Artist asks: Are you really happy enough?
Collection confronts ideas of contentment
How happy are you? It’s the question that acclaimed New York-based Austrian designer and typographer Stefan Sagmeister (sagmeisterwalsh.com) has asked himself many times over the course of his life.
In fact, he has made a series of TED talks about the importance of life lessons, time off and searching for satisfaction that are captured in both his book Things I have Learned in My Life So Far and the ThingsIHaveLearnedinMyLife.com website.
A double Grammy Award-winner for his album designs and packaging for Talking Heads’ One in a Lifetime box set and the David Byrne and Brian Eno album Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, Sagmeister exhibits a massive collection of works and interactive displays at the Museum of Vancouver with his touring collection titled The Happy Show.
“This came out of the really positive feedback I had after giving a talk on design and happiness,” Sagmeister said.
“I thought I would make a movie about the subject of happiness and how design impacts upon it, after a friend pointed out that all of the trial-and-error experiments we tried at work as well as designing furniture for my home all made me happy.
“But we realized we bit off more than we could do as the whole concept of ‘what is happy?’ is so subjective.”
He couldn’t see how a standard graphic design studio could be proclaiming what was happy to the world, but had firm conviction he could pronounce upon one subject with certainty and then share that with others.
The Happy Show includes everything from documenting his struggles with alcohol to pursuing the three pillars of what we now call wellness: meditation, therapy and legal psychopharmacological drugs.
He wanted to see if these things made a difference with someone who wasn’t depressed at the beginning.
“I knew that I was without doubt the world’s leading authority on my own happiness, so by necessity it became a personal thing,” he said.
“This part is a bigger element of the film than the show. It includes things such as giant inflatable monkeys which, I believe, should be incorporated into everyone’s space if you have the room.”
There are gumball dispensers used as happiness gauges and a bicycle powered neon wall for people to engage with.
Throughout the entire space, there will be Sagmeister’s hand-scrawled thoughts and musings on happiness, as well as ample opportunity to get involved in making your own observations.
At at time when polls suggest Vancouver is one of the least happy places in Canada, The Happy Show should be somewhere to have a much-needed laugh. Well, there or reading real estate listings and then playing with a mortgage calculator to see how many generations it will take to pay off that single family home.