Words Kate Orne Portrait Juergen Teller Photography Martien Mulder

Published in No 15

On a quiet lane in the Hamptons, facing a constantly mutating oceanscape, lives an artist who creates provocative work from found objects and readily available materials — at times reusing elements from his personal history, the output of which has left a lasting mark on so many of us. Today, his raw, enigmatic sculptures and objects continue in the same fashion (no pun intended), spurring our thoughts and imagination forward and deeper inside.

The man is Helmut Lang, the camera shy and profoundly influential fashion designer who walked away from a groundbreaking career, in 2005, to devote his life to a calling that as a youth, he says, was his first. Through my visits and email exchanges with Lang, the artist shared not only his home but also what’s on his mind.

KO I was struck by your proximity to the ocean. Has the ocean changed since you’ve been here?

HL 

I am mesmerized by the endlessness of the ocean, or at least I experience it as endless, and that feeling never gets old. It has become wilder and more dangerous since we arrived here and there is no doubt that this is due to global warming. To observe that the whales have parked themselves here, out of their natural cycle of showing up twice a year, is a mirage that everything is fine.



KO You are very private, an enigma to those who are not close to you. You and Edward (Edward Pavlick, Lang’s life partner) are tucked away from the Hamptons crowd. How do you define privacy?

HL 

For me, privacy means not needing to share everything one does with the entire world. There are plenty who are eager to do so anyway.

KO Tell me a little about your property.


HL We don’t know much about the history of the buildings, except that the Tyson family moved them here in the mid-1900s. Much of the land was just open fields with just a few farms. The Tyson matron herself painted and invited other artists to work and spend time here in the summer. Since then, the Tyson compound became a legendary refuge for renowned creatives. The main house is mostly nineteenth century, and the guesthouse was a silversmith’s cottage from around 1700. The bird barn and workshop I don’t know anything about, except that it was used for exhibitions back then. My studio barn, which we moved here around 2009, was a generous gift from Adelaide de Menil.

KO The new sculptures in your studio struck me as strange, provocative organs, living deep within, like you dug inside of yourself…


HL I started that body of work 3 or so years ago. Dramatic events in my life and my friends’ lives unleashed that work. Then COVID came, friends died for different reasons, and war came to Europe, which could become WWIII. So, they have become more intense and more loaded along the way. I’m determined to finish the broken hearts and other injuries sculptures due to the current situation and the urgency I feel about our emotional and physical injuries. In general, I have been concerned for years about the times we are heading into.

KO Has living surrounded by nature been an influence on your work?


HL I would assume it influences my work in an unconscious way, as every surrounding does. It can inspire a counterreaction, to be radical in art, to be in opposition to nature. I know I was only ever interested in radical Modernism. The early Abstract Expressionists out here were revolutionary and radical: Pollock, Krasner, de Kooning, Frankenthaler, Mitchell, Motherwell, Kline and Rothko, etc.

KO You were raised by your grandparents in Ramsau am Dachstein, a small village in the Austrian Alps, where you had no access to TV or phone until you were about 9 years old.

HL 

I grew up surrounded by incredibly beautiful nature — an incredible gift, as I came to understand later. As kids we were always sent outside to entertain ourselves and invent all we needed for it. It was adventurous, fearless and sometimes camp, but we all survived jumping from high hay storage barns or trees, rolling down hills, building dams at the river, and checking each other’s privates out. Around 6 years old, I started to help with farming, foraging, and working at the bakery — work became just as natural as walking the 45 minutes to school through all seasons.


I realized later that it was a split recollection, which also had a dark side. My grandparents were refugees from Yugoslavia and not accepted by the local mountain community for a long time. It was hard for them, and I remember heartbreaking stories of rejection. I was a toddler from divorced parents tossed in from Vienna and was often made aware that I didn’t belong in the village. Small mindedness and God-pretending people can be brutal. I never really had the comfort of being grounded in a family or belonging to a specific place early on — maybe it’s the reason why I became a borderless world citizen.

 KO Your granddad was a shoemaker, what did he teach you?



HL He made shoes from scratch and worked alone, sometimes my grandmother helped. I learned that work is a process that takes as long as necessary, until one is satisfied and proud of the results. Nothing wasted or shortcut for profit.

KO You felt further mistreated when you moved to Vienna at 10 years old, how so?



HL I had a different accent because of where I came from. I was also unfamiliar with the rules of the suburbs and had a very different upbringing with skills nobody needed in the city. I had never heard of soccer etc. I was called a retard; it was humiliating, and I made a good target. I didn’t really know my father, and my stepmother hated the burden of me, and all that had serious consequences for me. Suspicions that I was gay didn’t help. I would say those were the hardest 8 years of my life. I moved out when I was 18, with two banana boxes containing my schoolbooks, nothing to lose, and the possibility of eventually finding freedom and myself.

KO Do you find that your childhood had a strong influence on you as an artist?

HL Growing up with a necessary reduction to the essential, the need to experiment and invent in those circumstances, the opulence of festivities and local customs, the need for belonging in an urban environment later as a teen, and having lived and worked in different cultures — the sum of these and all other experiences is who I am.
 

KO Do you recall your first exposure to art?

HL My first exposure was my experience of artists as human beings. Their interests, lifestyles, and acceptance of being different was impactful and inspiring. Among artists, I felt I had landed where I could survive as myself. I don't remember what my first exposure to an artwork was. Maybe nature itself, a perfect cow dump, in church (forced to go), as a model for an artist friend at 18, or in Vienna with all its old and new art. But I know I was seriously contaminated.

KO What about the first object you created that brought a sense of accomplishment?


HL Probably my hair, in the early eighties, with way too much hair spray.

KO Your home is a beautiful balance of the past and present.

The environment I work and live in is extremely important to me. I don’t need grand or big, but I need it to be my vision. I was like that already as a little boy living in my grandparents’ attic. Of course, I rearranged that one too.


HL I prefer the massive, stone-walled buildings in Europe and the urban brutal modernity of our apartment in New York, but this is a historic wood house which deserved respect despite my initial doubts that it would hold up. It became a project to preserve its essence, but also make it as modern as possible. I had stuff to work with from my other lives in Europe, which went well with the Shaker feeling I encountered here.

KO Do you find pleasure in digging your fingers deep into the dirt?

My grandparents had a garden, and it was essential for our survival.


HL Growing, harvesting, and preserving all makes sense to me. They also instilled in me that with a small piece of land with a garden you can survive somewhat better. We also foraged, had chickens, and I got milk from the local farmer. The concept of being self-sufficient, organic, no-waste, and hardworking was the way I was brought up — it comes naturally to me. I always had the need to dig into the dirt as a balance to a public life — something I have in common with my late friend Stella [Tennant], and Kirsten [Owen].



KO You mentioned that minimalism starts with baroque, can you expand on this concept?


HL One has to consider all rich possibilities to conclude that they are better reduced, at least that is how I see it. Otherwise, you are simply imitating or reproducing a predetermined form, or limiting yourself from interesting sidesteps.

KO The MAK [Museum für angewandte Kunst / Museum of Applied Arts], in Vienna, holds a large part of your design archives, have you experimented with pieces from your archives in your sculptures?

 HL A significant portion of my personal archive was damaged in a fire and subsequently used in the production of my sculptures — new life from expensive creative compost. The MAK permanently houses the only official Helmut Lang Archive (1986–2005) in a designated room within the museum. It will eventually also serve as a hub connecting donations made to 20 museums worldwide, as part of a multidisciplinary digital archive where the history of my work in design can be traced. I used to teach at the University of Applied Arts, next door, and later received the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art, so giving back is part of it.

KO You often work with found objects.

HL I’ve worked with found or discarded materials all my life. I’ve always been attracted to elements with scars and memories of a former purpose and combined them with the new. My process is more intuitive than historical. I had no formal training in fashion, and I have no formal training in art. Consequently, I am creating my own language by being unafraid and experimenting the hell out of things.

 
KO Your approach is like a lifelong investigation, no matter the medium. What are you searching for?

HL To do the best I can do on any given day.

Have you found that a past in fashion conflicts with a career in the arts?

Being afraid of change is not one of my qualities. I am not conflicted by the perceptions of the current or the old. For a while now, the art world has been changing and a new generation of artists, galleries, and collectors from all backgrounds are breaking new ground, existing outside the old hierarchies. I am one of them. We are in the new New and everything is changing.
 


KO As a designer, you never sketched but pulled your ideas from extensive research, how does a series of sculptures evolve for you?



HL I didn’t do sketches because I get bored by predictability and excluding possibilities from the beginning. It was and is a collection of emotions, rather than research. Research is technical; creative work needs a lot of confused moments that want to be dominated to make sense at one point.

What happens to me during the work process, intellectually and form-wise, is that I approach a piece with an unknown beginning or an imaginary idea, which I have not experienced and therefore remains innocent, waiting to be explored. This emotion results in a flow of works or procedures that can be interrupted at any point. These are condensed, layered, broken up and collected again, and suddenly taken over by something else. At any given moment, loss of control takes effect. If the sculpture is strong enough to fight back, that is often a good moment to stop.

No part of the process is comforting, as there is always accumulation, dismantling, reconfiguration, and reconsideration involved to get there. Comfort would be distracting. To apply pressure to oneself means to care about what one does. I never expect things to be easy along the way. Knowing too much can hinder you too.

KO You had a close friendship with the late Louise Bourgeois, what attracted you to each other?

HL We simply liked each other and out of that developed a natural desire to work together, which was also a great excuse to spend time together. Louise was all or nothing. Intense, warm, embracing, and straightforward. All qualities I treasure. She said we were both runaways, but that was only one understanding. When I think of her, it is an uplifting feeling I can’t really describe. She reaffirmed my practice and belief that materials are just materials, and they are here to serve you. She was also not afraid of crossovers and taught me not to lose time in order to please others.

KO Creative friendships mean a great deal to you, another close relationship is with Jenny Holzer. Do you bounce ideas with friends?

HL If you collaborate on a project, you bounce ideas off each other. Otherwise, you share when you are already half there or finished. The creative process is often an isolated one. But more valuable than the work talk is really sharing each other’s personal conditions and the magic of spending time together, mentally or physically.

KO Criticism can be tricky. How do you deal with it?

HL I deal with it :) If it is intelligent, I think about it — it is an important part of a creative conversation. If it is not, I feel for the critic.

KO Your influence as a fashion designer remains strong. Does fashion have any meaning to you today?

HL I have always respected my past, but I have always been moving forward throughout my life. It is not healthy to be stagnant or live in the past. That said, I am proud that I am responsible for a body of work that is still contemporary and influential. But it is also important that a new language is formulated because the times are clearly demanding it, and I don’t see enough of it. Fashion is not only fashion — it eventually becomes an evident expression of an era.

KO What is occupying your mind now?

HL I am deeply concerned about the general human condition and the loss of all civility, and the nearly unavoidable collapse of the human race and life as we know it. It’s either the planet or us, or both. All that is happening now is just a puzzle piece of what is to come, if we don’t focus on our planet. The fallout will be apocalyptic, and we are close to achieving it. It should be all over the international media landscape, and it better be a driving force to deal with it now, to mobilize a solution. Otherwise, we are totally fucked.



Helmut Lang is represented by von ammon co and Sperone Westwater. www.h-lang.studio @h_lang_

Photographer Martien Mulder is a regular contributor to UD. She is repped by wschupfer.com

Kate Orne is the founder and editor of UD.