Upon entering Paula Cooper's south-side gallery space on W. 21 Street, patrons pass by a series of modest black and white photographs of art spectators at the second documenta in Kassel, Germany. The 26 photos which make up the work, Photographic Notes, documenta 2, 1959, were taken by the young Haacke, a student at the time shooting on his breaks while working as an assistant at the tremendous exhibition fair, and seem intuitive and well composed. There are pictures of various unidentified figures who immediately take on social significance in relation to the massive abstract works on display around them — one figure gesturing authoritatively with his hands might be a curator or art professional, while another older figure becomes simply an unenthusiastic spectator. The placement of the work by the gallery's entrance may seem as intuitive a gesture as the pictures themselves. While the images depicted might appear diluted by the passage of time to contemporary viewers — black and white photographs of large Ab-Ex canvases seeming almost inseparable from their historical bracket — they nevertheless retain a current vocabulary because the rules of art spectatorship have so little changed over the past fifty years. Yet the photos do in fact document a sort of radical change taking place in post-war Germany at the time of their production, as many German citizens in 1959 came to Kassel to witness for the first time the spectacle of contemporary art, multitudinous in its varied manifestations and self-obsessed vanities to which Haacke so explicitly and deftly refers.

Photographic notes... is both a kind of mirror for exhibition goers as well as a singular, self-referential component in the show, signifying a documentary mode where context and framing become just as important as the content of the art, whether it be information aesthetics or massive kinetic sculpture. The former is represented by Sol Goldman and Alex DiLorenzo..., installed around the corner on three walls that make up a space where the abstracted information Haacke has gathered as art material can be physically navigated by viewers. Trickle Up (1992), a reversal on the well known neoliberal mantra, installed in the center of the Haacke exhibition, is a sculpture consisting of a severely weathered old couch upon which rests a pristine, embroidered pillow depicting an idealized image of the White House and a 1992 quote from George Herbert Walker Bush equating anxiety over cuts to the capital gains tax with a Puritanical social anxiety about "someone somewhere having a good time." Directly above this work hangs Mission Accomplished (2005), a reference to one of the current president's more publicized instances of misspeaking and a close-up print reproduction of the American flag whose torn half lies on the floor, at the foot of the couch in Trickle Up. Shoe prints evident on the torn print, one wonders if it was the artist or the gallery patrons who had trampled upon the work.

The most spectacular object on display is undoubtedly Wide White Flow (1967), a large rectangular piece of white fabric elevated slightly from the ground and activated by several large fans blowing streams of air directly beneath it. The fabric takes on the properties of flowing jets of water and is instantly mesmerizing to observe, as patrons circle around it to any of several vantage points. The press release describes the piece as being conceptually grounded in Haacke's interest in observed systems functioning in a constant state of flux. One might compare the piece to Haacke's more well know, if less spectacular, Condensation Cube (1963-65). The work here, like Condensation Cube, functions like a maquette for the real-world systems Haacke's more politically invested work aims to study or unsettle. Indeed, the social issues Haacke addresses in the other works on view are in contrast very sharply defined — the abstracted power matrices supported by seemingly immobile aggregation of capital, the production of meaning in contemporary art spectatorship, and the relationship of media spectacle to public policy — and continually draw attention to the ideological and material spaces where our own perception of the work is constituted: the gallery space in one instant, the city in another, the country in yet another. Wide White Flow, on the other hand, threatens to disrupt this otherwise Brechtian context emphasis by seducing us with its ceaseless motion, its minimal but monumental aesthetic, and its visual potency as a kinetic system functioning precisely as it should. In a word, the dialectic here between this work and the others, competing for attention with radically divergent strategies, takes on a form of its own: both a critical model of art spectacle and its enacted, strategic disruption.