Archive for the ‘The Happy Show’ Category

The Found Poetry of Happiness: Stefan Sagmeister “The Happy Show”

June 1 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

Not long ago ICA’s social media channels were running pretty dry, sort of like those so-called canals on Mars, a planet on which water has yet to be discovered.

Mars

NASA image from Viking I orbiter, 1980

This year, though, our Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube channels are flowing in streams while meetings about social media swim across our calendars.

It’s not easy to decide how to use a new form, maintaining the voice and priorities of the institution while hurtling down the Niagara of platforms, images, abbreviations, exclamation points, urls, likes, repostings, friends, and followers. Which way is up? How much is enough? Will these old barrel staves of thought, judgment, and grace protect us in the torrent?

One current ICA exhibition, Stefan Sagmeister The Happy Show, has proved an ideal testing ground for social media: its flexibility, allure, and potential creativity. The Happy Show has its own Tumblr page, a sunny yellow miscellany of photos, quotations, video clips and—predominantly and wonderfully—drawings by visitors of what happiness looks like to them.

We have a station in the show with cards and markers, inviting viewers to make these pictures.

Happiness drawing station

Every week ICA’s assistant digital media editor, Pam Yau, retrieves the cards, sorts them into categories (activities, animals, people, food, etc.), scans them, and sends them off to Sagmeister, Inc. where a few are selected for inclusion on the Tumblr, and all are fodder for infographics.

Happy food infographic

Sagmeister, Inc.

You can see all the drawings on Flickr, a diversion I highly recommend. People have drawn palm-treed islands, roller skates, DNA strands, lips, space ships, ham haunches, laundry hanging jauntily on the line, and many suns.

Sagmeister has also issued a series of questions via Twitter for visitors to answer:

What is the happiest word?
What would you do if you had a year off?
What food makes you happy?
What have you done to make someone else unexpectedly happy?

Followers have Tweeted back in droves. Their responses, especially when considered in grouplets, read almost like found poems:

What Would You Do If You Had a Year Off?

Road tripping from Alaska to Patagonia.
Write a book, maybe? Learn Indian handicrafts?
Photograph Irish dancers in every country possible.

* * *

What Did You Do to Make Someone Else Unexpectedly Happy?

I took care of a dog last summer. I emailed pictures of her every day to her owners with funny captions.
I like to write an unexpected postcard to my friends.
Remembered to bring the macchinetta del caffe camping!

* * *

What Food Makes You Happy?

A runny boiled egg with potato waffle soldiers for dunking.
Nutella crepes.
Oysters on the half shell.
Lasanga….yeah!

Stefan Sagmeister goes out of his way to say that his exhibition will not make you happier. And in general, whether or not social media promotes happiness (this blog excepted) is still an open question. That said, the lively, imaginative, diverse outpouring of material being shared online around The Happy Show is truly a delight. It may not make you as happy as a Nutella crepe or seeing a flying saucer, but for a virtual experience, it’s right up there.

* * *

Stefan Sagmeister: The Happy Show is open at ICA through August 12, 2012.

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Man of Your Dreams: Installing First Among Equals and Stefan Sagmeister The Happy Show

April 6 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

In the second-floor gallery, some of the crew are working on the sugar cube installation. Stacks of cubes of different heights spell out “Step up to it,” one of the truisms, or rules to live by, that anchor the new ICA exhibition, Stefan Sagmeister The Happy Show, which is a romp, and a serious exploration of happiness and the human condition, and a glimpse into the mind of one of America’s leading graphic designers all at once.

Sugar installation

Elsewhere in the gallery, other people are busy with other happiness installations. The exercise bike is being hooked up to light a neon sign if you peddle hard enough. The interactive spider web video is being fine tuned. Sagmeister himself is busy with a black marker, writing on the walls. He looks busy and full of energy. A couple of days ago, when I got into the elevator to go home, I found him in there writing on the interior doors.

Stefan writing

“How are you, Stefan?” I asked him.

“I’m having fun!” he said.

There’s a lot to be done before the show opens 25 hours from now. Luckily First Among Equals, the exhibition in the big downstairs gallery about ways artists work together, has been unofficially open for a few weeks, so that part of the museum is calm.

Of course, the last few days before First Among Equals opened, its doors were busy too. That busyness had a different rhythm, with little pockets of activity blazing up around the gallery as various artists came and went. Then, on the last afternoon before the show opened, everything in the gallery came to a stop when the Paul Thek sculpture showed up. Alex Da Corte, whose SCENE TAKE SIX installation incorporates works of a dozen or so artists, had received permission to use a small Thek as part of his piece. It arrived in an array of custom-made crates which the crew lined up on a table.

“A beautiful packing job,” Paul says as Mary Grace begins untaping boxes. One crate has lots of small ceramic pieces—green and blue and brown—embedded in cradles of foam. A second crate reveals a big conch shell with a plug and a light bulb. Mary Grace checks what’s in the crates against pictures, and she makes notes, documenting the condition the pieces are in when we receive them. Shell generally abraded and built out of dirt and grime, she writes. Light in shell not secure. The rest of us wait, trying not to crowd her.

“This is so terrifying,” Alex says. “It’s like meeting the man of your dreams and knowing it.”

“I remember when I had to condition check the Damien Hirst shark,” Mary Grace says. “And the cow head with the flies. We were sitting there counting all the flies and the larvae.”

Paul, wearing white art handling gloves, begins placing pieces into a terrarium. Mary Grace stands nearby and hands them to him one by one. “This one goes in there,” she says, but it doesn’t fit where she points. They consult the pictures and try again.

Installing the Paul Thek

Photo: Alex Klein

Brendan, another artist with work in Alex’s installation, comes over. “Does it feel soft?” he wants to know.

“No,” Paul says.

“Does it feel brittle?” Alex asks.

“Yeah,” Paul says.

“Is this the first time you’ve ever handled a Paul Thek, Paul?” Alex asks.

“Man, do I enjoy this part of my job,” Paul says.

Standing nearby with my notepad, scribbling, I’m thinking the same thing.

Looking at the Paul Thek

Left to right: Robert, Paul, Rachel, and Alex. Photo: Alex Klein

* * *

First Among Equals and Stefan Sagmeister The Happy Show are open through August 12.

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After the Monkeys: The stories exhibitions tell

February 24 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

“Okay,” Mary Grace says. “What do we have after the monkeys?”

“The mirror,” Paul suggests.

“That’s another thing we should try out,” Stefan agrees. Stefan Sagmeister, a graphic designer known for his innovative typography and his work with bands like The Talking Heads, is at ICA this sunny Monday for meetings about The Happy Show, his upcoming exhibition. When I came in to work this morning, he and his staff were already busy, measuring the stairs and taking pictures and examining the doors on the elevator.

The Happy Show will not only fill ICA’s upstairs galleries and Ramp, it will extend out onto the mezzanine, into the elevator, down the stairs, and even onto the mirrors in the bathrooms.

Enormous inflatable white monkeys—currently en route from Europe by ship —will hold a banner out on the Terrace. A long acrylic tube will lead from a coin drop on the mezzanine, down out of the building into a bowl on the street. There’s a lot more besides—things I don’t know about, things alluded to in mysterious bits of conversation as good as dialogue you’d find in a novel:

“The arms were hanging on a wall with gloves on them.”

“Once we run out, are you okay with American chocolates?”

“If we keep the Bali dancer instead of the sugar installation…”

During lunch, Stefan talks about the movie he’s making. Like the ICA exhibition, The Happy Film is a piece of the designer’s ten-year exploration of happiness, and parts of it will be on view as part of The Happy Show. Stefan clearly enjoys the challenge of working on the film, though it’s hard, he says, to figure out how to sustain such a long narrative.

This reminds me of something I’ve been thinking about ever since ICA’s Senior Curator, Ingrid Schaffer, remarked that a curator is someone who knows the stories. “Does an exhibition have a narrative?” I ask.

Anthony is the one curator in this room, and he answers quickly and unequivocally: “Yes.”

Stefan seems less sure. He wonders out loud about the narrative of the exhibitions currently on view.

“Well, there are lots of different kinds of narratives,” Anthony says. “You could have Dickens, or you could have David Foster Wallace.”

“What’s the narrative of The Happy Show?” I want to know.

“In this case it’s not easy,” Stefan says, “because there are so many points of entry.” He means the way you’ll be able to enter the show either via the Ramp downstairs, or up the museum’s main staircase and through the mezzanine. Still, he outlines it for me: The background information about his own thinking about happiness. Statistical information from studies he finds interesting:

The print work:

The video and film work:

So far, so good. But when I think about narrative (and, as it happens, I think about narrative a lot), I think about change. By the end of a story, as a result of all the events that have occurred, something has shifted —Cinderella has become a princess; Odysseus has finally returned home; Anna has thrown herself under the train. I wonder, when we’re talking about an exhibition, who is the protagonist? Is it the work itself that shifts? Is the artist the invisible hero, changing by implication? Is it us—is the idea that we ourselves are changed by the experience of the exhibition?

I remember when I started working at ICA, I used the word “design” to say what a curator did. No, I was told. Curators don’t design; they organize.

The object of that sentence, of course, is exhibition, as in: The curator organized the exhibition. But I’m coming to understand that they also organize our experience. A curator may not tell us a story in a Once upon a time sense, but they create a space in which we can experience a rise and fall of tension, or a sequence of things that gradually (or suddenly) change, or a series of events leading up to a moment of insight or intense emotion.

Mostly, in my experience, these changes, insights, and emotions are beyond words—outside of language. But The Happy Show, being a largely text-based exhibition, may be at least partly an exception.

Stefan has said that expecting a show about happiness to make you happier is like expecting a commercial for exercise equipment to make you slimmer; at best it can be a spur to make you take action. Still, given what I’ve seen of his plans for the exhibition, I won’t be surprised if The Happy Show does make me happier—if not for ever after, at least while the monkeys are in view.

* * *

The Happy Show opens at ICA on April 4.

Images (except for measuring the staircase) courtesy of Sagmeister, Inc.

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Sag-Mania: Stefan Sagmeister and the Pursuit of Happiness

December 16 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

As I descend from the ICA offices to the lobby, I can hear the buzz of voices as the elevator passes the second floor—the Sagmeister buzz. Designer Stefan Sagmeister is giving a lecture at 6:30, and 300 people have signed up to hear him. Designers, font inventors, art educators, enthusiasts: for an hour they have been checking in, getting their hands stamped, and hurrying upstairs to claim a seat. There are far too many people to fit in ICA’s auditorium. Luckily the upstairs shows closed on Sunday. We rushed deinstallation and set up rows of chairs and benches in the same gallery where ICA will present The Happy Show, a new installation by Sagmeister himself, in April.

Sagmeister, a still from The Happy Film

Sagmeister in a still from The Happy Film, 2011. Courtesy of Sagmeister Inc.

Before the lecture starts, I ask the women sitting behind me why they’re here. “It’s Stefan Sagmeister!” they explain.

“What do you like about him?”

“He breaks all the rules,” one of them says.

Kenny Goldsmith, a conceptual poet who (in collaboration with ICA) is teaching a whole class on Sagmeister at Penn this year, comes by in his kilt and magenta sweater to say hello. I tell him I’m looking for an angle for the piece I want to write on Sagmeister.

“The man himself is the angle,” Kenny says.

“Why’s that?”

“Design is the last thing on this mind.”

“What’s on his mind?”

“Film, performance, body art, language.” This afternoon, introducing Stefan at a lunchtime conversation with former ICA Director Claudia Gould at Kelly Writers House, Kenny said of the class, “We’ve studied everything from the Helvetica typeface to body art to the psychopharmacological exploits of the Romantic poets onwards…Sagmeister is a pedagogic dream.” A little later he added, “He’s an iconoclast, a boundary breaker, which makes him a perfect match for ICA.”

Kenny Goldsmith

Photo: © Cameron Wittig, Walker Art Center

The Happy Show will certainly break boundaries, as Stefan’s lecture does tonight. Part personal narrative, part history of the psychological study of happiness (both positive psychology and cognitive therapy were, it turns out, invented here at Penn), Sagmeister showcases his own work only, it seems, incidentally. He does, of course, use good design to communicate his message. The guy makes great slides.

For ten years Sagmeister has been exploring happiness. Maxims, taken from his diaries (“Trying to look good limits my life,” “Obsessions make my life worse and my work better,” and so on) spelled out in spectacular, innovative, and often interactive typography will form the basis of the ICA show. In one interactive video installation, the words appear as spider webs, fragmented by the body of the viewer stepping in front of them, and then reforming. In another, a visitor can pedal a stationary bike to power lights that spell out alternating phrases. A magnetized wall that organizes iron filings into letters is a work in progress. It may or may not make the show.

Credits for The Happy Film

Photo: Jenna Weiss

The exhibition will also feature parts of The Happy Film, a personal project that follows Sagmeister as he explores three categories of mental intervention that may or may not affect happiness: meditation, cognitive therapy (the film crew is in the sessions with him, but he says he forgets about them after a few minutes), and finally drugs.

Sagmeister claims his work won’t affect people’s happiness: “It would be foolish to expect that the film will make anyone happier any more than watching a Jane Fonda workout video would make you skinnier.”

Still, there’s this. Toward the beginning of the lecture, Sagmeister asks the audience to raise their hands to show how happy they are. The lowest level is 0 (“I feel like shit”) and the highest is 10 (“I love life”). At the end of the lecture, he asks for another show of hands. This time, there are a lot more 8s and 10s.

Happiness chart

Photo: Jenna Weiss

After the applause, I ask some listeners (more designers) if they’re disappointed Sagmeister didn’t talk more about design tonight. They’re not. All the other designers lecture about design, they tell me. They are happy to hear about happiness instead.

* * *

The Happy Show opens at ICA on April 4.

To sign up for Miranda’s mailing list, email rpastan@ica.upenn.edu.

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The Happy Class: Art and design, art and life

October 21 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

“Kenny, it’s the first time I haven’t seen you all in white,” one of the students says.

“The seasons are changing,” Kenny replies. He’s wearing a madras shirt and a spotted bow tie as he leans over the conference table answering questions about his recent trip to Shanghai.

Kenny at the White House

Kenny in the Red Room at the White House earlier this year.

This is English 165: Writing through Culture and Art, a collaboration between ICA and Penn’s Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing. Every other year, poet, critic, and Ubuweb editor Kenny Goldsmith teaches this unique seminar for Penn undergraduates, giving them the opportunity to spend a year investigating a topic related to an upcoming exhibition at ICA. This year the topic is Stefan Sagmeister, a graphic designer known for his work with Lou Reed, The Talking Heads, The Rolling Stones, and others, and for his innovative work with typography. As Kenny says in his course description, “Sagmeister has pioneered the concept of graphic design as a way of living a free, happy, and creative life, providing a new take on the 20th-century idea of the intersection of Art and Life.” Sagmeister will design a new project at ICA in spring 2012. He envisions the exhibition, titled The Happy Show, as the culmination of his ten-year investigation of happiness.

Last week, while Kenny was in Shanghai, ICA Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow Jennifer Burris gave the students in English 165 a primer on body and performance art. She taught them about Tania Bruguera, a Cuban artist who played Russian Roulette in front of an audience with what was said to be a loaded gun; about Teresa Margolles, a Mexican artist whose work, which is engaged with her country’s drug violence, uses material traces of corpses and morgues; about Catherine Opie, a lesbian artist who has an image of two women holding hands in front of a childlike depiction of a house carved into her back—a gesture Sagmeister says helped inspire one of the works he is best known for: a poster for a lecture he gave at AIGA, the professional design association, which consisted of a photograph of his naked torso with advertising text carved into it.

The students loved Jennifer’s class, and they were clearly haunted by the art she talked about. They were eager to tell Kenny about it, but they were also troubled. What was the relationship between an artist bearing a deeply personal and political image on her back as Opie did, and a designer having an advertisement for a lecture cut into him? What is the relationship, exactly, between art and design? And furthermore, what does it mean for an art museum to present design work? Is art about passion and design about money? If so, what to make of an artist like Takashi Murakami who staged a Louis Vuitton boutique inside his 2009 exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles? The students struggled with these questions, framing and reframing them, while Kenny nudged them deeper. One of the students, who had initially asserted that art and design were interchangeable, seemed to shift her stance, suggesting that art was perhaps one of many tools a designer like Sagmeister keeps in his toolbox. Kenny seemed to agree: “The thing that’s great about Sagmeister is we’re jumping off into so many places: typography, process art, concrete poetry.”

He also said, “Art almost always admits ambiguity, whereas a designer needs to eradicate ambiguity…I think art has the power to transform lives, as Sagmeister is always saying he wants his life to be transformed.”

It’s extraordinary, in fact, the extent to which Sagmeister has embedded his personal quest for transformation into paid design work, which for years has featured creative and poetic typographical settings of sentences culled from his diary: “Everything I do always comes back to me;” “Trying to look good limits my life”; “Obsessions make my life worse and my work better”; and many others.

One of the purposes of today’s class is to hone questions the English 165 students have been preparing for Sagmeister, some of which will get asked by Claudia Gould, ICA’s curator for the The Happy Show, at a public conversation with Sagmeister in December. In case Stefan is reading this, I won’t give away the actual questions, but I was extraordinarily impressed at how thoughtful, smart, and informed they were, addressing not only these issues around art and design, but also those of self-portraiture, image, integrity, vulnerability, gender, and national culture. Kenny commented on each question as we went around the table, helping the students refine them. Some of the questions were pretty tough, but Kenny was pleased. “I think Sagmeister will appreciate the challenge,” he said.

I have to think this is true. Challenge seems to be central to Sagmeister’s project—to publicly commit himself to going farther than he otherwise might. He seems to me to be a man deeply familiar with his own shortcomings and always on the lookout for new ways to circumvent them. I think of him as a kind of trickster figure, crossing and recrossing the boundaries between art and design, the personal and public, the ironic and the sincere—and in the process calling the very existence of these boundaries into question in a way that often strikes me as more art-like than design-like—that is, admitting a great deal of ambiguity. At the same time, he has found a way to make the commercial world we’re all swimming (or drowning) in more lively, attractive, and engaging than it would otherwise be, and at the same time earning a living.

Still, as Sagmeister himself points out in one of his sentences, “I can’t please everybody.” This sentence is slated to be spelled out on a magnetized wall at ICA next April in cascading, dancing iron filings. I won’t venture an opinion as to whether this is art or design, but I will say this: you won’t want to miss it.

* * *
Broken up into 5 parts Trying/to look/good/limits/my life and displayed in sequence as typographic billboards, these phrases work like a sentimental greeting card left in a park north of Paris.

Design: Sagmeister Inc., New York
Art Direction: Stefan Sagmeister
Design: Stefan Sagmeister, Matthias Ernstberger
Photo: Matthias Ernstberger
Client: Art Grandeur Nature

The Happy Show opens at ICA on April 4, 2012.

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The Happiest Moment

July 1 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

“People who make things with wood are the happiest people,” Stefan Sagmeister says. “You see what you’ve accomplished every evening. And the wood smells good.”

Paul, an artist who is also a professional art crate builder and ICA’s head preparator, affirms that he is happy; he does a lot of wood working. I say I have heard that orchestra musicians, when surveyed, turn out to be quite unhappy, and we speculate as to why this might be. Happiness is a slippery creature, which may be partly why Stefan is so interested in it. A well-known and influential graphic designer (you might know his album covers for the Talking Heads, Lou Reed, and the Rolling Stones even if you don’t recognize his name), Stefan has been making a personal and professional study of happiness for the last decade. You can see him talk about it in some great TED videos, and he is currently at work on a documentary called The Happy Film. The reason he’s here at ICA on this sunny June Monday, along with two designers, Jessica and Michael, who work for him, is that he’s making a show at ICA next spring: The Happy Show.

Peeking into ICA's wood shop

It’s not exactly clear yet what will be in The Happy Show. Organized by ICA Director Claudia Gould, it will partly showcase Stefan’s work and partly be a new installation he’s dreaming up. So far, Stefan is conceiving a series of encounters, experiences, experiments, and sets of instructions that not only explore and embody happiness, but are intended to make visitors happier as they move through the space. There may be therapy sessions, meditation classes, music. There may be chocolate, ladders, windows with views, tickling machines, instructions for taking cell phone pictures with a stranger with your eyelids touching. There will undoubtedly be good design.

Today we’re touring the space, giving Stefan a sense of the container he has to work with. We take a peek inside ICA’s wood shop, behind a locked door in one of the galleries, filled with saws and ladders, sheet goods and lumber, screws and nails, and a hammer drill.

“It looks like it’s fun to work in here, no?” Stefan says. He is a tall man in a light blue shirt, his Austrian accent lilting through the air.

“It’s great,” Paul says.

“Maybe we keep the door open and put some Plexi here,” Stefan says. “If we do this woodworking thing.”

“I thought Stefan would like it,” Claudia says.

Up on the roof. Photo: Robert Chaney

We wander out into the main upstairs gallery where One is the loneliest number, a show exploring artistic collaborations, is on view. Michael and Jessica take pictures of all the angles with their phones. Claudia talks about other exhibitions that have been presented in this space in the past: Trisha Donnelly’s paintings lined up tightly along one wall, the work of Dutch designers Hella Jongerius and Jurgen Bey, Damián Ortega’s disassembled VW bug. “He paid someone in Mexico City to take it apart,” Claudia says. “We hung it here, and then MOCA bought it. There’s a big history in this space.”

We look at the Ramp, a long V-shaped corridor with windows on 36th Street, discussing the challenges of lighting and what to do about a tree that has filled out, partly blocking the view. We talk about which entrance people will use to get into the show, which museum walls are permanent and which can be removed. Stefan says something about building super complicated things, and Paul smiles. “We love a challenge,” he says.

We look at the mezzanine, the lobby, the staff kitchen. “What parts of the museum are up for grabs?” Stefan asks.

“Everything is possible,” Claudia says.

The June sun shines through the glass onto the mezzanine, and traces of exhibitions past seem to hang in the air. You can almost see the ideas beginning to spin in Stefan’s head. Good weather, inspirational history, no immediate pressure, and an expansive vision as yet uncompromised by logisitics or budgets: this may be the happiest moment in the creation of any work of art.

* * *

The Happy Show will open at ICA in April 2012.

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