Helmsboro Country

A leading artist of conceptual art and institutional critique, Hans Haacke has spent more than sixty years exposing the political and socio-economic systems that underpin art and its institutions. Helmsboro Country takes acute aim at the tobacco company Philip Morris and then-U.S Senator Jesse Helms. Philip Morris, the maker of Marlboro cigarettes, was an early pioneer of corporate giving to the arts and an active contributor to U.S. elections. In 1989, as part of a public relations campaign, it paid the U.S. National Archives $600,000 to reproduce copies of the Bill of Rights in Philip Morris branded packaging; it also supported the election campaign of North Carolina’s Republican Senator Jesse Helms, who vigorously lobbied against the National Endowment for the Arts and freedom of speech.

Helmsboro Country takes the form of a monumental flip-top box of Marlboro cigarettes that the artist modified and rebranded with the face of Senator Helms. Five-foot-long cigarettes spill onto the floor revealing the tobacco paper, printed with the Bill of Rights and the message: "Philip Morris Funds Jesse Helms." Here, the artist underscores the hypocrisy of a company that celebrates its affiliation with arts organizations while simultaneously supporting a political figure actively hostile to the arts and free expression. Unlike the product-oriented sculptures of Pop art, to which the work bears similarity, Helmsboro Country does not draw on commercial design to source new imagery but to use the visual language of a corporation against it.