CAMBRIDGE, MA.- The MIT List Visual Arts Center presents Hans Haacke 1967, an exhibition that revisits Hans Haacke’s solo exhibition at MIT from that year, together with ephemeral works that both preceded and followed the 1967 show. When invited to do a solo exhibition in 1967, Haacke was known as a “kinetic” artist—yet he made it clear upon arriving that his works were now to be called “systems,” produced with the “explicit intention of having their components physically communicate with each other, and the whole communicate physically with the environment,” according to the artist’s statements in 1967. The exhibition included Grass, in which a mound of dirt was seeded with grass that grew inside the gallery; Weather Cube, in which water droplets condensed in response to the gallery temperature and humidity; Ice Stick, a six-foot refrigerated column on which ambient moisture froze and melted; Wide White Flow, constructed of white fabric and fans specifically for the MIT show; and a 1,400-foot string of balloons flown as an outdoor piece. For the present installation, many of the works from Haacke’s solo 1967 exhibition are brought together again for the first time in fourty-four years. The exhibition is organized for MIT’s List Visual Arts Center by Caroline A. Jones, professor in the History, Theory, and Criticism Program at MIT.

While best known for politically charged work employing investigative methods and focusing attention on politicians and corporations, Haacke’s earlier work involves physical and biological systems. In 1967, the artist emphasized that his works were neither “sculpture” nor “kinetic” in the usual sense of either term. Many of these early works involved provoking and staging time-based events: wind in water vs. water in wind; the cycles of feedback systems of organic life; the dynamism of water in its solid state—freezing, evaporating, and melting; and the production of artificial climates. In retrospect, it can be seen how the later work with “social systems” relates to these experiments, but what Hans Haacke 1967 will reveal is the strength of the artist’s early interest in nonhuman systems.

Although some photographic material related to the original 1967 exhibition at MIT exists (published at the time in The Tech) no significant documentation or critical text on this important project has ever been produced. This exhibition revisits a significant body of work and documents MIT’s long-standing commitment to contemporary art. The result of intensive research and collaboration with the artist, Hans Haacke 1967 both reinvents the solo exhibition that the artist produced at MIT and contextualizes it within his broader research. The exhibition is accompanied by a scholarly catalogue that includes an essay by Jones, statements from Haacke, and an introduction to Haacke’s work written by the late Edward Fry that has never before been available in English.

HANS HAACKE
Hans Haacke is a world-renowned artist whose work explores, both natural (such as geological and meteorological) and social (including governmental and corporate). Born in Cologne, Germany, in 1936, Haacke received his degree in 1960 from the Staatliche Werkakademie in Kassel, Germany. He then worked in Paris at the print studio of Stanley William Hayter, and made his first trip to the United States, on a Fulbright fellowship, to study at the Tyler School of Art of Temple University in Philadelphia in 1961. In his early work, Haacke’s use of water and air was influenced by his involvement with Group Zero, an international group of artists interested in finding new and often kinetic materials with which to make art. After working in Cologne for several years, Haacke moved to the U.S. in 1965 and began teaching; his primary position was at the Cooper Union in New York, where he was a professor of art from 1967 to 2002. He has also taught at universities in Seattle, Philadelphia, Hamburg, Essen, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and, in 1993, the College Art Association’s Distinguished Teaching of Art Award and Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement. Haacke received the Golden Lion (which he shared with Nam June Paik) at the 1993 Venice Biennale for his site-specific installation Germania in the German Pavilion. The German parliament invited him in 1998 to propose an art project for the renovated Bundestag; after much public debate, the permanent installation was completed and inaugurated as Der Bevolkerung (“Of the Population”) in 2000. Throughout his distinguished career, Haacke has exhibited in numerous solo and group shows around the world. In 2006, he was the subject of a career-long retrospective titled Hans Haacke: wirklich, Werke 1959–2006, which was shown at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin and the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg. He has participated in many documenta exhibitions in Kassel and in biennials in New York, Venice, Sydney, São Paulo, Johannesburg, Gwangju, and most recently Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates. He lives and works in New York City.

CAROLINE A. JONES
Caroline A. Jones, director of the History, Theory, and Criticism Program and professor of art history at MIT, studies modern and contemporary art, with a particular focus on its technological modes of production, distribution, and reception. Prior to completing her PhD at Stanford, she worked at the Museum of Modern Art (1977-83) and the Harvard University Art Museums (1983-85), and completed two documentary films. In addition to these institutions, her exhibitions and/or films have been shown at such venues as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo. Jones is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, among others, and has been honored by fellowships at Wellesley's Newhouse Center for the Humanities (2010-11), the Institut national d'histoire de l'art, Paris (2006), the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and the Max Planck Institut (2001-2), the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton (1994-95), and the Stanford Humanities Center (1986-87). Her books include Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (2005) and Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist (1996/98). She was the co-editor of Picturing Science, Producing Art (1998) and the editor of Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art, which accompanied an exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in 2006-7. She is currently completing a book on Desires for the World Picture: The Global Work of Art.