amperometric:
Artwork by Hans Haacke, as part of “Data Deluge” at Ballroom Marfa
Hans Haacke
News, 1969
RSS newsfeed
20 x 60 inches
Courtesy of Esther & Joseph Varet
In 1969, as part of the exhibition “Prospect ‘69” in Düsseldorf, Hans Haacke installed News, which consisted of a telex machine that printed out news items that were transmitted live by Germany’s leading press agency, Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA). Visitors to the exhibition were able to get news “hot off the presses,” reading such headlines as “Concorde Breaks Sound Barrier,” “GDR Celebrates 20th Anniversary” and “Anti-Apartheid Protesters Disrupt Frankfurt Book Fair.” It was later exhibited as part of the seminal 1970 exhibition “Software — Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art” at the Jewish Museum in New York. Haacke continued to update the technology of News; today it consists of a dot matrix printer that receives data from an RSS newsfeed.
The fact that events of the outside world were directly affecting the content of an artwork inside the hermetic world of a gallery or museum space was critical for Haacke, who stated in Lucy Lippard’s book Six Years: The dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972: “A ‘sculpture’ that physically reacts to its environment is no longer to be regarded as an object. The range of outside factors affecting it, as well as its own radius of action, reaches beyond the space it materially occupies. It thus merges with the environment in a relationship that is better understood as a ‘system’ of interdependent processes. These processes evolve without the viewer’s empathy. He becomes a witness. A system is not imagined, it is real.”
