a Haacke."

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