from www.goethe.de
"Taking Things Literally" - Hermann Hiller: A Designer Between Art, Object Design and Fashion
The made-to-measure suit made of yellow measuring tape, the beach dress made of beach mats, the housecoat made of tarpaulin, the day suit made of daily newspapers, the overall made of rubber gloves: Hermann Hiller takes things literally and pursues – similar to the Dadaists - the art of deconstruction: albeit not the deconstruction of language but of the meaning of words. Hiller creates clothes from banal materials such as construction netting, measuring tape or disposable gloves. He consequently changes not only the sense or function of the material, but also plays with the meaning of the clothes' conventional designations. With the aid of maps, playing cards or measuring tape, which are generally only judged on their utility value, the designer also wants to tell stories. Hiller deliberately plays with the "public's" expectations and vision of things, and by destroying them, triggers an alienation effect. His "street suit" stuck all over with ten kilos of road grit looks so much like a road that the wearer becomes part of it and disappears. With the classic cut of a lounge suit, it looks like the majority of men's suits but at the same time is unlike any that have ever been seen on the street, according to Hermann Hiller.
The Aesthetic Attraction of Consumer Goods
Art and fashion have always interacted in the course of history, either by art adopting everyday, fleeting or transient aspects, or by fashion processing abstract or visionary ideas. Already in 1916, Marcel Duchamp with his urinal plucked the trivial and the commonplace from everyday life and made them the subject of art, just like the followers of Pop Art in the 1960s. Hermann Hiller also focuses on this idea. His wearable objects keep up the tradition of Pop Art without losing their individuality. In an almost playful way, Hiller draws – in the Pop Art sense of the word – an aesthetic attraction from banal consumer goods. His evening dress is made of packaging tape, his "play suit" is made from the felt covering of a roulette table and his "ladies suit" is made of playing cards. Clothing for Everyday Objects
Hermann Hiller not only creates clothes for people but also for cars and lamps: a lamp in a plastic bag becomes a "bag lamp" and a car is wrapped in a huge "car bag". The wrapped up car indicates the immobile world of the car of the future (due to air pollution and road congestion). Packed in a cheap, non-tear synthetic fibre (like that of the chequered plastic bags), the car loses its function as a status symbol. "Superfluous objects", such as the car, thus disappear as symbols: a plea to get rid of them completely someday. In contrast, blankets for wrapping furniture during removals came to stand for the clothing of the mobile society because we "move" every day, from house to workplace, from workplace to the bar, cinema or gym. The "blanket clothes" were made live in 2002 on an ice-rink installed in the i-camp theatre in Munich. Two huge removal crates served as a stage, cutting and sewing table. Cheap, grey furniture blankets made of pressed recycled fluff were modelled directly onto the body; with here and there, the need for another opening, a gathering of material or some additions. Planning, improvising, cutting, adjusting and judging - the process of creating works of sculpture that are nevertheless wearable becomes visible. Scissors replace the chisel and needles replace the paste.
Architecture as an Experiment
Hermann Hiller is not a fashion designer in the true sense of the word. Born in 1963 in Munich, he studied architecture and sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts (Akademie der Bildenden Künste) in Munich. After graduating as an engineer in 1990, he steadily broadened his scope of activity. This was achieved particularly in cooperation with the students of the Munich Art Academy, where he has been teaching since 1997. His installations and wearable objects allude to architecture and become architecture. Hiller's building projects, which he executes with Markus Lanz and Toni Thiele as the architects and design group kwin, are just as unconventional. They focus on the projects at Guttenburg Castle in Upper Bavaria, which include the construction of an exhibition building. In this project, Hiller, with his client Nico Forster, pushes the possibilities of current building work to the limit: the architecture of experimentation has priority over the final product, the building. Only scrap building machines are used, for example, and the shell of the building acts as a stage for performances. In 1999, Hiller was awarded the City of Munich Architecture Award (Förderpreis für Architektur der Stadt München), accompanied by the exhibition Heroes have no Baggage (Helden haben kein Gepäck) in the Munich Architekturgalerie. At the Border Between Art, Object Design and Fashion Design
In 2001, Hermann Hiller was invited by the Goethe Institute in Rio de Janeiro to work for four weeks with the Brazilian textile cooperative Coopa Roca in the Rocinha favela in Rio de Janeiro. Since many people walk about Rio as live billboards, Hiller decided to identify the "clothing" of the so-called sandwich man or woman with his/her creators, and had portrait photographs of each of their parents placed on the front and back instead of the usual adverts. The results were presented at the Retalhar exhibition in Sao Paulo in 2002 and in Rio in 2003. Then in 2003, five seamstresses from Rocinha were in turn invited to Berlin, where Hiller staged a kind of sewing performance at the Volksbühne theatre. In this performance, frufru de escada, Hiller had Brazilian craftwork applied to flowery aprons, the noise of the sewing machines became music through the amplifier. Hermann Hiller and the organisers were pursuing two quite different aims with these two projects: on the one hand to make people aware of the working conditions and the cooperative in Brazil and on the other, to promote creative aspects as well as tailoring and processing skills. Hermann Hiller's concept, that clothing stands for people's personal circumstances and relationships, for work and leisure, proved to be the right one also in this project. He took up the idea that activities rub off on people and their clothes, as for example wood shavings that stick to a joiner's overall. "I'm not talking about reality, but about ideas. These ideas have been transformed and become material. So the clothes are not meant to be fashion, but only materialised ideas. It is important, however, that the clothes are sewn together … and of course that they are worn", Hiller explains. His wearable objects are thus at the border between art, object design and fashion design. But above all, their wit and irony prompt the observer to reflect and to question things, and bring an amused smile to his face.
Dr. Ingrid Loschek
is Professor of Fashion History and Theory at Pforzheim University of Design and is the author of numerous books on fashion
http:www.loschek.de Translation: Mary Boyd
Copyright: Goethe-Institut, Online-Redaktion
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May 2005
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tnanks for posting the article and pics anna karina
