Stefan Sagmeister seeks happiness

Al Filreis

Stefan Sagmeister (1962-) is among today's most important graphic designers. Born in Austria, he now lives and works in New York. His long-standing collaborators include the AIGA and the musicians David Byrne and Lou Reed. His New York-based graphic design firm is called Sagmeister Inc. At noon on Thursday, December 8, 2011, Sagmeister visited the Kelly Writers House and was interviewed before a live audience by Claudia Gould, former director of the Institute of Contemporary Art and currently director of the Jewish Museum. Here is an audio recording of the same event. From April through August 2012, the ICA features a Sagmeister exhibit called “The Happy Show.” During that visit to Philadelphia, Sagmeister also met with the fifteen undergraduates in Kenneth Goldsmith's year-long seminar on contemporary writing/contemporary art, a collaboration of the ICA and the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing. Goldsmith asked the students to write ten happy, upbeat truisms during the first day of class and then, on day two, to narrow them down to one. “Do what you want.” “Don’t put off to tomorrow what you can today.” “Always mean what you say.” This emphasis on trite wisdom is tied to the ICA's Sagmeister show, an investigation of Sagmeister’s imaginative implementation of typography and ten-year exploration of happiness. A series of works follow a (non)narrative of truisms, or rules to live by, that run through the museum’s second-floor galleries, the ICA’s “ramp” space, and in-between spaces. Social data gathered from psychologists Daniel Gilbert, Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, and anthropologist Donald Symons contextualize these maxims, originally culled from Sagmeister’s diary. At ICA, “The Happy Show” examines the ideology of self-improvement via constructed dicta.

April 29, 2012

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DIGITAL PEDAGOGY: This was a magazine story published in 2001 about my use of e-media in teaching. “Postmodern poets focused on the process of their poetry, rather than on what the words in their poems actually said. The purpose was to make poetry and language new again. There's no better way to describe Filreis's teaching style. He uses technology to free class time for discussion, which to Filreis is more important than the course material itself. The point is to develop his students' ability to think critically, not to have memorized every last fact about Gertrude Stein. And yet, he said, through that active engagement with the material, students end up remembering more of the content.”

Click on the image.

ASHBERY PERFORMS STEVENS: In October of 1989, John Ashbery went to St. John's the Divine Cathedral in New York to be part of the induction of Wallace Stevens at the Poets' Corner. There was a vespers service and Ashbery read six sections of Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Imagine that--that poem read at a vespers service! Anyway, I certainly don't know of another recording of Ashbery performing Stevens. Stevens was a fairly bad reader of his own poems. Ashbery is deemed by many to be an indifferent reader of his poems. (I don't agree, but understand the point.) But here, reading Stevens, Ashbery is marvelous. Here is a 7-minute recording of sections 3, 5, 12, 17, 18 and 30 of the Stevens poem that comes closest to real serial writing (seriality at the level of the section, anyway).

THE (ANTI)MODERN PRESIDENT. After looking at an abstract mural at the U.N. then President-elect Eisenhower said, “To be modern you don't have to be nuts.”

THE END OF THE LECTURE & PLANNING TO STAY. As often as I can, I call for the end of the lecture as we know it. I'm pretty serious about this - not often exaggerating on the point. Click here for one of many forays into the topic. Once you're there, click on the "end of the lecture" tag for still more. My thoughts on institutional politics and the arts were presented in a manifesto called "Planning to Stay" (published as a pamphlet by No Press); the text of that talk is available here.

KELLY WRITERS HOUSEPhiladelphia's PBS affiliate, WHYY-12, produces a TV show that in each episode features four centers for the arts and creativity in the Philadelphia region. For its winter 2010-11 program, the show devoted 15 minutes to the Kelly Writers House in a segment called “The Creative Campus.” To watch the video, click on the image above.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUSTI dislike Spielberg’s Schindler’s List intensely. It's a film, I think, that is very friendly toward sovereignty. For more on this minority view, click on the image above. I teach a course at Penn on representations of the Holocaust in literature and film every other fall semester.

In 2003 I founded and continue to direct the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. CPCW brought together the university's writing programs and projects: Critical Writing, Creative Writing, the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, RealArts@PENN, Writers Without Borders, Creative Ventures, Jacket2, and more. For information and links to each of these projects, click on the logo above.