Courtesy of the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York And, of course, he is in the National Gallery with the painting Whistlejacket, and the work began to come together.”Ĭirculation, 1969 by Hans Haacke. “I knew Stubbs from the Tate gallery and other places, but I didn’t know he had dissected horses and made these engravings. But to really speak about what is going on these days it had to be a skeleton and so I started to do some research.” He was directed towards George Stubbs’s 1766 book, The Anatomy of the Horse. “Then the more I thought and learned about the space, including the fact that an equestrian statue was originally meant to be on the plinth” – of William IV, but the money ran out before it was completed in 1840 – “I wanted to do something with a horse. Nearly all of his work primarily draws on its location, and he says Gift Horse was always going to include some reference to the City of London as well as an oblique reference to Adam Smith’s “invisible hand of the market”. In the decades since, he has continued to draw attention to the often hidden connections behind society, politics, business and art, in work that has traced the Nazi background of prominent collectors and of the German Venice Biennale pavilion, and exposed the links between British Leyland and apartheid South Africa, as well as in projects that have criticised individuals – Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Charles Saatchi, Senator Jesse Helms – and tobacco and oil companies with links to art institutions. (Haacke wasn’t invited back until the end of the 80s.) A year later, Haacke had a work about the business of a notorious New York slumlord banned by the Guggenheim museum on the grounds that he had “aims that lie beyond art”. He added that he was sure it “will get people talking”, which was a pretty safe bet as Haacke’s work has had no problem getting people talking since his 1970 Museum of Modern Art piece, MoMA Poll, embarrassed the re-election campaign of Governor Nelson Rockefeller – a leading MoMA donor and former museum president whose brother David was chairman at the time – in relation to the Vietnam war. Johnson certainly sounded enthusiastic enough when he claimed that the work “encapsulates the dynamic mix of history and the contemporary that makes London such an exciting cultural capital”. “There is no way that something that plays with Wall Street in this fashion would ever be approved under the auspices of the mayor.” “The reason I thought it would not be accepted was that I knew what would have happened in New York,” explains the 78-year-old German born artist, who has lived and worked in Manhattan for the last 50 years. The work could be read in many ways, but few people would miss the implied critique of the relationships between power, money, art, privilege and history – the project, backed by the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, was to be sited outside the National Gallery during a period of unprecedented financial speculation in art. However, the project did appeal to him and he set about working up an idea for a 13ft-high sculpture of a horse skeleton cast in bronze, which would be finished off with a digital-display ribbon tied around a foreleg, like a bow on a present, which would show live prices from the London stock exchange. Except in Burgess’ story it is argued that primal instincts like violence and sex cannot be reformed since it is breaking the human condition, whereas Phillipson’s piece shifts the perspective of desperately attempting to cling to structure.When the artist Hans Haacke was asked to submit a proposal for a statue to occupy the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, his initial reaction was that it was a “good joke” to invite him but there was no way his work would be accepted. To extend the senses of the fly as the invisible eye to the point of automation is the natural end of modernism. What can be considered organic, like the cherry, is infested by greed and its mechanical extension. It’s in this brief analysis I’m reminded of Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange. The cherry that sits on-top, rich and saturated, is toppling over the structure It confronts our expectations of symbols and their combinations, as if it were jigsaw pieces that do not match. Hedonistic iconography, something as simple as sugary sweetness, can dismantle the status quo. This piece forcibly exposes the themes of corruptible democracy, the distrust of government surveillance and the imminent dangers of nationalistic pride. I felt the same feeling of belittlement that were present for The Age of Love.
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