Hans Haacke: Mixed Messages was part of Give & Take, one exhibition across two sites: Serpentine and the V&A.
Give & Take was an unprecedented partnership between Serpentine and the Victoria and Albert Museum. This innovative exhibition, presented concurrently at both institutions, provided a unique opportunity to experience unexpected connections between contemporary art and art of the past.
Serpentine presented Mixed Messages, an installation work by the renowned conceptual artist Hans Haacke comprising objects he had selected from across the V&A’s permanent collections during a series of research visits over the previous year. In exchange a group exhibition of fifteen contemporary artists was shown in a number of the V&A’s galleries and spaces.
Offered unparalleled access to its collections, Hans Haacke studied objects and artefacts from the V&A as as well as the history of the museum, then re-presenting a selection of those objects at Serpentine.
Haacke described his exhibition in 2001:
“A precursor to the classic European museum was the ‘Wunderkammer’, or cabinet of curiosities. Humanist scholars and princes assembled oddities of all kinds as subjects of study, wonderment and trophies of conquest. Curiosities in the sense of the strange and exotic were met by the curiosity of the inquisitive eye and mind (Sir John Soane’s house in London is a late manifestation of this adventurous spirit). Hierarchies of ‘high’ and ‘low’ did not exist in these collections. The knowledge pursued was encyclopaedic – and the capacity to marvel paramount. In certain respects this spirit is antecedent to attitudes behind today’s anthropologically inspired study of ‘material culture’.
When I began wandering through the galleries of the V&A in preparation of this exhibition I decided to approach it as if it were such a ‘Wunderkammer’. I took photographs of everything that for one reason or another piqued my curiosity. Curators generously drew my attention to works that, based on my conversations with them, they suspected would be of interest to me. During this exploratory stage, I found myself returning over and over again to a loosely-knit set of themes. I was reminded of a phenomenon I had experienced before, namely, that objects signify one thing when they are seen alone, but have a very different meaning when viewed in combination with others. As is the case with all selections and arrangements, this very process inevitably ‘puts a spin on them’. Even in isolation, depending on one’s ideological make-up, they evoke a host of meanings.
A striking example for an image with multiple and contradictory semantic layers is a photograph by Marco Jindrich titled ‘A Souvenir of Warsaw, 1942’. We see a photographer taking a picture of two Polish soldiers with rifles at the ready. They pose in front of a backdrop with a painting of a bucolic landscape. The photo session takes place in the middle of the ruins of Warsaw. Equally poignant is a doll in the Museum of Childhood. It comes with interchangeable heads: a black boy’s head, a white boy’s and a white girl’s head, as well as a choice of black and white limbs. One black arm is considered too fragile for a journey from Bethnal Green to South Kensington.
Taking the ‘Wunderkammer’ as a model for my exhibition. I opt for hybridisation, the discontinuous and non-linear. Seemingly coherent systems of museum classification are disregarded (in fact, most of them have little to do with the role the objects played in their ‘native’ environments). Instead I embrace ambiguity and contradiction. The inclusion of objects I personally like or view as ‘masterworks’ is matched by the selection of items I find ridiculous or despicable. Such a ‘frivolous’ disruption of the customary order is likely to cause semantic turbulence. It provokes the naïfs – and I count myself among them – to take up the challenge of making sense in different ways, namely according to our own life experiences in today’s society. This creative process, full of the pleasures of free association and discovery, is comparable to a parlour game I played as a child, a game that gained art-historical recognition when it was adopted in the 1920s by the Surrealists: the exquisite corpse. This resurrection of disparate parts as a coherent composite is related to another Surrealist technique for the production of meanings, a provocative example for which is Comte de Lautréamont’s notorious meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table. In Mixed Messages I act as a “social secretary” who puts together a guest list and a seating order hoping that a sly arrangement of unexpected encounters will bear fruit.” Hans Haacke, 2001
Conceptualised and selected by Lisa G. Corrin, this spirited and thought-provoking exhibition merged two institutional sensibilities and challenged assumptions about concepts within the visual arts, such as the definition of beauty or the distinction typically made between fine and decorative art.
Give & Take
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