In 1971, the cancellation of an exhibition of Hans Haacke's work at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York defined this artist for an audience largely unfamiliar with his work. The most notorious of the pieces that offended the Guggenheim's director, Thomas Messer, was entitled Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971. Consisting of maps of Harlem and the Lower East Side, 142 photographs of buildings, and explanatory notes about their ownership and value, the work was based on information about the affairs of convicted rent gouger Harry Shapolsky that Haacke had culled from the New York County Clerk's office. Although no Shapolsky family member sat on the Guggenheim's board (contrary to popular belief), Messer cancelled the show, characterizing the installation as "an alien substance that had entered the museum organism" and unquestionably needed to be fended off.

By identifying the pressure point where an increasingly corporatized art world attempts to neutralize abrasive social realities through sophisticated public relations, Haacke found his mÈtier. During the seventies and eighties, no issue seemed too large or complex, no corporation or government too powerful for Haacke to take on. His subjects have included breaches of civil rights in South Africa and Germany, the manipulation of museums by corporations and well-placed individuals, and the Orwellian doublespeak and repressive cultural policies of the Thatcher and Reagan regimes. A 1983 exhibition of Haacke's work at New York's John Weber Gallery included a particularly witty and incisive piece called Reaganomics, consisting of a lightbox showing a portrait of the former president with a caption below reading, "Yes, my son collects unemployment, too! Reaganomics."

Haacke's corporate targets have included Mobil, General Electric, Allied Chemical, Chase Manhattan Bank, British Leyland, Philips, Alcan, Saatchi & Saatchi, and the Ludwig Chocolate empire. Of his pieces aimed at corporate targets, one of the best known is The Saatchi Collection (Simulations), a 1987 installation at Victoria Miro Gallery in London that addressed the advertising mega-firm's South African subsidiary and the corporation's participation in the apartheid regime. The piece included a page from the company's 1985 annual report emblazoned with the phrase, "As Lenin said, everything is connected to everything else." The Saatchi corporation's renowned collection of contemporary art--and the power the Saatchis have long wielded in the art market--adds a deeper and more caustic resonance to Haacke's implied critique in the piece.

The artist does not, however, work from a predetermined shopping list of issues; he is typically inspired by what he reads in the press, or by a site at which he has been invited to exhibit. In 1988, Haacke was commissioned to produce a public artwork for the annual Styrian Autumn Festival's exhibition, Points of Reference 38/88, in Graz, Austria. The 38/88 designation referred to the fiftieth anniversary of Hitler's annexation of Austria, and an international roster of invited artists created works for locations in Graz that are identified with the Nazi regime, including the local Gestapo headquarters, city hall, and squares where Nazi rallies had been held. Haacke selected a prominent city square graced with the seventeenth-century Mariens”ule (column of the Virgin Mary). In 1938, it had been the site of a Nazi rally, for which it had been covered with a huge obelisk topped with a fire bowl and decorated with the Nazi insignia and the inscription und ihr habt doch gesiegt (and you were victorious after all). Taking this inscription for the title of his piece, Haacke recreated the Nazi obelisk precisely, adding a text around its base that described the fates of the nearly 60,000 Graz residents killed or missing in the war. Nearby, Haacke erected a billboard that included facsimiles of 1938 documents detailing Nazi confiscations and "Aryanization" campaigns, including a newspaper's upbeat account of the burning of a synagogue. The work instigated massive media coverage and public discussion, and on the night of 2 November 1988, it was firebombed. This act of arson was later discovered to be the work of a young neo-Nazi and an elderly Nazi. Both were arrested, and the vandalism prompted renewed public discussion and demonstrations.

Some of Haacke's projects have not reached fruition. This month, John Weber Gallery is exhibiting a maquette for a proposed work that was commissioned and subsequently rejected by the French government last year because of its implicit criticism of racial discrimination. In 1989, the French government asked Haacke, along with five other artists, to create a plan for a public artwork in the courtyard of the Palais Bourbon to commemorate the bicentennial of the birth of the National Assembly in 1789. Haacke's proposal consisted of two elements: the first would convert the formal garden in the courtyard into a single plot in the shape of France. On this "map," typical French crops would be grown in ecologically sound, four-year cycles (including a fallow year) and maintained with traditional farming, rather than formal gardening, methods. This mini-farm would symbolize France's agricultural base, and its sometimes necessarily disheveled appearance would stand in contrast to the manicured gardens of Versailles and the imposition of what Haacke calls the "royal will on nature."

The second part of the plan called for the creation of a smooth cone, four and a half meters high and twelve meters in diameter at the base, fashioned from 577 rocks, one from each electoral district. From the summit of the cone, a jet of water would shoot fifteen meters into the air. The water that collected in the trough around the cone's base would then flow through a breach in the nearby balustrade and around the map-shaped plot. The inscription was to be the French revolutionary motto, libertÈ, egalitÈ, fraternitÈ, prominently featured in raised gold calligraphy on the cone--written in Arabic. Says Haacke, "France has a population of three million Muslim immigrants who are widely discriminated against. It's ridiculous to speak of equality, fraternity, and liberty, just as it is in the United States with blacks and hispanics. The national credo has no meaning; it's a litany, and France is not unique in that." Not surprisingly, the work was rejected. "As I anticipated," says Haacke, "the inscription made it impossible for the jury to select my proposal."

Born in Cologne in 1936, Haacke has lived and worked in the United States since 1961. A recipient of the equivalent of a MFA from the State Art Academy in Kassel in 1960, he applied for two fellowships and received both. The first, a German State Academic Exchange Service or DAAD scholarship, took him to Paris, where he worked with the legendary printmaker Stanley Hayter and came to know many of the artists involved with GRAV (the Group de Recherche d'Art Visuel), a loose association of artists interested in new, technological materials and processes. The second, a Fulbright fellowship, brought him to Philadelphia's Tyler School of Art. Since 1963, he has made New York his home, apart from a two-year stint in Germany (1963-65) required by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Why did he come back to the United States? "When I returned to Germany," he says, "the political and social atmosphere there was extremely stifling. It was quite alive here, and personal factors also came into play--my wife is from New York."

Recognized as today's most celebrated political artist (since the death of fellow German Joseph Beuys in 1987), Haacke recalls becoming politically sensitized in New York during the late 1960s. For Haacke, the non-art events of that turbulent decade--the student movement, civil rights, Vietnam, events in Paris and Berlin--decisively influenced his development. "They had a great impact on my movement toward the social-political," he remembers. "I was looking at the individuals and institutions that play a big role in the art world--the trustees of museums and the museums themselves--as well as the ideological impregnation of art and how it is presented to the public. What happened outside the art world during the late sixties helped me understand that it is all part of the general fabric of society. It is not something separate."

Many commentators and critics, however, didn't see it that way. They tried to "legitimize" Haacke's work by likening his practice of quoting from public records and the media to the use of real-life debris in cubist collage or "ready-mades" in dada objects. Now that art is no longer trapped at the end of this aestheticizing limb, however, it seems more fruitful to compare Haacke's work to that of artists, filmmakers, and novelists of a documentary persuasion: consider Truman Capote's docu-novel In Cold Blood; Antonio Muntada's Boardroom, a video installation that has electronic portraits of televangelists mouthing their own pieties; Marcel Broodthaer's installations critiquing exhibition presentations; and Errol Morris' recent film, The Thin Blue Line, which resulted in the retrial of a man wrongly convicted of murder. Such lucid and impeccably researched works wear their politics on their sleeves not because of personal passion or expressionistic style, but through the cool and rational appearance of objectivity.

Haacke's interest in the interconnectedness of systems--social, political, physical, or biological--as a viable source of artistic inspiration and expression was also piqued by the work of critic and curator Jack Burnham, whose writings on the language of systems and cybernetics Haacke first encountered during the mid-1960s. Haacke's earliest experimentation with systems theory examined biological and physical phenomena, harnessing natural elements such as wind or water to create works that critiqued conventional exhibition practices. In 1967, Haacke strung a series of large white balloons across the sky over Central Park, converting it into an aerial gallery. He transformed a gallery floor at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1969 into a circulation system comprised of branching, fluid-filled plastic tubes. A 1965 exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto consisted of a brood of chicks hatching. His fluid-filled "condensation boxes" of that era responded to changes in temperature, creating atmospheric, mini-weather systems that are perhaps the best known of Haacke's early works, being the most traditional in format and therefore the easiest to exhibit.

Under the emerging umbrella of conceptual art, Haacke's work--and the broad-based conceptual movement itself--was introduced into the mainstream via two major museum shows in 1970: Information at the Museum of Modern Art and Software at the Jewish Museum, both in New York. Haacke participated in both by conducting polls - part of a series of poll-works he produced between 1969 and 1973. His two-part contribution to Software consisted of five teletype machines transmitting news dispatches from wire services such as UPI, and a computerized poll intended to provide a statistical profile of museum visitors and their opinions. Unfortunately, the complex, "branched" software, developed in conjunction with computer specialists at MIT, never worked. (This experience prompted Haacke to wryly comment that "in retrospect, it put a chill on my enthusiasm for high tech.") For the MOMA-Poll, in the aptly named Information show, visitors were asked, "Would the fact that Governor Rockefeller has not denounced President Nixon's Indochina policy be a reason for you not to vote for him in November?" Over sixty-eight percent responded "yes," and some of them must have appreciated the irony attendant in the Rockefeller family's longstanding involvement with the museum.

Throughout the seventies and eighties, Haacke continued to refine his ideas about the interconnections between art, nature, and socio-political systems--"the general fabric of society." Just as Burnham had stimulated his thinking about systems analysis during the sixties, so did the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger's essays about what he dubbed "the consciousness industry" impress Haacke during the following decades. Taking Enzensberger as his point of departure, Haacke explains that "art in the art world, and culture in general, are branches of the media, which produces our political and social thinking climate. Television and newspapers are much more powerful, but there are crossovers. There is a reflection--and it goes both ways--between art and media; especially through advertising and public relations." The use of Enzensberger's resonant terms provided Haacke with an effective vocabulary for analyzing connections between powerful, immaterial forces, thus allowing him to avoid strict ideology.

Haacke is one of the few artists (Victor Burgin and Judith Barry are others) who grapple with the multidirectional influence of advertising and public relations. Although it brought the unsavory reality of real estate speculation inside the temple of art, Shapolsky et al. only suggested the interpenetration of the cultural and political. Works such as MetroMobiltan articulate the active role museums play in the creation of social consciousness and political reality. For this piece, a large architectural installation exhibited at John Weber in 1985, Haacke suspended three banners from a twenty-foot-long fiberglass model of a classical architectural detail whose design is based on the cornices of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. The left and right banners read, respectively, "Mobil's management in New York believes that its South African subsidiaries' sales to the police and military are but a small part of its total sales. Mobil." and, "Total denial of supplies to the police and military forces of a host country is hardly consistent with an image of responsible citizenship in that country. Mobil." The center banner is a reproduction of one that once hung in front of the museum, advertising the gold-laden Treasures of Ancient Nigeria, which Mobil sponsored in 1980. A black and white photomural, visible behind and alongside the banners, shows a funeral procession of black victims of the South African police at Crossroads, near Cape Town, on March 16, 1985. The cornice bears a plaque that reads: "Many public relations opportunities are available through the sponsorship of programs, special exhibitions, and services. These can often provide a creative and cost-effective answer to a specific marketing objective, particularly where international governmental or consumer relations may be a fundamental concern. The Metropolitan Museum of Art." The texts and images of MetroMobiltan suggest that, by supporting apartheid, the policies of Mobil and the Metropolitan Museum result in the deaths of black South Africans.

While the message of this piece is readily accessible, its subtext and sources are quite complex. The texts on the left and right banners come from Mobil's response to a 1981 shareholder resolution offered by a coalition of churches to prohibit sales to the South African military and police. The text on the plaque quotes from a museum leaflet aimed at corporations, reminding us that museum grants are not spontaneously generated but actively solicited. In the essays and notes that accompany his exhibited works, Haacke often provides additional information as a context for his art. (Haacke does all his own research, explaining that he would need to hire high-priced professionals to ferret out the specialized information he seeks.) In conjunction with MetroMobiltan, he notes that Mobil has provided grants for numerous so-called primitive art shows, frequently of works from countries where the corporation has major holdings and plans to expand its operations. The relatively recent use of banners at the Met has been interpreted by numerous observers as the product of the hype-and-blockbuster mentality that has made museums obsessively attentive to attendance figures and largely dependent on corporate support. Not surprisingly, Haacke derives very little support from corporations. Even prior to the MetroMobiltan exhibit, Mobil had tried to prevent Haacke from using the company's logo in a 1984 catalog from the Tate Museum by delaying its publication.

Nor do major corporations acquire his works. Unlike many artists, Haacke knows exactly who owns his work because he demands that prospective purchasers sign a contract. Known as the Siegelaub contract, because it was first conceived by the pioneering conceptual art dealer Seth Siegelaub and attorney Robert Projansky in 1971, it grants the artist fifteen percent of any profits from a work's resale, rights to reproduction of its image and the right of consent to its public exhibition in a particular thematic context. Although the institution of artists' moral rights is common in Europe, Haacke notes that many collectors refuse to sign the contract. "It really irritates people when you start talking about property rights," he says. "It's a symbolic issue."

Symbolism is, of course, a major issue in Haacke's work. He is a master at pulling the rug out from underneath the timeworn cliches that have replaced living symbols, as he did in the Palais Bourbon proposal for the French government. For Haacke, the French National Assembly's rejection of his project is an affirmation of his astute critical sensibility. "I was gratified that my political assessment was correct," he says, "After all, I don't attack them for being real politicians."

In a world of real-politik, Haacke is, above all, a realist. He understands the exercise and limits of power. (He refuses to be photographed for publication or to discuss unfinished artworks, and he demands input on editing his quotes for clarity.) When talking about the effectiveness of his art, Haacke asserts, "I don't delude myself that I'm a powerful agent [of change]." In the cosmic scheme of things, he's right, of course. But the controversies that so many of his works foment belie this. As Haacke observes in measured understatement, "What happens in the art world can have considerable repercussions."