installation view: DER BOTANISCHE GARTEN SPEISING, Gallgasse, Vienna

16 02 24*

Finish Fetish
The first time I met Helmut he was leaning against the bar at AFG in ocean blue bibs. Albert introduced us with a cat-like smile, grinning at the size of the universe inside of his head. It was a decade or so ago and it was fall or maybe winter in the 2nd district. Helmut had spent the day covering the interior of a building with white walls and I wasn‘t sure if he was a teenager or working to pay against a mortgage. We talked about skating, Italy, and dialect. He helped me glue drywall together at the seams for one show, then we started collaborating on another. He made a triplearmed turntable and taught me a lesson about looking that echoes into almost every project I‘ve worked on since. A year or so later we went to Lithuania with Albert and started small fires, played around in a former KGB‘s front yard and watched the sun set from opposite sides of the earth.
A couple of nights ago we talked about racing on acid. He tells me there‘s a specific pocket you can hear with the right team surrounding you. That weather becomes lost with just the right dose, and the slipstream is where you can rest in the noise. He explains speed in psychedelic terms and I nod. I think teams are for believers, terms are made of lies, and individuals made from corners. I think Helmut wants to bend the world but doesn‘t have enough logs to heat it. This afternoon I had a really nice dream about being in the mountains. I was standing with some artist friends and looking at a half pipe covered in snow and gym padding. We discussed whether it was a spine until I woke up to arguing. I had another dream about being a security guard for Conan O’Brien. It paid twenty-five an hour and we mostly spent time talking about his camera collection. I quit the job just in time to wake up for work. As a transition I wanted to insert the show title here with some clever description of conceptually tagged fetishes, maybe a line or two about sleeping next to my shoes when I was a kid (both the Reebok pumps and the Jordans). A tidy sentence about melodic sculptures, my brother shitting into my skate shoes, belonging, and the myth of the 90s being categorized by a kind of ecstatic stability. I tried to work out some lines about consumer allegiance as millennial first order identity politics but failed.
Helmut steps to the side of a parking block. We talk about objects being eaten by their surroundings, how slivers of color make brands, how surprisingly slim the margin between getting bent and bending is. He tells me that if his works need titles they’ve failed to speak for themselves and describes how denim is stitched until it becomes a curtain. I think about prestressed jeans and how watching him walk a bike can teach me about the physics of drag. I try to tune into the calm but unsettled rustling of his melodies. I ask him to build a bed for my kid but instead he finds out that our apartment is missing a wall. I like watching him stop to admire a spill, seal meaning into objects, wait for bubbles to pop. I like the way he ignores himself and folds his hands. I like watching him look for objects without names. I like making lists of things I‘ll never do. We talk about the weather when we want to forget about site. I ask him if he wants to make a showroom for perverts. When we’re too cold to say goodbye, I open the door and think about taste.
—–
Seth Weiner, 2024

CANDY OR NOT

Glimpsed from the highway, Vienna seems like a big city.
For a brief moment, you have this possibility in your head.
Through a naturally grown accumulation of skyscrapers from different decades, it emerges as an idea – and disappears like a shadow in the night.
(Heiss Helmut, 14 October 2023, A23 Vienna towards Prague)

Material formations, curves above curves, and bent in different directions at the same time,
are rather related to the double helix – or the curvature of space-time – than to architecture and design.

A forced connection of parts,
without a catalyst
but under pressure
and with time.
A certain unease arises from the contrast between the razor-sharp precision – and the simplicity of the materials used.

In case of Candy or not candy, the Japanese TV show, the participants bite into objects, that are either made of sugar – or exactly what they represent. The purpose is not to question certainties, but solely the comic effect, the image created and the performative expression of the celebrities in the absurd situation.

The sculpture therefore has something to do with a moment
with a monument
and the question of correct use dosen’t apply

Here it’s obvious: this is paper. You might think that it is supposed to trick you into something real –
but that is misleading.
Appropriating the material, relating to it, personally and politically.
And the form derives from an object of everyday life.
Like falling for an advertisement
Capture the good life!

One possible reaction is the AHA-experience. Often frowned upon, it includes a moment of shock and reflection of your own position, and that can be uncomfortable.
But then there are some little traps and exaggerations, little jibes within the object.

Helmut Heiss copies his own cycling shoes and reconstructs them out of paper. This takes forever, it takes all the time in the world. Through the precision in the approach and the material properties of different types of paper exactly reflect the material of the original. Trying to achieve this level of precision creates errors and glitch-moments because they are no longer “true to themselves”. In order to represent something, you actually have to work out the essentials and are not to get lost in the details. In Helmut Heiss works, paradoxically, a critical compactness emerges, which makes now everything appear essential – like a parallel reality, something that shows the vulnerability of a symbol.

Thea Moeller