As the gal who slouches around in her Dad's old shirts, I don't pay much attention to fashion ... though I was peripherally aware of Helmut Lang's avant garde designs. Then, this morning, I stumbled across an article of him in the Wall Street Journal Magazine -- an article about his new career as a sculptor. And thus did I discover him doing something in sculpture I did for SUN STIGMATA and am doing in the Murder, Death and Resurrection poetries. To wit, from the article by Julie L. Belcove:
Lang...ushers me down to a second room, where some 200 tall, thin poles lean against the walls. From a distance they resemble a forest of birch trees. Most are blackish or whitish, while some are bright red, blue or yellow. Up close their mottled surfaces reveal themselves to be resin and pigment mixed with bits of colorful yet indecipherable textures--in truth, shredded remnants of Lang's clothing designs....
In what was perhaps a cathartic exercise, Lang found an artistic use for his own fashion trove. After a 2010 fire in the SoHo space where he stored his remaining archive, he systematically destroyed the 6,000 to 8,000 items of clothing that survived. "That all got shredded with an industrial shredder," he says, "without hierarchy."
Beautiful mind. Beautiful poetics.
Here are some shots of the illustrations in the article. The first is of the pole sculptures and the second is a resonant black sculpture which had been simply a stack of flattened cardboard in his studio that he doused in thick coats of resin and pigment...
What's interesting, too, about his pole sculptures is that Lang is self-educated and yet felt moved to manifest the iconic imagery of the pole sculptures. That, contrary to the corporatized/academicized art and poetry cultures, shows something basic about Art.
No comments:
Post a Comment