Cameron Rowland at Daniel Buchholz & Etablissement d’en face projects

(Daniel Buchholz, Etablissement d’en face projects)

The critique of calling these Hans Haacke 2.0 would assumedly miss the point: it's more important to take up the mantle of real issues than to redesign its heraldry; the political real takes precedence over aesthetic peacocking. And that "Information" depicting, say, the lineage of certain institutions sketchy holdings as plain as possible might always look like that. And while Haacke's interest centered on the more poisonous assets of art, Rowland's purview concerned with the much larger systemically disenfranchised upon whose sweat these institutions were built and remain standing despite. For both artists the unadorned information/objects in both come across as ominous. Held blankly on walls and floors with little comment both artist's objects come across as simultaneous threat and dejection. No museum today would handle censorship the way the Guggenheim did with Haacke, rejecting his exhibition and firing the curator. Today with similar information you could hold a whole Museum PR department hostage or - and perhaps this where the dejection comes in - things would continue as they are. Maybe Fred Wilson's Mining the Museum is the better example.



See too: Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda at 356 Mission

“The Contract” at Essex Street

(“The Contract” at Essex Street)
Artists: Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda, Maria Eichhorn, Wade Guyton, Hans Haacke, Park McArthur, R. H. Quaytman, Cameron Rowland, Carissa Rodriguez

Haacke’s overt literalism was due to its merely exposing what was read between lines, its belief in the act of transparency. Oddly everyone in this exhibition - which takes its title in reference to Haacke - makes work that is overtly opaque, obfuscating and mysteriorizing itself in the opacity of its use of cultural symbols. If Haacke’s work was about transparency in the value extracted from art objects, the rest of the work in the show is about contemporary art’s extraction of value/content from culture, complicit in its own theft of value, “borrowing” symbols that were never lent. While appropriation foregrounds its act of theft, this exhibition’s implicit form is a possibly insidious version that guises itself as a form of critical doubling. Quaytman’s “borrowing” of Andrea Fraser’s most vertiginous performance, reprinting it under her own brand image - even if old orchard friends - placing even what has become her logo over the top of the image, what is this but a strange form of theft among friends? Is this exhibition an homage to "Haacke’s" seminal contract, which attempting through transparency to ink slight power to artist’s, or a simple vampiring of cultural capital of it, placing artists, literally, around it as if osmotically credibility it would absorb.
"Haacke’s" poster, contract, and idea was free; I can’t imagine anything else in this show is.