VIENNA — Helmut Lang was by no means a person of many phrases. You’ll perceive why you probably have the great fortune to go to “Séance de Travail 1986–2005,” the retrospective of his career in fashion — the first of its kind anywhere — which just opened at the MAK Museum of Applied Arts in his hometown Vienna.
There is so much that does Lang’s talking for him, all of it drawn from the “living archive” he donated to MAK in 2011 after a fire in his studio incinerated everything else. The museum’s inventory runs to more than 10,000 items: design drafts, advertising proofs, finished campaigns, prototypes, samples, packaging, artist collaborations, photographs, show videos, press clippings, documentation of behind-the-scenes work processes and more.
But that institutional list doesn’t do justice to how idiosyncratic — how personal — the exhibition is. It all comes from him. Maybe that’s why he was prepared to talk about it, in a rare moment of candour.
“If you don’t see things for a while, they suddenly become precious again,” he says.
Lang’s fashion work and his subsequent career as an artist are underpinned by his conviction that “Alles Gleich Schwer” or “everything has an equal weight.” As MAK curator Marlies Wirth says, “Whether it’s a good suit or the second proof of an advertisement, it’s all worthwhile. One without the other would never have come to this legacy as it is now. Everything counts, not only each person’s work but also all the strategies.” Which is why the exhibition’s embrace of the macro (a reconstruction of Lang’s New York store space) and the micro (the rubber band printed HELMUT LANG for use as a backstage bracelet) is so seamlessly fascinating.
Again, it all comes from him, with a little help from Vienna. He left for New York in 1998, and he’s never been back. Lang doesn’t fly (hence our conversation took place in the digital ether). But the influence lingers, perhaps because Vienna inculcated a kind of contrariness in him in response to its stolidity, its imperial opulence. Like the writers and artists he names. “Franz West, Thomas Bernhard, Robert Musil, Elfriede Jelinek — the list is endless — they were all kind of nourished by their circumstances but expressed it in their opposition because they couldn’t live in that climate. There’s a certain climate in Vienna which is not that radically supportive of outstanding ideas.”
I never imagined Lang would do anything like this, that he would be prepared to explore his past in this way, to make it so grandly physical but also curiously intimate. Neither did he. For all that his rigorous aesthetic, and the dynamic, organic way he expressed it, reshaped fashion in the ’90s and inspired generations of designers who came after, he has remained a shadowy, enigmatic figure. No books, no retrospectives, no documentaries, no official chronology or encomia of any kind. Until now. Lilli Hollein assumed the position of MAK director in September 2021. A Lang exhibition was her priority. “The only relevant Austrian fashion,” she called it. By October, she was already knocking on the door of his house on Long Island, where he has been keeping his head down since 2005 when he quit fashion, working in his studio, tending to his garden and his animals. The original notion may have been retirement. It didn’t stick.
Hollein’s timing wasn’t great. Lang and his partner Edward Pavlick had just moved house, which included the studio and the farm along with their personal belongings. “Lilli said, ‘We really want to honour you.’ I said, ‘Can you please do this after I’m dead? Because I’m busy with my artwork and my life and other stuff, I’m really not into it.’ It was just not ready in my head.” She was insistent. She wanted a dialogue with a living artist. “You know, sometimes older women are relentless in their pursuit of their own happiness.” Lang laughs. (I wonder if he’s thinking about his deep and meaningful collaboration with artist Louise Bourgeois.) “So before this goes down some road which I would regret afterwards not having been somehow part of, it was, like, you know, I gotta suck this up.” But he set parameters.
Helmut Lang, Astro Biker Jacket, New York, 1998 (kunst-dokumentation.com/MAK)
Lang’s MAK archive is just not actually about garments per se. The runway present appears to be like that survived are distributed worldwide throughout 18 establishments, together with the Louvre, the V&A, the Met, the Kyoto Costume Institute and the Musée Galliera. So Lang instructed Hollein he didn’t wish to have a look at outfits on mannequins. Instead, he wished some groundbreaking, technical strategy to show the very totally different supplies contained within the archive, and he wished a non-fashion curator to go together with it. Ticking that field was Marlies Wirth, MAK’s curator of digital media, artwork and design. She and Lang clicked directly.
He was at all times outlined because the apotheosis of minimalism in vogue. No designer who was ever described that means appreciated the label. Wirth settles on “essentialism” as extra acceptable. It was her concept to make use of the reconstructed retailer structure by Richard Gluckman because the scenography for the exhibition. That’s what she meant about ranging from the design methods. “It’s also an immersive experience for people, not only looking at archives but also literally walking inside originals,” she explains.
The few objects of clothes which might be exhibited are all fiercely emblematic of elementary concepts in Lang’s work: folklore (the early corset jacket); surrogate pores and skin (stingray, snakeskin and reflective supplies); practical futurism (the “Astro Biker Jacket,” with a harness inside its silvery leather-based exterior which permits it to be hung casually, conveniently off the shoulders); and hybrid (a morphing of flight jacket and sweatshirt). You can hint the evolution of these concepts by any variety of up to date vogue collections. But probably the most provocative proposition was at all times Lang’s accessoires vêtements. Significantly, there may be an annex dedicated to them within the exhibition. His relationship with pores and skin — revealing, concealing, with materials slashed or sheer — was at all times a necessary component of his design philosophy. His accessoires vêtements distilled it to its purest type.
Lang de- and re-constructed fundamental objects of clothes he known as fetzen, a sort of German vernacular equal for “schmatte” or “clobber,” sexualising them to the purpose the place they turned fetishwear. “Not always,” he insists now, stating that corsetry, for instance, is a basis of folkloric outfits all around the world. “The accessoire is often just the outline of an idea which we are very familiar with, like a polo shirt or a cardigan, but suddenly, when it’s just a framework, it becomes a whole other artistic expression.” But the transfigured vernacular could also be certainly one of Lang’s strongest contributions to the style lexicon. In the present, there may be an merchandise known as a “reflective bra holster” from 1995. Though it’s a literal slip of a factor, it’s sewn from “polyamide, nylon, rubber/gum, metal, lace.” It haunts me.
The immersive coronary heart of an already absorbing exhibition is a seating plan, scaled up and laid out on the ground. With an enormous video taking part in on the finish of the “runway,” there’s an summary however eerie sensation of strolling into an precise present. Which, the truth is, it’s. The Lang venue that may ceaselessly be floor zero for me was Espace Commines, a 19th-century industrial warehouse within the Third Arrondissement, however there have been no extant paperwork referring to that house’s seating preparations so the séance de travail whose seating plan loaned itself to the MAK exhibition is Spring 2004, certainly one of Lang’s final, which occurred on the Tennis Club de Paris. The recreation was his concept. “I had always wanted to do this as an art installation, so somehow it made sense at MAK, because it’s interactive. And for people who know, like you, it’s necessarily reflective.” True, I stepped again in time to search out my precise seat (second row, behind American Elle). But, extra to the purpose, the set up acts as a poignant memento mori. That sensation is amplified by a few the sculptural columns (you might additionally name them folkloric maypoles) Lang fashioned from fragments of clothes that survived the hearth in his studio, and a ghostly handful of chairs painted white that he known as “Front Row.”
It’s been greater than 20 years because the Tennis Club de Paris. Lang turns 70 in March. “I’m actually not really afraid of death, but looking along the front row in the seating plan from 2004, half of them are dead. When you look at earlier floor plans, from when I started in the business, it’s even worse. I felt almost stupid when I was in the studio and said, ‘Oh my God, half of the front row’s dead,’ talking like some fucking old person. It’s like when you call your younger relatives and before you can say anything, they ask, ‘Who has died?’” He quotes a Golden Girl (he doesn’t keep in mind which one): “These are not your golden years, these are your last years.”
By which level, your entire life has taken on a retrospective glow. You don’t want a museum present to remind you. Gesamtkunstwerk has turn out to be a pop cultural byword for the whole integration of life and artwork. There’s one thing about Helmut that has at all times felt fully gesamtkunstwerklich, the way in which that vogue, artwork, structure, music, graphic design and promoting (he was the primary designer to promote within the National Geographic) all made this factor that so exquisitely fills the halls of the MAK Museum. When he launched his Fall 1998/1999 assortment on the web (one other designer first), New York’s yellow cabs all wore a Helmut Lang lid (additionally a primary). There are two within the present. One of them he discovered on the road. When he launched his denims assortment, he collaborated with the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation (one more first). The choice of photographs used for promoting included “Man in Polyester Suit” which the Getty Museum Collection describes as “Black man in grey suit and vest with his uncircumcised penis hanging out of his zipper.” Unsurprisingly, Lilli Hollein doubts it will be potential for one more designer to duplicate the identical profession arc immediately: the rigour, the radicalism, the fearless experiment.
The finest information is that MAK is in talks for the present to journey to different cities. Lang is reconciled to the concept. “I see it in the artwork, how it ends up, how it is used and understood. It always becomes many lives. And it seems this also becomes many lives. Before, it was a piece of clothing which all kinds of different people were using different ways. And at least I have no regrets. It’s going to be what it is.” And what “it” is for Lang proper now could be “a really good display.” For occasion, Richard Gluckman’s unique architectural plans rebuilt precisely to their unique dimensions. Or the media room, the handfuls of screens taking part in each present (with its soundtrack on headphones). Kirsten Owen and Boyd Holbrook, the attractive blonde Adam and Eve of Helmut’s courageous new world! “Everything that was happening is just there, and that this in itself is starting to communicate without anything else is kind of remarkable because it’s nothing people like you do not know but it starts a conversation there, without anybody asking for it.”
Lang laughs that very specific chortle once more. “And I think that’s pretty good. I think it is quite a groundbreaking exhibition.” Which was, in spite of everything, certainly one of his major objectives when he mentioned sure. “I feel it captures whatever it’s supposed to capture. You know, the work was not always planned out. It just rolled along. And we also didn’t do a book or anything from the past so far, because it all takes a long time. And I do like my day job.”
But Lang has additionally come to a different existential realisation, one whose potential impression on the whole lot of his work, and our appreciation of it, is compelling. “I think the one thing I realised during this time is that past and present and future are basically all happening at the same time.” A séance de travail is a piece session, or a piece in progress. For Helmut Lang, the present won’t ever finish. As he says, “The past is never easier than the present; the present is always the opportunity.”