He's Karl Lagerfeld's second cousin

Undercover critic/artist/thinker/architect/editor and taste-maker Hans Hack has agreed to partake in a little cerebral dousing for SUPERSWEET’s Art We Heart Special. In his search for the ultimate Zen, Hans strapped on his 1954 vintage Milgauss Rolex, polished his Apple Airbook and strode his cigarette legs down to three very different exhibitions.

What they say: Regarded as one of Europe’s most important contemporary artists, this retrospective presents an overview of Messager’s career, revealing an astonishing and affecting repertoire of forms and materials, combining human and animal to overturn ideas about women by subverting the…male gaze. She tells stories, working on the grotesque, on buffoonery, on the flip side of life.

What Hans says: I’m dubious towards any woman needing to subvert male stereotypes when it tends to achieve the very segregation they are trying to avoid (let's not even mention the dreaded “F” word). However, Messager’s cult-status aesthetic can be enjoyed– as she puts it – “on the flip side of life.” Her use of the ‘grotesque’ effectively corrupts any pre-conceived ideas we might hold towards our childhood identities. Wondering between suspended, mutated toys and a giant fluid organ fluxing biologically, Michael Jackson’s Neverland comes to mind, as does Freud, who stands like a familiar pink elephant in this bizarrely comic retrospective with darker psychological intentions.

Verdict: Visually arresting.

What they say: Le Corbusier is the most influential architect of the 20th century. His architecture and radical ideas for reinventing modern living, from private villas to large-scale social housing still resonate today. Barbican presents the perfect backdrop to explore the man and his legacy.

What Hans says: No sooner had I entered the gallery, my A-symmetrical hairs erected in anticipation of this architectural genius’s first major survey. The curation was such that it journeyed punctiliously from Charles-Edouard Jeanneret’s beginnings as a horologist, artist, collector and social thinker, through to his defining moments as an urbanist and modernist architect. I was delighted to pour over preserved issues of L’Espirit Nouveau, his groundbreaking journal on architecture’s dynamic synthesis with 20th century art movements.

Original models of his famous Purist villas, such as the exquisite Villa Savoye, demonstrated just how radical, yet accessible, his service was to the discerning European public. Works by his collaborators, such as Fernand Léger, Amédée Ozenfant Charlotte Perriand and Jean Prouvé, are also featured. My one quibble registers the somewhat lack-luster arrangement of his tubular steel furniture –recognized designs shoved randomly into a corner of the room and cordoned off like embarrassing  zoo cretins  – an unforgivably lazy way to curate an epic master of whom our civilian attention is surely unworthy.

Verdict: Highly recommended. Witness a legacy of our time.

What they say: This remarkable period of artistic experiment questioned the fundamental properties of art, challenged the idea of art as a unique commodity and looked at its contribution to a more pragmatic society. The exhibition charts the evolution of Rodchenko and Popova’s aesthetics from abstract painting to graphic design, and all media under the New Economic Policy.

What Hans says: It’s time to correct your Cyrillic script and equip yourself with an underground pamphlet concerning communism and its scurrilous bed-fellow, Russian propaganda. For those who wish to appreciate the finer points of political oppression, constructivism is one way of looking on the bright side. Luiba Popova and Aleksandr Rodchenko reside as pioneering artists of this lesser known movement concerned with architectural form and line-work. In principle, these artists were engineers, arranging subject matter scientifically and objectively as manufactured objects. 

The concept is difficult to grasp and often self-contradictory throughout each room – at once defining itself as objective and non-objective as well as scientifically manufactured, as it is random. This is painfully ironic given the exhibition’s title.  What I gathered was this movement was as much concerned with constructing new theories as it was about deconstructing previous movements, such as art as expressionism. Which is a good thing, if you’re an emotionally void intellectual who celebrates form and function in lieu of the unnecessary elaborate baroque.

That is the ideology of constructivism, and you can revel in Room Nine where the duo adapted their concept dynamically under the oppressive new circumstances of the ‘New byt regime’ , though skillful poster-work and innovative photomontage.

Verdict: An impressive collection of work – an unclear definition of constructivism.

Words: Hans Hack
Opening Illustration: Vicky Froud