Hans Haacke: Blue Sail

Hans Haacke, 1964-1965, installation. chiffon, oscillating fan, fishing weights, and thread

German artist Hans Haacke has lived and worked in New York since traveling to the U.S. on a Fulbright grant in the early 1960s. Although his early works dealt with natural processes (such as water's thawing and condensation, or the movement of air currents), Haacke is best known as a pioneer of institutional critique.

Many of his works attempt to expose the connections between money, politics, and art — for instance, corporations' financial support of museum exhibitions as a means of whitewashing politically questionable organization policies. For Haacke, the institutions of the art world have too long hidden behind mollifying myths of disinterested beauty and "art for art's sake." His work insists that artists and viewers alike have a responsibility to acknowledge their position on the global stage.

http://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/120791#

Week 2: Blow Up: 05.10.10

Blow Up by Scott Snibbe records, amplifies, and projects human breath into a room-sized field of wind. The installation comprises two devices. The first is a rectangular array of twelve small impellers, which stands on a table on one side of the gallery. This small input device is electronically linked to a large wall of twelve electric fans. The tabletop impellers are spatially and temporally synchronized to the fans in the wall. When a “sender” blows into the first device, “receivers” experience the magnified breathing patterns over their entire bodies. When he stops blowing, the wall continues to play back the most recent breathing pattern, captured in an amplified loop, until someone inspires a new pattern.




www.snibbe.com/projects/interactive/blowup