interview by Neville Wakefield

Every house holds its ghosts, but some also carry a charge—of memory, of vision, of rupture. The Schindler House, with its radical slabs and open geometries, is one such site: a crucible of modernism, a psychic container for the desires and contradictions of those who passed through it. While its architectural legacy is etched into the story of Los Angeles and its place in the modernist imagination, the deeper narrative lies in the flicker between inside and outside—of both structure and self. It is in this liminal territory that artist Helmut Lang enters, not as an intruder, but as a kindred spirit: an Austrian émigré whose work, like the house, is defined by thresholds—between past and future, softness and brutality, repression and release. Lang’s sculptures do not merely occupy the space; they reactivate it. Once pliant materials—rubber, foam, wax—are pressed into forms that echo with psychic residue. They do not illustrate history; they bear it. They do not represent the body; they remember it. In this collision of architecture and affect, Lang renders vulnerability muscular, and desire structural. His is a language of compression, of trauma reformed into shape, of identities still becoming. Here, within the Schindler House, the past is not over—it is pressing in, from all sides. Curator of Helmut Lang: What remains behind, which is on view this spring at MAK Center’s The Schindler House, Neville Wakefield discusses with Lang the power of his “darker sexualized forms of desire.”

NEVILLE WAKEFIELD: What was the first experience that had a profound effect on you?

HELMUT LANG: When I saw the erect penis of an adult man as a seven-year-old.

NW: What was the first experience of art that profoundly affected you?

HL: To be honest, I can’t remember. It was more the experience of time with artist friends that profoundly affected me.

NW: Though separated by over half a century, there is more in common between your art and the architecture of Rudolph Schindler than the fact that you both originated from Vienna and emigrated to the USA. There’s a current of radical experimentation running through architecture, activism, and art that is perhaps uniquely Austrian, and I’m curious as to whether you associate your work as an artist with a particular type of culture or upbringing?

HL: Most of what I’ve done bears the imprint of foundational influences—those inescapable basics instilled without permission, simply by being educated in post-imperial, post-World War II Vienna, shaped further by an earlier alpine austerity and the possibility of simplicity. It was all refined and nurtured, physically and mentally, escaping the closed narrative and equally opulent volume of Austria.

What I carried with me was a commitment to artistic integrity, a drive for radical experimentation, and a certain fearlessness to find unprecedented territory.

NW: Obviously time and place are intimately connected but is there a difference to leaving a place behind such as Austria and leaving a past behind such as your previous career as a designer?

HL: Not if the choice is made on my own will and the desire is to move on into another physical or mental space to explore a continuation of life which is not yet lived. When everything becomes too predictable or confined, I’m willing to abandon all sense of security. It’s probably all rooted in my history of forced or wanted displacements and confinements, and a lack of grounding and belonging in my early years.

NW: When I first encountered your work as an artist you were quite literally shredding the past. It was an act of both disavowal and transformation. The work that you showed most recently at the Schindler House in LA conjured the past in ways that were both more subtle and more profound, evoking the way in which both memory and trauma become inscribed in the body. Does this shift reflect an interest in material as the bearer of psychological rather than evidential content?

HL: I am not committed to any material in particular. I don’t know how most of my artworks start and where they end, and definitely not where the form comes in, so in this echo of a definable and undefinable past lies the presence.

Materials are just fertilizer to expand the boundaries of sculpture and abstraction in different bodies of work. Overthinking and then simplifying are joined to find the mysterious, familiar, and disturbing, which all seem to go together effortlessly for me.

I don’t reference my past literally, if you think about it—though I’m radically aware that I am the result of everything I’ve lived and my pursuit of what’s still unknown. I’m clearly not someone who’s wired for the easy way out.

Helmut Lang
*prolapse II*, 2024
latex, shellac, resin, foam, steel
22.5 X 33.25 X 23.5 inches

NW: That said, it seems that you are drawn to materials that bear a kind of human residue—the impress of the recent past. When you think about a material such as mattress foam, are you thinking about what it can become or what it has been?

HL: If used, it is rather what has possibly happened there. The content is human residue in various senses—traces more significant than the material ones. Both converge past and future, opening infinite potential for the new.

As I am rather instinct-driven, it only all makes sense to me after the work is strong enough to fight me back, or I feel something is there which I have not experienced, or seen, or understood myself, until that point.

NW: None of the works that you showed at the Schindler House were made with it in mind and yet the connections were incredibly powerful. Both sculptures and house seemed to be vessels containing not just the memory of their making, but also the psychological presence of their creators and inhabitants. Even though abstract, the works read as representative of the human condition. Do you consider yourself a humanist?

HL: As the word has so many different meanings and associations and is also a categorization, I feel more comfortable saying that I consider myself a decent human being.

NW: That sounds like Kurt Vonnegut who said something like, to be a humanist is to have tried to behave decently without the expectation of reward or punishment after death. Do you believe in an afterlife? Or do people just live on through the legacy of the objects they create?

HL: I agree with the Kurt assessment—sounds fair enough. I think the afterlife is what remains behind in people’s memory and the impact you made on other humans. If there is a creative legacy that survives, that is not disturbing either.

NW: The reason I ask is in part because the sculpture in the Schindler House had a powerful presence, but it also felt in dialogue with another kind of presence which was equally ineffable—the presence of those who had inhabited its four walls, who had eaten, slept, laughed, argued, and fucked there. Perhaps it’s just the human stain, but I started to think of the sculptures as another part of a long lineage of distinguished occupants. Am I projecting too much when I think of them in terms of character?

HL: Obviously some transcending energy is happening at the Schindler House with the sculptures in residence. The sculptures have amassed a different energy and communication ability than in the studio or in a white cube gallery and are equally more demanding and embarrassing. Although they are abstracted fist fragments representing resistance, despair, or joy, they interact more as whole beings. I have never seen such an intense and personal reaction from an audience assembled from the entire landscape of the human condition. Whatever is happening in this dialogue is an unprecedented experience.

NW: I was thinking about the house not just as the precursor to the mid-century movement but also as the repository of all the non-architectural and social experimentation that came with the architectural removal of barriers between inside and outside. The exhibition and the sculpture invites the audiences to play in this liminal space, which is something I don't think happens too often. Do you think of those barriers as something to be overcome? In fact, do you think of them at all?

HL: It seems to be possible according to the impact individual viewers described of their experience and innermost feelings at the exhibition.

Helmut Lang
*kleine Portrait Arbeit II*, 2015–17
shellac, plastic, wax, steel
8.5 X 8.625 X 1.75 inches

NW: What is your state of mind when working on the sculptures?

HL: It is like being in a turbulent relationship. All emotional positions are laid out raw and lived alternately, all in search of unprecedented knowledge.

NW: And this relationship gets played out in the material? Sometimes it seems to have been caressed into being, at others tortured…

HL: It is more an act of discovery, mentally and physically. Art is an initiative occupation. Materiality has to contribute to the creative process, but the deciding factor is knowing the moment to stop in the articulation through intuition. Intuition is probably the most important part of the work process if I think about it.

NW: You’ve spoken about the moment at which a work breaks free from the process of its making and starts to take on a life of its own. I’m curious as to how you arrive at that moment and whether that’s the point at which the object can take on a form of animism?

HL: When the work is strong enough to fight you back, it could mark the beginning of a form of animism. It is also the moment when one instinctively feels ready to present their artistic position, offering it to others and embracing that exposure.

Helmut Lang
*consenting position*, 2015–17
shellac, pigment, resin, foam, steel
43.75 X 22.75 X 7.5 inches

NW: Is this power of art an Oedipal process whereby the work must, in some way, kill the father creator upon realization in order to find new audiences?

HL: I might have a lot of layers to deal with occasionally but that is one I am not concerned about. It is the killer’s problem.

NW: So, from killers to erections, let’s go back to where we started—the profound effect of seeing an adult penis at age seven… There’s a sexual tension that permeates all of your work, which goes beyond the phallic attributes of pieces such as make it hard, or more recently, for you. Are sex and creativity inexorably entwined?

HL: Is the idea of sexuality not entwined in nearly every aspect of life, unconsciously or obviously?

It is beneficial to keep the inner child alive and I find verbal “Schmutzfuss” associations (a Viennese Trojan horse) quite helpful to ease over intellectual observations and drama, or just for a laugh, or even as a Janus-like title for an art piece.

for you was offering the choice of giving the middle finger in resistance, anger, or just being Italian, or seeing a phallus in developing progress, which most people did. So you tell me.

interview by Neville Wakefield

ART / FASHION/ CULTURE / MUSIC / FILM

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