Link to pics and article here.
Helmut Lang at home in East Hampton.
Helmut Lang
Three years ago he shocked the fashion world by walking away from the groundbreaking label he founded. Now the designer-turned-artist unveils his new work.
By Diane Solway
Photographed by Bruce Weber
October 2008
It’s one of those glorious, cloudless days of summer, and Helmut Lang, the avatar of stripped-down, urban cool, strides past the restored 1790 farmhouse, the shingled chicken coop, the organic vegetable garden and the assorted ducks scrambling on his East Hampton oceanfront property to greet me. One of the most influential designers of the Nineties, whose cult status endures, Lang has been pretty much ensconced in this bucolic idyll since selling his remaining shares in his company to the Prada Group in 2004 and soon after resigning from the house he created. For the past three years, fashionistas have mourned his departure while speculating about what he’s been up to. But the über private Lang has remained mum about his new projects. All that is about to change: The 22 artworks that recently sat in various states of assembly on Lang’s front lawn, in his barn and inside his wood-beam house are now on view at the Kestnergesellschaft, a contemporary exhibition space in Hanover, Germany, which has just unveiled the first major solo exhibition by the artist formerly known as fashion designer Helmut Lang.
The organic garden, with strips of foil to keep the deer away, in front of Lang's farmhouse..
To Lang’s devotees, those who lived by his style dicta and spoke of his low-rise jeans in reverent tones, his shift from the center of the fashion universe to a solitary studio might seem a radical leap. But Lang’s sensibilities have always been firmly rooted in the realm of art. “I always felt that Helmut wasn’t really in the fashion world—he was in his own world,” says photographer Bruce Weber, a longtime friend who regards Lang as something of an outsider artist. In fact, it was Lang’s collaborations with Jenny Holzer and Louise Bourgeois in the Nineties and his appropriation of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs for print ads that helped usher in the current mash-up of art and fashion.
As Lang sees it, his latest incarnation is simply “an evolution, a progression,” not a break. “I wanted to explore everything I knew on a different level,” says the Austrian-born Lang, now seated under a trellis at a simple wooden table overlooking sand dunes and the ocean beyond. “The size of the company kept growing, and I had the feeling at one point that I would become the victim of my own success and get pushed further away from what I worked so hard to be able to do. I did try to do more artistic work in between, but it was not possible to be one of the main players in the fashion world and then to do art at the same time. I was ready to take a new challenge, in part because in fashion, things have become very predictable.” His approach—whether to making fashion or art—is the same: “to arrive somewhere completely different from where you started.” Risk comes with the territory. “Once I’m committed,” he says, “I’m unafraid of the outcome.”
Lang redefined the face of modern fashion largely by listening to no one but himself. When asked if he fears taking his work public, he replies with Yoda-like equanimity: “It will mean something or nothing—but that is also part of the purpose. It’s time to grow, and eventually, it is what it is.”
At 52, Lang is tan and buff in his trademark uniform of black T-shirt and jeans. Only today, “funnily enough,” he notes, an amused smile lighting up his sober demeanor, “they’re by Levi’s, not Lang.” His dark brown hair, graying at the temples, is swept back and covered by a black cap that spells out swat in faded letters. Gentle and cerebral, he’s reluctant to probe or reveal, and his answers are often elliptical. Isaac Mizrahi he’s not. “I’m really bad at describing my own life,” he apologizes sweetly in accented English when asked whether he tends the organic garden out front. Taking the measure of the man can prove elusive, even for Lang’s closest friends. “Shy, reticent and mysterious,” is how sculptor Louise Bourgeois describes him. Artist Roni Horn goes further: “Helmut isn’t somebody you can approach head-on,” she says. “‘Enigma’ is a great word for him. He follows his own rhythms. He feels the undertow of his sensitivities, and that’s really more what’s directed him.”
To do something “slightly different,” points out Lang, “doesn’t mean that your personality goes away.” Horn says she wasn’t surprised by Lang’s latest move. “His clothing design was always sculptural in nature —very material based, very physical, and then sensual and sexual,” she says. “It’s his way of living and relating to things.” Asked for her appraisal, Bourgeois says in an e-mail, “Helmut is always experimenting. The subject is never the materials, but what you want to express.”
Just what Lang wanted to express as an artist took him some time to discover. He’s never been one to rush things. Preferring to experiment away from the public glare—just as he did when he started out as a designer in Vienna in the late Seventies—he moved to his house in East Hampton and told friends he was doing nothing. For a while he did. “The second you say something, everyone says, ‘When is it going to be shown?’ It’s this constant thing of ‘What’s next?’” he says, noting that he imposed this self-isolation to allow himself to think differently. “I wanted to take all the time I needed to feel comfortable with what I’m doing now, to transfer my voice to a different medium, to different proportions.” No longer ruled by the fashion calendar, he began archiving the clothes he’d designed and the notes and objects he’d collected.
In looking back, he found his way forward. One of his first art projects was his “Selective Memory Series” for the avant-garde magazine Purple—80 pages consisting largely of digitally manipulated notes from Lang’s friends and fashion colleagues. (“Never mind the awards, I looked smashing, didn’t I?” scribbled Roman Polanski in one of them.) Its publication caused a stir, not least because the authors had assumed that their private notes were just that. But the scrim between public and private has always intrigued Lang, who recalls that once he scanned the notes, they assumed an “accidental visual pattern” irrespective of time, rank or gender. In any case, he says, many of those featured were “probably glad to have been remembered and not shredded.”
Ironically, his debut exhibition (he presented a single work at Brooklyn’s Journal Gallery in 2007) came about when the Kestnergesellschaft proposed a retrospective of Lang’s career as a designer. Though Lang had started a fashion archive, even buying back a number of older pieces on eBay, he couldn’t muster enough enthusiasm to complete it. “I’m not interested. I’m doing new work,” he told the director. So the director offered to show that instead.
What’s striking about his new work is how deeply personal it is in the way that Lang recycles artifacts and details from his life, “materials that have the imprint of history on them,” says the show’s cocurator, Neville Wakefield. “There’s an extent to which he’s excavating his own past and stripping it of the associations it might have had and turning it into something new.” The same attention to detail, shape and materials is there, only now, says Lang, he can say what he wants in different proportions, forms and contexts, freed from the limitations of the human body and the way it moves. “And the waste in art is much less than in fashion,” he jokes.
The textured surface view of one of Lang's lifeforms works.
The week before his sculptures and installations were shipped to Hanover, Lang gave me a tour. Inside the open barn, three wooden American eagles that once sat in his SoHo store had been sliced, transformed and weathered into abstracted forms. Arbor, a 40-foot maypole sculpture that Lang had constructed on the front lawn, referenced the community rituals of his rural Austrian childhood, though hanging from it were iron wreaths, with feathery strips recycled from a dismantled boa, in place of ribbons. Nearby were Lang’s lifeforms works—two nine-by-three-foot minimalist oak boxes filled with sheepskin and covered with tar—which, “depending on your emotional state,” says Lang, evoke either graves or gardens. On the floor inside the house, he carefully laid out several pieces from an astonishingly tactile, painterly series he calls surrogate skins. At first glance, they look like luxurious animal hides but, on closer inspection, reveal themselves to be accumulated layers of translucent paper that Lang spent considerable time coloring and gluing. “Most people start with a tabula rasa,” says Wakefield. “Helmut starts with something elaborate and often ornate and reduces it to its abstract essence, which is what he did in fashion as well.” In fact, the new works—much like Lang’s tailored peacoats, layered T-shirts and narrow, sharply cut suits made of unlikely fabrics—look remarkably casual, even nonchalant. But stay with them a while and you realize, says Wakefield, “that there is an incredible sort of alchemy of arrangement going on.”
Helmut Lang at home in East Hampton.
Helmut Lang
Three years ago he shocked the fashion world by walking away from the groundbreaking label he founded. Now the designer-turned-artist unveils his new work.
By Diane Solway
Photographed by Bruce Weber
October 2008
It’s one of those glorious, cloudless days of summer, and Helmut Lang, the avatar of stripped-down, urban cool, strides past the restored 1790 farmhouse, the shingled chicken coop, the organic vegetable garden and the assorted ducks scrambling on his East Hampton oceanfront property to greet me. One of the most influential designers of the Nineties, whose cult status endures, Lang has been pretty much ensconced in this bucolic idyll since selling his remaining shares in his company to the Prada Group in 2004 and soon after resigning from the house he created. For the past three years, fashionistas have mourned his departure while speculating about what he’s been up to. But the über private Lang has remained mum about his new projects. All that is about to change: The 22 artworks that recently sat in various states of assembly on Lang’s front lawn, in his barn and inside his wood-beam house are now on view at the Kestnergesellschaft, a contemporary exhibition space in Hanover, Germany, which has just unveiled the first major solo exhibition by the artist formerly known as fashion designer Helmut Lang.
The organic garden, with strips of foil to keep the deer away, in front of Lang's farmhouse..
To Lang’s devotees, those who lived by his style dicta and spoke of his low-rise jeans in reverent tones, his shift from the center of the fashion universe to a solitary studio might seem a radical leap. But Lang’s sensibilities have always been firmly rooted in the realm of art. “I always felt that Helmut wasn’t really in the fashion world—he was in his own world,” says photographer Bruce Weber, a longtime friend who regards Lang as something of an outsider artist. In fact, it was Lang’s collaborations with Jenny Holzer and Louise Bourgeois in the Nineties and his appropriation of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs for print ads that helped usher in the current mash-up of art and fashion.
As Lang sees it, his latest incarnation is simply “an evolution, a progression,” not a break. “I wanted to explore everything I knew on a different level,” says the Austrian-born Lang, now seated under a trellis at a simple wooden table overlooking sand dunes and the ocean beyond. “The size of the company kept growing, and I had the feeling at one point that I would become the victim of my own success and get pushed further away from what I worked so hard to be able to do. I did try to do more artistic work in between, but it was not possible to be one of the main players in the fashion world and then to do art at the same time. I was ready to take a new challenge, in part because in fashion, things have become very predictable.” His approach—whether to making fashion or art—is the same: “to arrive somewhere completely different from where you started.” Risk comes with the territory. “Once I’m committed,” he says, “I’m unafraid of the outcome.”
Lang redefined the face of modern fashion largely by listening to no one but himself. When asked if he fears taking his work public, he replies with Yoda-like equanimity: “It will mean something or nothing—but that is also part of the purpose. It’s time to grow, and eventually, it is what it is.”
At 52, Lang is tan and buff in his trademark uniform of black T-shirt and jeans. Only today, “funnily enough,” he notes, an amused smile lighting up his sober demeanor, “they’re by Levi’s, not Lang.” His dark brown hair, graying at the temples, is swept back and covered by a black cap that spells out swat in faded letters. Gentle and cerebral, he’s reluctant to probe or reveal, and his answers are often elliptical. Isaac Mizrahi he’s not. “I’m really bad at describing my own life,” he apologizes sweetly in accented English when asked whether he tends the organic garden out front. Taking the measure of the man can prove elusive, even for Lang’s closest friends. “Shy, reticent and mysterious,” is how sculptor Louise Bourgeois describes him. Artist Roni Horn goes further: “Helmut isn’t somebody you can approach head-on,” she says. “‘Enigma’ is a great word for him. He follows his own rhythms. He feels the undertow of his sensitivities, and that’s really more what’s directed him.”
To do something “slightly different,” points out Lang, “doesn’t mean that your personality goes away.” Horn says she wasn’t surprised by Lang’s latest move. “His clothing design was always sculptural in nature —very material based, very physical, and then sensual and sexual,” she says. “It’s his way of living and relating to things.” Asked for her appraisal, Bourgeois says in an e-mail, “Helmut is always experimenting. The subject is never the materials, but what you want to express.”
Just what Lang wanted to express as an artist took him some time to discover. He’s never been one to rush things. Preferring to experiment away from the public glare—just as he did when he started out as a designer in Vienna in the late Seventies—he moved to his house in East Hampton and told friends he was doing nothing. For a while he did. “The second you say something, everyone says, ‘When is it going to be shown?’ It’s this constant thing of ‘What’s next?’” he says, noting that he imposed this self-isolation to allow himself to think differently. “I wanted to take all the time I needed to feel comfortable with what I’m doing now, to transfer my voice to a different medium, to different proportions.” No longer ruled by the fashion calendar, he began archiving the clothes he’d designed and the notes and objects he’d collected.
In looking back, he found his way forward. One of his first art projects was his “Selective Memory Series” for the avant-garde magazine Purple—80 pages consisting largely of digitally manipulated notes from Lang’s friends and fashion colleagues. (“Never mind the awards, I looked smashing, didn’t I?” scribbled Roman Polanski in one of them.) Its publication caused a stir, not least because the authors had assumed that their private notes were just that. But the scrim between public and private has always intrigued Lang, who recalls that once he scanned the notes, they assumed an “accidental visual pattern” irrespective of time, rank or gender. In any case, he says, many of those featured were “probably glad to have been remembered and not shredded.”
Ironically, his debut exhibition (he presented a single work at Brooklyn’s Journal Gallery in 2007) came about when the Kestnergesellschaft proposed a retrospective of Lang’s career as a designer. Though Lang had started a fashion archive, even buying back a number of older pieces on eBay, he couldn’t muster enough enthusiasm to complete it. “I’m not interested. I’m doing new work,” he told the director. So the director offered to show that instead.
What’s striking about his new work is how deeply personal it is in the way that Lang recycles artifacts and details from his life, “materials that have the imprint of history on them,” says the show’s cocurator, Neville Wakefield. “There’s an extent to which he’s excavating his own past and stripping it of the associations it might have had and turning it into something new.” The same attention to detail, shape and materials is there, only now, says Lang, he can say what he wants in different proportions, forms and contexts, freed from the limitations of the human body and the way it moves. “And the waste in art is much less than in fashion,” he jokes.
The textured surface view of one of Lang's lifeforms works.
The week before his sculptures and installations were shipped to Hanover, Lang gave me a tour. Inside the open barn, three wooden American eagles that once sat in his SoHo store had been sliced, transformed and weathered into abstracted forms. Arbor, a 40-foot maypole sculpture that Lang had constructed on the front lawn, referenced the community rituals of his rural Austrian childhood, though hanging from it were iron wreaths, with feathery strips recycled from a dismantled boa, in place of ribbons. Nearby were Lang’s lifeforms works—two nine-by-three-foot minimalist oak boxes filled with sheepskin and covered with tar—which, “depending on your emotional state,” says Lang, evoke either graves or gardens. On the floor inside the house, he carefully laid out several pieces from an astonishingly tactile, painterly series he calls surrogate skins. At first glance, they look like luxurious animal hides but, on closer inspection, reveal themselves to be accumulated layers of translucent paper that Lang spent considerable time coloring and gluing. “Most people start with a tabula rasa,” says Wakefield. “Helmut starts with something elaborate and often ornate and reduces it to its abstract essence, which is what he did in fashion as well.” In fact, the new works—much like Lang’s tailored peacoats, layered T-shirts and narrow, sharply cut suits made of unlikely fabrics—look remarkably casual, even nonchalant. But stay with them a while and you realize, says Wakefield, “that there is an incredible sort of alchemy of arrangement going on.”
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