MAK Center for Art and Architecture presents What remains behind by Helmut Lang in the artist's first solo institutional exhibition in Los Angeles at the Schindler House. The historic house designed by fellow Austrian Rudolph Schindler provides the spare, proto-minimalist frame for a series of freestanding sculptures. As with all of Lang’s work, the visible and the invisible are put in direct play. Stating his preference for materials “with a past, elements with irreplaceable presence and with scars and memories of a former purpose,” Lang impregnates the architecturally hallowed space with the powerful but ghostly presences of collective pasts and unknown futures.
Every house tells a story. Some tell many. The famed Schindler House tells more than most. The architectural story of the first slab-cast modernist house, the progenitor of a mid-century experiment that situated Los Angeles on the intellectual and ideological coastlines of the great European and American traditions is well known. Less well known are the lifestyle experiments, contentions, dreams, allegiances and defections born within. This, the psychic architecture of the storied house, exists in the conversations around light, space, sex, the boundaries between inside and outside, between people seeking new means of manifestation that still cling to the patinated concrete slabs and fill the silent spaces in between. Within this real and imaginary framework, the work of another Austrian emigree lends its own version of what it is to be human to the concrete forms and enclosures that now house it.
Before being bound and hardened into fist-like forms whose presence now fills the empty rooms, Helmut Lang’s materials were soft, pliable, yielding and still bearing the scars of the past and the impress of memory upon them. His predilection for found or discarded material allows him, through the act of sculpting, to reshape narrative as much as form. Handed-down mattress foam, rubber and wax became the syntax of a language based on the malleability of material and memory. The results are works that both imagine the future and materialize the past. Literalizing repression, Lang calls upon the secret life of objects to reveal themselves through the prolapses of material whose meaning cannot be fully constrained. As a result, the tensions they hold are multiple. Neither entirely figurative nor entirely abstract, they bring a fundamentally reductivist approach to material that is deeply impregnated with the burden of history. Sometimes this reads as a confrontation between the body and its past derelictions. At others the current is sexual, an accumulated tension that itself becomes a stand-in for human identity, vulnerability and desire. Always they occupy a liminal space where form is in a continual state of becoming.
Within the Kings Road space, the presence of Lang’s sculptures transforms each of the storied rooms into echo-chambers reverberating ideas of materialized humanity across concrete, wood and glass. Proximity and aspect constantly change. Like emotions, they are fugitive, restless and refuse to settle into singular meanings and forms. Shape-shifting in character as much as form, depending on where one stands, they can appear mordant, lugubrious, tragic and even comic. But beneath these surface impressions is the undertow of darker sexualized forms of desire, a less palpable but more powerful energy field that forces us to confront the inherent tension between the body, the object, the gaze and the architecture that contains them. Just as all art is manifest thought, so these works are extroversions of interior conditions. Lang addresses the tensions between the public and private self. In doing so, he investigates the ways in which the invoked but absent body is both an object of desire and a site of personal expression.
Muscular and vulnerable, the contorted material is a registration of memory, a condition of post-traumatic distress that calls inevitably to ideas about the fragility of the human form and the malleability of identity. Time is compacted into the material. Disavowing the orderly rational illusion of time as steady and periodic, it pulses between the bodies of expression and reception as if to trace the unsettling arrhythmia of recurring traumatic experience. As with the architecture, what is within is without and what is without is within.
— Neville Wakefield
