Posts Tagged ‘Stefan Sagmeister’

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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What Is Contemporary? Pick your own metaphor

September 30 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

Ingrid Schaffner, ICA’s Senior Curator, started her fifth annual “What Is Contemporary?” lecture where she left off last year: talking about money. Or, as she more poetically put it: “purchase, patronage, price point.” She showed an image of Stephanie by Maurizio Cattelan—a sculpture that recently sold at auction for $2,434,500—then offered us a cheaper alternative. Charley, “a radical art work masquerading as a magazine,” is also a creation of Maurizio Cattelan (and friends) and available for only 16 Euro. “There are lots of ways to be in the art world,” Ingrid proclaimed expansively, which seemed a good way to launch the wide-ranging, hold-onto-your-hat talk she then embarked on, a talk that sometimes felt like a roller coaster but was in fact more like a butterfly lighting down briefly on a hundred flowers, each one more fragrant than the next.

Or, occasionally, just smellier.

Ingrid talking

Photo: William Hidalgo

This is the third version of this annual lecture I’ve heard, and I wish I’d been around for the first two. One of the pleasures of hearing the talk is noting how it evolves and grows while staying essentially itself—like a Christmas Cactus that blooms only on that holiday, or an old friend you meet for dinner once a year.

Ingrid seemed a little anxious about the fact that her talk would cover old ground as well as new. She quoted Gertrude Stein (courtesy of poet Tom Devaney), the Empress of Echoes, who is supposed to have remarked, “There is no such thing as repetition, only emphasis.” And indeed, the pieces Ingrid mentioned this year for the third (or maybe it was the fifth) time seemed more interesting and resonant this year than ever: Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty shimmering under water in a recent photograph; Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Hartford Wash, in which the artist spent hours on her knees scrubbing the steps of the Wadsworth Atheneum; and James Turrell’s aching Skyspaces that, as Ingrid says, “use light to sculpt space.”

I’m tempted to emulate the style of the lecture in this blog post, offering a kind of found poem of titles and subjects. Ingrid divides her lecture into themes, and the names of the themes alone are hypnotic: terrain, systems, reference, history, evocation, flesh…

Instead, I’m going to consider the structure and function of the lecture itself, jumping right to the end to consider a remark Ingrid made in closing, when she invited us to “think of this talk as a Leatherman—or Leatherwoman—to open the work up. Use it if it’s useful, or throw it away.”

Driving home in the car in the dark, I wondered what she meant exactly. What is it about categorization that’s useful? How does a survey like this open work up?

Banana wall

Stefan Sagmeister, Richard The, & Joe Shouldice for Deitch Projects, 2008

In the category of alchemy, for example, she mentioned the following artists and works: Joseph Beuys and his Fat Chair, Karla Black and her Venice Biennale installation made of make up, Stefan Sagmeister (whose show at ICA opens in April) and his self-affirmation written in bananas of different ripenesses, Bill Walton (whose show at ICA is open now) and his studio—“that wonderful machine for transforming materials into art,” and of course James Turrell. I knew of most of these artists and artworks before listening to the lecture, but something about the way she yoked them together made me see something at the core of them that was new to me. Instead of considering Turrell’s Skyspaces, for example—as I have before—and thinking only, That’s wonderful, but why?—I thought, Ah, they’re related to these other works, they belong somewhere. They have a center of gravity. I felt I had a road in.

Bill Walton's Studio

Bill Walton's Studio, Philadelphia, 2011. Photo: Karen Mauch

Of course, any good work of art, like a major city, has lots of roads in. Ingrid could shift works from one category to another each year if she wanted to; for all I know, she does. The point isn’t to pin art down like a butterfly in a collector’s case, but rather to offer the mind a shaft of light along which to swim up through the air and meet the butterfly.

Shaft of light, road, Leatherman: you can pick your own metaphor. All I know is that, speeding home down the highway that night, I felt that the next time I encountered a new, strange, enigmatic work of art, I’d be better able to open myself to it and make it at home.

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If you have a metaphor for how you get connected to art, we’d love it if you shared it in the comments below.

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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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