NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE ).- I still remember, back when I was an art history student, the class in which I had to stare at a painting for an hour, just looking and describing what I saw within the frame. No interpretation, no contextualization to sully the true experience of art, the professor told us. All that analysis comes later, after the pure encounter between you and the painting.

It is never just you and the painting. So proved Hans Haacke, one of the most consistent and uncompromising figures of American art, who has spent a half-century mining the terrain around and behind works of art, and revealing the hidden operations of powerful associations, art museums very much among them. When critics were still sticking up for “art for art’s sake,” when artists were still indulging romantic fantasies of self-expression, Haacke was one of the first to insist that “art” is actually a complex system of institutions, governed by managers and administrators with their own aims and ideologies.

His preoccupation with art’s complicity in economic or political injustice has made him a frequent target for politicians, vandals and censors — most notoriously in 1971, when the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum canceled his show rather than exhibit his forensic documentation of the run-down real estate holdings of a Manhattan landlord. His critical stance has also left museums, somewhat understandably, reluctant to invite him in to trash the place.

For that, at least, we ought to praise the New Museum, which staged the German-born artist’s last major American exhibition in 1986 and which has now opened “Hans Haacke: All Connected,” an important but dispiriting reintroduction to this resolute antagonist. The retrospective will surely provide a valuable history lesson to young artists; it sprawls across four whole floors of the New Museum’s Bowery home and includes most of Haacke’s important works, from early environmental pieces to his recent monument, for London’s Trafalgar Square, of a skeletal horse with a stock ticker tied to one leg. (A surprising, regrettable absence is “Der Pralinenmeister,” Haacke’s pitiless documentation of alleged tax dodges of German art collector Peter Ludwig, who founded the Museum Ludwig in Cologne.)

The show cannot disguise that Haacke has often been a better activist than artist. Much of his later work is flat-footed and polemical when compared with his initial accomplishments in institutional critique. Yet there is still a value to Haacke’s early art of disclosure, especially in the wake of this year’s increasing scrutiny of where cultural institutions get their money. The Sackler family’s involvement in the national opioid crisis brought protesters to the Guggenheim and the Musée du Louvre; Yana Peel stepped down as chief executive of the Serpentine Galleries amid outrage over her ties to an Israeli cybersecurity firm; and Warren Kanders resigned from the board of the Whitney Museum of American Art after protests over the tear gas his firm manufactures.

Haacke’s engagement with the ethics of art goes back to his youth. He was born in Cologne in 1936 and saw his father lose a job after refusing to join the Nazi Party. While attending art school, Haacke took a summer job as a security guard at the second edition of Documenta, Kassel’s large-scale exhibition of international art — where he photographed befuddled visitors, obsequious dignitaries and hardy cleaners amid the abstract painting and sculpture. These photographs reveal how Haacke was beginning to perceive the economic underpinnings and the ulterior motives of art. Documenta, wrote Haacke, began “the loss of my innocence.”

In 1961 he moved to the United States, where he began to make ephemeral or environmental works, some inviting audience participation. A fan makes a bright blue tarp undulate like a jellyfish; a totem made of ice melts or grows as the ambient humidity rises and falls. Some look pretty hippy-dippy today, but these works foreshadow how Haacke would conceive of art works as systems, shaped first by the artist’s invention and then by external factors.

That approach undergirds the conceptual and critical projects that won him both fame and grief starting in 1970 — when, as his contribution to the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition “Information,” he placed in a gallery two ballot boxes made of clear acrylic. Above them was a question: “Would the fact that Governor Rockefeller has not denounced President Nixon’s Indochina policy be a reason for you not to vote for him in November?” (Not at all incidentally, New York’s governor at the time, Nelson Rockefeller, was a MoMA board member, and his younger brother David Rockefeller was its chairman.) Twice as many museumgoers voted yes as no.

This and subsequent polls were at once artworks and data drops, and, like the censored landlord project the following year, he presented his findings in a cool, flat style art historian Hal Foster would later term an “anti-aesthetic.” (At the New Museum you can participate in his latest poll, administered via iPad, where Haacke will ask how old you are, how much you make, and whether you think the rich are sufficiently taxed. As of this past weekend, 79% of visitors said no to that last question.)

His sleuthing — you couldn’t just Google this stuff back then! — exposed the supposed neutrality of the art museum as, at best, a pretense. “Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum board of trustees,” a series of lists from 1974, each typeset and framed like an official document, spells out how one of that museum’s supporters enriched himself through the previous year’s coup d’état in Chile. “On Social Grease” (1975) comprises six magnesium plates, etched with damning quotations on how art philanthropy serves business ends.

The curators of the exhibition, Gary Carrion-Murayari and Massimiliano Gioni, have installed Haacke’s sometimes dry work with contrapuntal elegance, mixing pieces from across decades. I do wish they had enforced a bit more critical distance. Haacke, as each gallery proudly proclaims, has written every single wall label himself — which offers helpful context but turns the show into an uncomfortable act of self-justification. The words put too much emphasis on what Haacke meant and not what he actually made.

For by the 1980s, his documentation or his corporate mimicry had given way to some ghastly installations. The precise designs of his Guggenheim exposés or “Der Pralinenmeister” were left behind in favor of pallid oil paintings of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

Haacke’s most successful later works have been monuments and other public interventions, such as “Der Bevölkerung” (2000), a garden planted within the German national Parliament. In a rebuke to the famous 1916 inscription on the Reichstag facade — which reads “Dem Deutschen Volke,” or “To the German People” — Haacke’s garden included neon letters spelling out an alternate motto: “To the Population,” implying that the laws should serve every person in the country, German or not. “Gift Horse” (2014), his equestrian skeleton from London, also made the most of its site, publicly equating past military might and present financial power.

But in the lobby of the New Museum, a new work sees Haacke join the growing ranks of artists whose rage at the current administration has led them to embarrassing error. It bears the title “Make Mar-a-Lago Great Again” (really, must we?); a giant flat-screen television displays the president’s most recent Twitter exudations, stationed amid a gold-plated golf driver, a banner printed with red baseball caps, and, no kidding, Statue of Liberty figurines with their bobbleheads ripped off. It’s really sad when the newest work in a nearly 60-year retrospective is the worst thing on view. Haacke should know better than anyone how insufficient such “political” art can be, especially when it expresses nothing beyond one’s own disgust.

The fact that no person and no artwork stands alone, that all of us are enmeshed in systems of economic and social power, is for anyone under 40 a statement of the obvious. We can barely remember a time before we were “all connected,” and young artists as different as Neïl Beloufa, Cameron Rowland, Park McArthur and Darren Bader have metabolized Haacke’s lessons for an age when our phones ping with tweets from the White House before we even get to the gallery. These artists and so many others testify to Haacke’s achievement, and also, perhaps, to its belatedness.


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