Posts Tagged ‘Stefan Sagmeister’

Something Comes Down, Something New Goes Up: Dog Days at ICA

August 20 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

“Anyone using this cart?”

“Yeah, just for another minute.”

“That’s okay, I’ll take the carpet dolly. And a ratchet wrench.”

I went away for a week on vacation, and when I came back, ICA’s shows had closed and the museum was full of art installers—or, in this case, de-installers—busily taking everything apart.

Stefan Sagmeister: The Happy Show is going on to enjoy new life in Chicago, Canada, Los Angeles, and France, and the art crate firm Wormwood and Haze has built a flotilla of custom crates, painted Happy Show yellow, to cocoon it on its way.

First Among Equals, as seems fitting given its interest in the fleeting dynamics of collaboration, is gone forever. There are just some Plexiglas stands and iron bars still screwed to the wall suggesting something was here.

Looking for a quiet place to write this blog post, I come across Alex Da Corte in ICA’s auditorium packing up his “SCENE TAKE SIX,” a piece I’ve written about several times in this space.

It was magical to see his installation come together last April, and I’m sad to see it packed into boxes. “So it’s all over,” I say.

“Yes,” Alex says. “It’s fun.”

“Fun?” I think he’s joking, but he’s not.

“You get to take it apart and see how you can use the parts again in different ways. It’s not precious.” Tugging at some long tubes that had been part of a scaffolding, he adds, “I haven’t thought about these colors for a long time.” He stacks more boxes on the cart and wheels them out to his PhillyCarShare van for the trip back to the studio, while banging noises float in from the gallery, and someone cuts pieces of foam on the screaming band saw. Upstairs on the terrace, the huge Happy Show monkeys lie in great heaps on the concrete, deflated for the final time.

It’s an odd, poignant moment at ICA: the dog days of summer, hot and stormy. Something comes down, something else—not quite known—gets ready to go up. William, counting up the summer attendance, reports that we recently broke a weekday record—250 visitors on a single August Wednesday!

What will fall bring?

Starting September 19, Jeremy Deller: Joy in People—a mid-career retrospective of the unpredictable, vibrant, British, Turner Prize-winning artist—will fill the whole museum. It will include a life-size recreation of Deller’s first show (in his boyhood bedroom in his parents’ house when they were away), a celebration of Goth culture (including an actual Goth brooding on a sofa), banners and videos and a parade float tea room where you can enjoy an actual cup of tea. Also, a section called My Failures.

Jeremy Deller, “Joy in People” banner (made by Ed Hall). Photographed in London, November 9, 2011, by Linda Nylind.

I have read about Joy in People, seen photographs, even helped draft the press release, yet I can’t quite imagine it—not really—the new environment that’s moving closer like a weather front. Before long I will enter it every day when I come to work, it will become my climate. Which is to say that not only will the environment change, but it will change me too. At least a little bit. At least I hope it will. Isn’t changing us—penetrating us, prying us open like oysters—what we most hope art will do?

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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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The Voting

May 11 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

Before the voting, there is the tour. Last April this group threw its support to Stefan Sagmeister The Happy Show, so tonight, in preparation for this year’s ballot, they walk through the galleries to see how the show looks.

Videos show truisms spelled out in moving Jello. There is a bike that lights up a big neon sign when you ride it. The group approaches the sugar sculpture, complete with lights and face recognition software. “If you look through the Plexiglas,” says Anthony, who is leading the tour, “the lights change color depending on how much you smile.”

John puts his face in the frame and tries it out, grinning. The sugar cubes light up brightly, green and blue. It’s as though the show itself is saying he made a good choice last year.

Every spring, members of ICA’s Leadership Circle listen to pitches by three curators about three upcoming ICA exhibitions, then vote on which show to support. “It’s like the battle of the Titans,” Ingrid says, revving up the crowd. “I feel very powerful,” one voter confides as the group settles in with sandwiches and wine. Outside, the giant inflatable Happy Show monkeys peer in as though they want to know what’s going on.

Stamatina goes first. She is organizing an exhibition of photographer Brian Weil who died in 1996. “Weil is a very under-recognized artist right now,” she says, “but a generation ago he was very well known.” She talks about Weil’s life and work, showing images of his photographs of people with AIDS and their families, of Hasidic Jews in New York, of murder victims in Miami. Weil was known for immersing himself in the communities of people he wanted to photograph, living with them for months sometimes before taking out his camera. Later, after the pictures were taken, he made visible his role as intermediary, scratching, blurring, or overexposing the negatives.

Untitled self-portrait (from Hasidim), n.d., gelatin silver print

Stamatina shows us the only known Weil self-portrait, a contact sheet of many images of the photographer in the guise of a Hasid. In these pictures, in hat and full beard, Weil gazes into the camera wearing a multitude of expressions as though trying to find one that fits.

Kate is up next. “Karla Black makes site-specific sculptures,” she says, clicking through her slides. Pink and white and baby blue, fabulously gauzy and powdery, these big constructions burgeon forth, dangling from ceilings or piling precariously up toward them.

Karla Black, “Nature Does The Easiest Thing,” 2011 (Detail). Installation view, Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Photo: © Lothar Schnepf, Cologne. Courtesy Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne

Often made from chalk, paper, body creams, toothpaste, and make up, they have what Kate describes as “a pastry or confectionary quality,” like macaroons at a giant’s tea party. This exhibition will be Black’s first solo show in an American museum.

Going last, Anthony explains the title of his group show, White Petals Surround Your Yellow Heart. It’s what the gods said to Narcissus when—fed up with him gazing at his reflection in the pool—they decided to turn him into flower. Anthony’s show is about pose, clothing, and self-presentation—how we “multiply our personalities” by what we put on our bodies. He tells us that it takes inspiration from a JG Ballard quote—“Fashion: A recognition that nature has endowed us with one skin too few, and that a fully sentient being should wear its nervous system externally.” Anthony has a long list of artists he hopes to include. Wardell Milan makes drawings and collages of people—part outer skin, part skeleton—overlayed with paint, paper, or swatches of fabric.

Wardell Milan, “Naomi and Landscape #1” 2009, c-print

Zoe Leonard’s photographs of runway shows catch the models looking at each other as though in lesbian flirtation. Frances Stark has a sculptural dress in the form of an old-fashioned dial telephone that she wears for performances that touch on sex-phone-chatting.

When the three curators sit back down, the serious ruminating begins. “Can we rate them 1-2-3?” someone asks. “Are any of the shows going to travel?” someone else wants to know. “Raise your hand when you’re done,” Sam calls, “and we’ll come around and collect your ballot.” Pencils scribble, hands go up. Sam and Christy disappear into the kitchen to count the ballots.

A moment later, they’re back. “And the winner,” Sam declares, “is Brian Weil!”

Stamatina looks happy.

Actually, everybody looks happy! People voting to spend money for art is not something you see every day.

Only the monkeys, out on the terrace, glower. They are like children whose mother is pregnant again, angry at the prospect of being displaced.

Photo: Pam Yau

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Learn more about Leadership Circle here.

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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

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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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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.

* * *
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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