Hans Haacke
When Hans Haacke began as an artist he was very interested in natural processes. He was quite minimalist. He produced cubic boxes titled ‘Condensation Cubes’. But he took minimalism a step forward because he was interested in what context will cold condensation in the interior of those boxes have . If we think about condensation it is a manifestation of something what is invisible - pressure change. He took this idea - the manifestation of something invisible - and looked at social structure in this way. Just the natural law operated in the world. Haacke compared the invisible in the box (represented by condensation) to the invisible structure by which the society is lead.
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Hans Haacke does not produce pretty pictures. What he tends to do is to produce documents and on the bases of those documents he makes political or social claims.Because he is conceptualist and he is not interested in expressing himself but he looks for publicly available information in terms of texts and photographs. He attempts to draw attention to those invisible, political contexts of the way museums operate in the world.
He recalled :
“I became politicized, like a lot of people. As I had been dealing with what I considered, at the time, to be physical and biological ‘systems’ it appeared to be only logical, from the point of view of general system theory, and particularly in view of what was happening in the social arena, also to address social issues. That seemed to require a shift in medium ... That led me to the incorporation of words. Our social relations are structured and largely intelligible through verbal constructs. This development in my work coincided with the influx of words into the art scene of the period”(Sandler, 1997)