This paper examines Hans Haacke’s 1993 project Germania as a literal disruption of the utopic vision of the Venice Biennale as an international art event, specifically as it relates to the construction of national identity. As Jordan and Haladyn argue, Haacke’s project deconstructs the very foundation of the national identity of Germany that can be traced back to Hitler’s patronage and investment in the German pavilion; for Haacke the only way to undermine this elided history is to physically break up the ground of this exhibitionary space

Haladyn, Julian Jason

Jordan, Miriam

OCAD University Open Research Repository

OCAD University Open Research RepositoryFaculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences2008 Disrupting Utopia: Hans Haacke’s Germania or Digging Up the History of the Venice BiennaleHaladyn, Julian Jason and Jordan, Miriam Suggested citation: Haladyn, Julian Jason and Jordan, Miriam (2008) Disrupting Utopia: Hans Haacke’s Germania or Digging Up the History of the Venice Biennale. In: Charged Circuits: Questioning International Exhibition Practices, 14 Mar 2008, Montreal, Canada. (Unpublished) Available at http://openresearch.ocadu.ca/id/eprint/1340/Open Research is a publicly accessible, curated repository for the preservation and dissemination of scholarly and creative output of the OCAD University community. Material in Open Research is open access and made available via the consent of the author and/or rights holder on a non-exclusive basis. 1Disrupting Utopia: Hans Haacke’s Germania or Digging Up the History of theVenice BiennaleMiriam Jordan and Julian Jason HaladynEntering the German pavilion at the 45th Venice Biennale, visitors were confronted by alife-size photograph of Hitler’s June 14th visit to the pavilion during the 1934 Biennale.At this point in time, Hitler had been appointed chancellor of Germany in January 1933,but he would not officially become Führer until August 1934; Hitler’s visit to theBiennale took place only sixteen days before The Night of the Long Knives, when Hitlermurdered Ernst Röhm and eliminated the threat of the SA, securing his power andleading the way to his becoming Führer.1 This photograph, framed by the classicaldoorway of the pavilion, is directly juxtaposed with an oversized plastic reproduction of aDeutschmark coin occupying the former location of the eagle and swastika thatpreviously adorned the entrance.2 The coin and the photograph, representations ofcommerce and politics, are subtexts of the art world that Haacke continually references inhis artistic practice. The only way to enter the space of this pavilion was to walk underthe enlarged Deutschmark and confront the evidence of the photograph – documentingthe fact that Hitler stood in this very site and used the Venice Biennale, as he used manyinternational exhibitions, as an apparatus for disseminating Nazi ideals – which Haackerecontextualizes with his installation. In this manner, Haacke forces us to confront thehistorical and political context of the German pavilion as a site before we physically enterthe space of his 1993 installation Germania – the title ironically recalling Hitler’sgrandiose vision for a renamed Berlin, which would be ‘capital of the world’.Before discussing this installation, it is important that we investigate the contextHaacke is calling attention to through Germania, specifically the history of the VeniceBiennale. Similar to the international exhibitions that preceded it – such as the 1851Great Exhibition of the Arts and Manufactures of All Nations at the Crystal Palace inLondon, the 1867 Paris World’s Fair, and the 1873 Vienna World’s Fair – the VeniceBiennale was created in 1893 to be an attraction of international proportions, onefocusing on art as commerce. In “Gondola! Gondola!” Haacke describes the birth of theBiennale as a “desire for a global love-in…. It still moves masses of visitors to Venice ahundred years later. Riccardo Selvatico, an author of comedies and mayor from 1890 to1895, together with local artist-friends, invented the Biennale as an international salesexhibition.”3 The first foreign pavilion to be built was that of Belgium in 1907, followedby the British, German, and Hungarian Pavilions all in 1909. The Biennale currentlyhosts 29 pavilions, representing countries around the globe.4It is significant to note the correlation between the exhibition of art at the VeniceBiennale and the representation of nationhood through the establishment of thesepavilions. To exhibit within the context of a national pavilion is to represent that nation;this organizational strategy has been used in most, if not all, international exhibitionssince the Crystal Palace. Discussing the representation of nationhood within earlyinternational exhibitions – specifically referencing the Crystal Palace – Tony Bennettpoints to the principles organizing representations of “nations and the supra-nationalconstructs of empire and races,” which he points out are “developed into that of separatepavilions for each participating country.”5 This pavilionization of the space ofinternational exhibitions, far from a ‘natural’ process, cultivated a distinct relationship2between nations and the exhibition of culture, one based upon the spatial embodiment ofpolitical and economic progress. In other words, the pavilion of a country at aninternational exhibition, such as the Venice Biennale, is not simply a space for exhibitingartwork or cultural artifacts, but functions as an arena for the construction of a national orsupra-national identity. This identity, predicated upon the political and economic motivesof the specific country exhibiting, forms a representation of the nation as a progressiveand cultural empire or enterprise; the effects of this separation of spaces into nationalareas or zones imposed a rhetoric of progress onto “the relations between races andnations by superimposing the associations of the former on to the latter.”6 Through therhetoric of progress, therefore, the implementation of pavilions within internationalexhibitions, in this case the Venice Biennale, allows for the formation of an idealized andeven utopic representation of national identity through the controlled construction ofsupra-national displays of nationhood.7 These displays of national identity presented aform of international self-representation that functioned as constructed utopias,specifically designed to reflect the ideals of the country. This can be seen mostprevalently in the history of the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale.Originally designed by Daniele Donghi, an architect of the Venice City Council,the 1909 “pavilion initially hosted Bavarian art, and starting in 1912, works from all overGermany. Closed during the war, it reopened in 1922 exhibiting works from the thenFederal Republic of the German Reich. Property of the Venice City Council, in 1938 itwas taken over by the German government, and rebuilt under Hitler's order substituted bya more modern design by Ernst Haiger.”8 The pavilion was renovated as part of Hitler’sambitious plans to build the new empire of the Third Reich in the image of Nazi idealism.These cultural developments were part of an aggressive “foreign policy” by the Nazis’,which was influential on German participation “in world expositions or internationalexhibitions, such as the Venice Biennale,” which “conveyed messages that did not gounnoticed” by the rest of the world.9 Through the use of architecture, art and cultureHitler orchestrated the widespread propagation of German propaganda both withinGermany and outside of it, disseminating the Nazi ideals of Volk, “one of the key wordsof National Socialist philosophy, meaning ‘folk and folkdom,’ the totality of the Germanpeople and the German race.”10 At the Venice Biennale the reconstruction of the Germanpavilion in 1938 functioned as a direct reflection of the ideology of the “German peopleand the German race” under Hitler’s aegis, the classical design of the original buildingwas altered in order to transform the structure into the embodiment of Nazi utopianideals. As Walter Grasskamp observes, the redesign of the pavilion by the Nazis’ entailedthe removal of  “the ornate antique frieze,” which was replaced with the “NewSachlichkeit classicism of the thirties, so typical of the Fascist architecture of Italy andthe Third Reich in Germany… celebrating concepts of social order through its formalism.Its main aim is to intimidate the observer.”11 Aside from the removal of the swastikaeagle from over the entranceway in 1945, which was left empty, the structure of thepavilion remained the same from 1938 until Haacke’s intervention in 1993.Haacke’s invitation to represent Germany at the 45th Venice Biennale came asquite a surprise given the reunification of Germany and the fact that Haacke was notpreviously a “German national artist,” but for all intents and purposes he became one“with his 1993 installation at the German Pavilion in Venice.”12 As is typical of Haacke’sartistic practice, the installation at the Venice Biennale called attention to the tortured3history of Germany, specifically as embodied within the German pavilion, through whichhe highlights the ideologies of political and commercial interests that were the underlyingsubtexts of the site. He accomplished this by a surprisingly simplistic and direct means ofconfronting the history of the space: he dug up the floor. As Benjamin Buchloh argues,“it is only in Haacke’s systematic removal of yet another architectural surface …that thefull depth of historical and ideological inscriptions within a seemingly nondescript andnoncoded institutional space are fully articulated.”13 The sight of this broken foundationis startling, especially since the interior is not visible from the doorway of the pavilion,because the view is blocked with a large red wall bearing the photograph of Hitler.Visitors must literally get around the Nazi history of the site before entering the mainspace of the pavilion.The juxtaposition between the documentary photograph of Hitler visiting theBiennial in 1934 and the disruption, both physical and symbolic, of the demolished floorelicits a number of associations and interpretations, most prominently based within theirreconcilable divide between the Nazi past and present usage of this site of exhibition.“Inside the building, Haacke created a metaphor for German history. The buildings floorslabs had been taken up, some of them badly damaged in the process, and left lying as afield of rubble. This produced a distressing terrain that evoked a large number ofassociations.”14 The most obvious association being the destruction that resulted from theNazi campaigns of World War II; there is a stark visual parallel between Haacke’sdestruction of the floor and images of bombed out cities, with buildings throughoutEurope reduced to rubble in the name of German nationalism, that dominate histories ofthe war. In this manner, Haacke visually repositions or relocates the historical remnantsor traces of the devastation caused by the war into the idealized space of the Germanpavilion. As Pierre Bourdieu states, Haacke “transforms the recreation of the memory ofthe past into a critical questioning of the present by making a few minimal but decisivemodifications in the old setting.”15 By destabilizing the ground of viewing, a neutralperspective cannot be firmly established, and visitors are left to, physically andsymbolically, pick up the pieces of German history.The act of placing an oversized Deutschemark coin over the doorway to thepavilion, the location previously occupied by the imperial eagle, gives visitors a hint as tothe direction Haacke believes that German history has progressed – or not, depending onyour interpretation. Haacke calls attention to the parallels between the political past of theGerman Pavilion and the commercial interests that dominate a reunified Germany. This ismost evident in Haacke’s decision to fill “the place once reserved for the eagle on aswastika with a simple coin,” a union of past and present through which he questions“whether the national spirit that the pavilion embodies to this day was representative,” aswell as whether that Nazi spirit “still haunts the uneasy country this pavilion is supposedto represent. As the face value of a corporate identity of the state, the coin replaced thetraditional symbolism of the state with a sober heraldry of economic life.”16 In Germania,the destruction of the form of presentation, that of the German space of exhibition at theBiennial, serves to reveal the hidden or unnamed content of the space itself as aneconomic and political representation of a German utopia or ideal.Haacke’s act of digging up the floor of the German pavilion is a destruction of thefoundation sponsored and built by the Nazis in the 1930s; this literalized disruptionphysically hindered visitors from the aesthetic experience of the space due to the lack of4solid ground on which to stand. In this manner, Germania raises questions concerning therelationship between history and the present, specifically when they coexist within thesame site. The German pavilion as a structure was built to represent Nazis ideals, yet thissame structure, in a virtually unaltered state has continued to be used as a representationof Germany within the context of the Venice Biennial. The liberating result of Germania,according to Bourdieu, is that it “frees the present which is enclosed in the past, andwhich simple commemoration leaves untouched. It forces us to confront what the past,apparently dead and buried, has to say about the present.”17 Haacke manages to disruptthe utopic vision of the pavilion as an representation of German supra-national identityby locating the site within its own history. Why not simply destroy the building andconstruct a new pavilion? As Haacke states: “When I was asked in 1993 at the VeniceBiennale whether the German Pavilion, which had been remodeled by Hitler, should betorn down, I replied that you cannot do away with German history that way.”18                                                 1 For a thorough account of these events, see Max Gallo The Night of Long Knives: June29-30, 1934 (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).2 The oversized one Deutschmark coin that Haacke places above the doorway is dated1990, referencing the date of German reunification, which took place on October 3, 1990.As a point of interest the obverse side of the Deutschmark coin is an imperial eagle.3 Hans Haacke, “Gondola! Gondola!” Free Exchange, eds. Pierre Bourdieu and HansHaacke (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995), 139.4 For a history of the Venice Biennale, see <http://www.labiennale.org>.5 Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History Theory, Politics (London: Routledge,1995), 81.6 Bennett, 82.7 There is an obvious hierarchy resulting from this process: the countries that constructtheir own pavilions possess the ability to build and disseminate representations ofthemselves, whereas countries or races that do not have their own space within theseinternational exhibitions are denied this ability. For a discussion of this culturalmarginalization, see Bennett’s chapter “The Exhibitionary Complex.”8 “Biennale Art History: The first foreign pavilions,” La Biennale di Venezia, 4 March,2008: <http://www.labiennale.org/en/art/history/900/en/3122.html>.9 Jonathan Petropoulos, Art as Politics in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill: Univeristy ofNorth Carolina Press, 1996), 263.10 Peter Adam, Art of the Third Reich (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992), 9.11 Walter Grasskamp, “No-Man’s Land.” Bodenlos, eds. Klaus Bussmann and FlorianMatzner (Stuttgart: Edition Cantz, 1993), 52.12 Walter Grasskamp, “Kassel New York Cologne Venice,” Obra Social: Hans Haacke(Barcelona: Fundaciõ Antoni Tàpies, 1995), 21. Along with Haacke the artist Nam JunePaik was asked to represent the recently reunited Germany at the Venice Biennale in1993. As Walter Grasskamp points out this strategic selection “sidestepped an unpleasantargument: Given the reunification, should both a West German and an East German artistbe shown at the German Pavilion of the Biennale?” by asking Haacke and Paik, “aGerman artist who had been living in New York since 1965 and a Korean who had hadhis artistic development in the Rhineland and was teaching there at present. Thus,Germany appeared as a country of both emigration and immigration. It was also a5                                                                                                                                                  specifically aimed gesture, given the recent violence against foreigners and politicalrefugees.” Ibid., 21.13 Benjamin Buchloh, “Hans Haacke: From Factographic Sculpture to Counter-Monument,” Hans Haacke for real: Works 1959-2006, eds. Matthias Flügge and RobertFleck (Berlin: Akademie der Künst, 2006), 54.14 Walter Grasskamp, “Real Time: The Works of Hans Haacke,” Hans Haacke, eds.Walter Grasskamp, Molly Nesbit and Jon Bird (New York: Phaidon, 2004), 75.15 Pierre Bourdieu and Hans Haacke, Free Exchange (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995), 115.16 Walter Grasskamp, “Kassel New York Cologne Venice Berlin,” Hans Haacke for real:Works 1959-2006, eds. Matthias Flügge and Robert Fleck (Berlin: Akademie der Künst,2006), 33.17 Bourdieu and Haacke, 115-6.18 Hans Haacke,  Matthias Flügge, and Michael Freitag, “To Whom Do the PeopleBelong?” Hans Haacke for real: Works 1959-2006, eds. Matthias Flügge and RobertFleck (Berlin: Akademie der Künst, 2006), 298.

Disrupting Utopia: Hans Haacke’s Germania or Digging Up the History of the Venice Biennale

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Disrupting Utopia: Hans Haacke’s Germania or Digging Up the History of the Venice Biennale

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