The heyday of Hans Haacke

At MIT, a fascinating look at artist’s ’60s exploration of relationships between phenomena

December 16, 2011|By Sebastian Smee, Globe Staff

In this installation view from the exhibit Hans Haacke 1967, a balloon floats… (MIT LIST VISUAL ARTS CENTER )

HANS HAACKE 1967 At: MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, through Dec. 31. 617-253-4680. listart.mit.edu

CAMBRIDGE - Over the course of this year, as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology celebrated its 150th anniversary, the List Visual Arts Center has mounted a series of four solo shows devoted to artists who were associated with MIT in the ’60s and ’70s. Each of these shows has resuscitated a figure who rose to prominence in that time, be it Stan VanDerBeek and Juan Downey, both now deceased, or the still living and working Otto Piene and Hans Haacke.

Taken together, the shows have reminded us of the incredible audacity and idealism still palpable in the air during this period of rapid technological and political change. In the process, they have uncovered fascinating - and at times traumatic - tensions in the relationships between advanced art, advanced technology, and politics.

The latest of them, ending on the last day of 2011, is “Hans Haacke 1967.’’ Coinciding with a wonderful two-room installation by Piene, the show will pique your interest regardless of whether you know anything about its origins.

But its origins are fascinating indeed, and may well trigger a flurry of ideas and inquiries.

The first thing to know about the show is that it is a basically faithful re-creation of a show Haacke mounted at MIT in 1967, with the addition of contextualizing documentary photographs from Haacke’s personal archive in a separate gallery. That show had been largely forgotten. But spurred by the artist and former List director Jane Farver, MIT art historian Caroline Jones undertook a major research effort and has succeeded in restaging an event (and, more than most exhibitions, it really does qualify as an event, unfolding in time) that looks as compelling now as it must have more than 40 years ago.

Many of the works needed to be re-fabricated. They are almost all either in motion or (in the botanical sense) alive. One combines two immiscible liquids held between two transparent sheets of plexiglass; you are invited to turn it upside down and watch the liquids settle into new formations.

Another is a kind of tubular parachute that hovers above a vertical air current. A third is a white balloon that floats in the center of the room, held in place by a curious, brain-teasing equilibrium of forces: gravity and an oblique jet of air.

There are also two patches of growing grass, one square and flat, the other a conical mound. There’s a thin vertical copper tube around which moisture condenses and turns to ice. And there’s a clear plexiglass cube with condensation forming lacy patterns as it runs down the sides.