One key theme that Hans Haacke relates to is the Institutional Critique. It emerged from the developments of Minimalism and its concerns with the phenomenology of the viewer, as well as formalist art criticism and art history, such as Clement Greenberg, conceptual art and its concerns with language, processes, and administrative society, and appropriation art and its concerns with consumption and identity. It is a form of commentary on the various institutions and conventions of art, as well as a radical disarticulation of the institution of art. Haacke used the Institutional Critique to criticize museum owners and their ties with corporations and corporate leaders who have dishonest practices.

With his earlier works, Haacke also relates to System Art, which is art influenced by systems theory that reflects on natural systems, social systems and social signs of the art world itself. “Condensation Cube” and “Condensation Wall” were System Works that embodied the physical occurrence of the condensation cycle in real time. Other themes of his earlier works included the interactions of physical and biological systems, living animals, plants, and the states of water and the wind. Systems Art marked a transition from art-as-object to the object of art. In a 1971 interview with Jeanne Siegel, Haacke defined a system as, “A grouping of elements subject to a common plan and purpose that interact so as to arrive at a joint goal.”