A new series in collaboration with Fondazione Antonio Ratti in Italy,
each book focusing on a different artist that has taken part in their
Advanced Course in Visual Arts. Black Dog Publishing start this series
with the internationally acclaimed radical artists Hans Haacke and Susan
Hiller. The books focus on the individual artists, their work, the
themes that were addressed on the course and their commentary on the
contemporary art world.
This book focuses on his 2010 site-specific work, Once Upon a Time...
screened in a disused church, San Francesco in Como, Italy. For the
installation, Haacke projected footage from major Italian television
channels onto sections of the original seventeenth century frescoes
adorning the church's apse. These videos were juxtaposed onto the
frescoes, filling in the gaps where the originals had faded due to the
ravages of time, the artist introduced continuously changing glimpses of
Italy's contemporary corporate culture. Into the missing parts of the
frescoes the artist video-projects live TV programs of Rete 4, Italia 1,
Canale 5 and the Milan stock exchange data in real time, in order to
create a sort of collage made of seventeenth century representations and
contemporary video images.
Hans Haacke also exhibited two of his other works in the church, in
response to the architecture of San Francesco and its frescos, Wide
White Flow 1967 and The Population meets St. Francis. The book
juxtaposes Hans Haacke's writings from San Francesco with speech
transcripts from Berlusconi and other essays commenting on his work to
provide an overview of the contemporary work of this established
artist.
