One of my favourite collaborations from the past popped up on Google today. Jenny Holzer x Helmut Lang,

Together these two made real, interdisciplinary, groundbreaking art, beginning with their first collaborative I Smell You On My Clothes installation at the 1996 Florence Biennale.

It was a multi-sensory and primal meditation on lust. Lang filled the exhibition space with a perfume meant to evoke the scent a lover leaves on the sheets, while Holzer’s LED sign displayed obsessive proclamations of love.

Later, in 2000 they collaborated on the launch of a new perfume – the advertising created to mark the launch of the brand’s first fragrance in 2000 was art-directed by Marc Atlan, the ads rejected the glossy images  of most perfume campaigns to instead employ Holzer’s bold black words on white paper.

Recapturing the intimacy that Lang had sought to project in 1996, the ad campaign brought together the human (“I BITE YOUR LIP / I BREATHE YOUR BREATH”) and the mechanical, its newspaper style evoking the mass-produced.

With no product shots and a tiny logo, it was anti-advertising, invested in the conceptual world rather than the commercial.