GALLERY
Neville Wakefield and Johan Lindeberg organised an intimate performance by metal guitar legend and music destructionist Mick Barr at the BLK DNM, 237 Lafayette, New York. Photo Jessie Askinazi
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Neville Wakefield's new license plate for Olympia Scarry. Photo Rachel Chandler
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Exploring his new-found freedom as artist, Helmut Lang presents a unique exhibition, curated by Neville Wakefield, at East Hampton's Fireplace Project. For his second solo show, Lang has created 16 stalactite shaped sculptures, constructed from destroyed plastic, metal, leather, fur and fabrics. If their forms and organic feel resemble those of corrosion and nature, their origins spring from Lang's fashion past. Having retired from the industry and donated pieces to museums, Lang felt the need to repurpose his 6,000 piece archival collection - the result, a violent assault over 20 years of fashion history, shredding the fabrics and function to the unrecognisable. Or, in Neville Wakefield's words:
'The materials and fabrics Helmut Lang used to give temporary definition to the body are now just traces of natural and synthetic fibers, plastics, metals, leathers, fur, skins, feathers and hair - erasing the past and the difference they once stood for. Thus metabolized, the material began to take the form of strangely beautiful excretions: witnesses to both the transience of our creative endeavors, and the enduring need out of which such efforts are born.'
Make It Hard by Helmut Lang opens tomorrow at The Fireplace Project and is on view through August 8, 851 Springs Fireplace Road, East Hampton, New York.
Text Sophie Pinchetti
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Neville Wakefield (the curator of Commercial Break in Venice) and his girlfriend the artist Olympia Scarry trying to escape Toilet Paper Party, Isola San Servo, Venice. Photo Olivier Zahm
Presented on a giant mobile video screen traveling the length of the Grand Canal in Venice, Commercial Break will feature artists engaging with the relationship between advertising and culture. The short digital works by recognized and emerging artists from around the world will bring to art lovers and tourists alike a constantly reforming and randomly sequenced stream of ideas that suggests a world in which content moves at the speed of advertising and attention itself is the ultimate product. Commercial Break features the work of 80 artists - including a lot of names that we love at Purple like Aaron Young, Ari Marcopoulos, Cyprien Gaillard, Terence Koh, Olympia Scarry, Dan Colen and Maurizio Cattelan - as a contemporary sequence of endless ideas and content. The project is produced by Dasha Zhukova's Garage Project, curated by the American art editor Neville Wakefield and powered by the independent magazine POST.
Commercial Break will be viewable on location through Venice during the opening of the Venice Biennale and is also downloadable from today at the ITunes Apple Store. The project is produced in association with the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture.