ART CITIES:Frankfurt-Stefan Sagmeister
Stefan Sagmeister represents a new type of designer who draws on a global wealth of emotionally charged experience. His design style blends typography and pictorial language in a striking and sometimes even disturbing manner, and it has made him one of the most influential graphic designers of the past decades.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Museum Angewandte Kunst Archive
The exhibition “Happy Show” present the results of Stefan’s Sagmeister ten-year investigation of happiness. The questions “What makes us happy?” and “Can happiness be trained?” embarked on a personal search for happiness and carried out various experiments on himself in order to find out the most effective way of increasing his individual sense of happiness. He tried meditation, concentration and relaxation techniques, underwent cognitive behavioural therapy and took mood elevators. He supplemented the results of these experiments with socio-scientific data provided by the psychologists Daniel Gilbert, Steven Pinker and Jonathan Haidt, the anthropologist Donald Symons and prominent historians, thus placing his findings in a greater context. Stefan Sagmeister sums up his personal maxims of happiness and life (originally excerpts from his diary) in catchy slogans, which he then turns into text-images. His experiments with typography are entirely unique, he forms letters from jello shaking in slow motion, has Balinese dancers perform entire sentences in ingenious choreographies, inscribes naked bodies, composes messages with bananas, eggs or blobs of whip cream, etc. A visit to the exhibition, however, is by no means limited to passive viewing. On the contrary, here happiness becomes a collective matter. In various interactive installations, for example, the visitors are questioned and/or invited to participate both mentally and physically. They have the opportunity to draw cards with instructions for happiness -promising tasks, are called upon to take money out of a receptacle and themselves contribute 20 cents, which roll through the museum on a marble run, changing owners in the process. Sagmeister’s favourite candy is served on silver platters. Numerous exhibition objects call for action on the part of the visitor, a typographic installation made of pieces of sugar encourages visitors to laugh by shining all the more colourfully the heartier the laugh. At the end of the show, gigantic gumball machines form an apparatus by means of which the visitors can rate their degree of happiness on a scale of 1 to 10 by pulling a piece of chewing gum out of the respective tube. At the same time, the apparatus visualizes the collective degree of happiness of all visitors to the exhibition until that particular moment.
Curator: Peter Zizka, Museum Angewandte Kunst, Schaumainkai 17,Frankfurt, Duration: 23/4-25//16, Days & Hours: Tue & Thu–Sun 10:00-18:00, Wed 10:00-20:00, www.museumangewandtekunst.de
