Thought this was interesting!

Hans Haacke's Germania 1993 German Pavilion, Venice Biennale

Haacke spoke of Hans Sedlmayr, an Austrian-born art historian (Nazi party member and later, an advisor to the Vatican) who saw abstract art as an attack on middle  class values. The social idealism under the Third Reich (and later the social realism in the GDR) was responded to by home-grown abstract artists showing at Documenta (in 1955) as well as NY AbEx painters whose shipping costs were subsidized by the CIA. In this context, abstract art was more than an academic argument, "It meant something," said Haacke. As abstract art lost its political luster, Haacke moved on to other media. 

For the 1993 Venice Biennale, Klaus Bußmann was asked by the Foreign Office--which controls the German pavilion--to curate work representing the newly united Germany. So bothered by the demand, he included Haacke-who lives in New York, and Korean-born Nam June Paik--who was teaching in Germany at the time. Haacke tore up the floor of Hitler's remodel of the pavilion. He said visitors to the installation picked up tiles and hurled them to the floor, breaking them even more, taking out their grief and anger on what transpired under the Nazis. 

http://imoralist.blogspot.com/2009/02/hans-haacke-at-redcat.html