Murky Waters: Hans Haacke's Rhine-Water Purification Plant
Authors: Rosenthal Sarah C. 
Published: January 2025

Hans Haacke's Rhine-Water Purification Plant (Rheinwasseraufbereitungsanlage) of 1972 was an early instance of ecocritical art used as a form of activism. Through it, the artist responded to a specific history of pollution in which, decades following World War II, industrial pollution was poisoning the Rhine, turning a site of mythical beauty opaque with heavy metals and potentially toxic chemicals. Haacke's work was a small-scale system that filtered jugs of heavily polluted water from the Rhine, with the clean water dripping into a basin on the gallery floor filled with living fish, and overflow directed into the museum's garden. In some ways, the work was typical of this 1970s moment, when artists including the Harrison Studio and Georgy Kepes increasingly used the materials and sites of ecological and environmental destruction to envision the future of humanity, to play with the aesthetic offerings of nature, and to advocate for the protection of the natural environment. But situated within a solo exhibition at the Haus Lange of the Kunstmuseum Krefeld (an installment of the museum's series of exhibitions on “Art and Nature”), Haacke's work deviated in two ways: First, it was looped into a suite of works indicating the political underpinnings of the problem of Rhine pollution. Second, it implicitly invited consideration of how art and its institutions fit into the ecosystem formed where politics and nature meet. Staged shortly after Haacke's canceled Guggenheim exhibition, the Rhine installation at once responded to the assertion that politics constitute an alien presence in the art museum and invited questions about art's viability as an agent of change. In Krefeld, wedged between data-oriented works (Shapolsky, et al.; MoMA Poll; Krefeld Sewage Triptych; etc.) and physical systems sculptures (Circulation, Condensation Floor, etc.) the work was a hybrid creature amalgamating art and politics. Nonetheless, the political promise of this hybridity was tempered by the work's boundedness to the historical and ideological toxicity permeating the roots of art and the Kunstmuseum Krefeld as an institution, For the museum was situated within the Mies van der Rohe–designed former home of Hermann Lange, who had been a National Socialist, whose textile company Verseidag (along with Bayer) was a top Rhine polluter in Krefeld. Implicitly attempting to filter Nazi history out of a river using a mythicized category of art, it drew out how interrelated myths (as theorized by Roland Barthes) of art, nature, political purity, and nationalism dialectically bind the installation to everything it opposes. Exploring Haacke's Rhine installation and its contexts, this article considers the work's fate to lie in either failure or obsolescence: Either it would fail to achieve the desired water cleanup or it would succeed and become irrelevant. In matters of ecology, we find, the work of art has the most impact when it tells us to go outside of art and the museum, acting in spaces of “pure” politics and polluting them with whatever new forms and ideas that currently constitute change.