I’m kind of glad I missed the opening — and first few weeks — of Stefan Sagmeister’s book-launch show at Deitch Projects, one of the few interesting art spots left in our neighborhood. (And by “interesting” I mean all the delicious, snotty ambivalence that word tends to conjure.) The reason I’m glad? Because the exhibit — titled, like the book, Things I have learned in my life — stinks worse now than it did on opening night.
Sagmeister, one of the few folks I’m aware of to merit the old eighteenth-century tag “celebrated” — as in saying “the celebrated graphic designer,” the way one used to say “the celebrated Count Volney” — doesn’t need me to blog about his show, one of the most blogged-about art events of the six-week-old year.
But, once I’d finally seen the show this weekend, the smell of it wouldn’t release its grip.
The show stinks. Literally. It smells, which is one reason I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.
There are a few other possible explanations. One is that I’m intrigued, for reasons more interesting to a literary historian than to most people, by his revival of the genre of the maxim. Long since reduced to the stuff of sincere refrigerator magnets, maxims were once (in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) the preferred genre of literary ironists like La Rochefoucauld and Franklin. They were didactic, but they also carried within them a sense that they might be more multivalent than their stabs at universalism would first allow.
How, then, are we supposed to read the twenty items Sagmeister claims to have learned in his life?
1. Helping other people helps me.
2. Having guts always works out for me.
3. Thinking that life will be better in the future is stupid. I have to live now.
4. Organising a charity group is surprisingly easy.
5. Being not truthful always works against me.
6. Everything I do always comes back to me.
7. Assuming is stifling.
8. Drugs feel great in the beginning and become a drag later on.
9. Over time I get used to everything and start taking for granted.
10. Money does not make me happy.
11. My dreams have no meaning.
12. Keeping a diary supports personal development.
13. Trying to look good limits my life.
14. Material luxuries are best enjoyed in small doses.
15. Worrying solves nothing.
16. Complaining is silly. Either act or forget.
17. Everybody thinks they are right.
18. If I want to explore a new direction professionally, it is helpful to try it out for myself first.
19. Low expectations are a good strategy.
20. Everybody who is honest is interesting.
Those who have read Sagmeister as being sincere in setting out these maxims tend to split between acolytes and cynics. Take, for example, the comments thread from the blog of a British art journal reviewing the show. Some folks treat Sagmeister as the second coming of Jesus Christ, or at least the reinvention of sliced bread, and seem ready to set up new churches based on his teachings. Others, though, aim to expose him as a bourgeois fraud. For example, the fellow who generously — and, I think, humorously — offers an “ideological” annotation to the principles set forth in the Book:
1. Helping other people helps me.
I MUST MAKE A GAIN FROM MY BEING HELPFUL2. Having guts always works out for me.
I AM FROM A PRIVILEDGED [sic] BACKGROUND AND REFUSE TO ACCEPT THE CRITERIA OF OTHERS3. Thinking that life will be better in the future is stupid. I have to live now.
DON’T CONCERN YOURSELF WITH THE WORLD (FUTURE/ENJOYMENT AS POLITICAL ANTAGONISM) THINK ONLY OF YOURSELF (PRESENT/ENJOYMENT AS MEDIATED BY CAPITALIST DICTATE)4. Organising a charity group is surprisingly easy.
I HATE HARD WORK – CHARITY NEGATES POLITICAL INQUIRY (HENCE IT’S EASY)5. Being not truthful always works against me.
THIS IS A LIE6. Everything I do always comes back to me.
I’M A CONSERVATIVE HYSTERIC THAT SEEKS TO MAINTAIN THE PRESENT7. Assuming is stifling.
I AM STIFLED BY ALLEGIANCE TO AESTHETIC ASSUMPTIONS8. Drugs feel great in the beginning and become a drag later on.
WILLIAM BURROUGHS FRIGHTENS ME, AND SO HE SHOULD FRIGHTEN YOU TOO9. Over time I get used to everything and start taking for granted.
I NEED TO CONVINCE YOU OF MY NEUROTIC FAILINGS, SO THAT YOU CAN ELEVATE ME TO LOFTY HEIGHTS10. Money does not make me happy.
I’M RICH ENOUGH TO SAY THIS11. My dreams have no meaning.
MY NIGHTMARE IS TO HAVE MEANING IN MY LIFE12. Keeping a diary supports personal development.
ONE DAY SOMEONE WILL WRITE MY BIOGRAPHY13. Trying to look good limits my life.
I IMPOSE MY ROMANTIC IDEA OF INDIVIDUALITY14. Material luxuries are best enjoyed in small doses.
I IMPOSE MY BOURGEOISE [sic] TASTES AS UNIVERSAL DOCTRINE15. Worrying solves nothing.
I DO WANT I WANT REGARDLESS OF CONSEQUENCES16. Complaining is silly. Either act or forget.
DON’T CRITIQUE MY WORK. LEAVE ME TO DO WHAT I WANT.17. Everybody thinks they are right.
I AM A LIBERAL WHO AVOIDS CONFRONTATION18. If I want to explore a new direction professionally, it is helpful to try it out for myself first.
I KEEP NEW IDEAS FOR MYSELF19. Low expectations are a good strategy.
ALL THAT IS NECESSARY IS THE APPEARENCE [sic] OF CHANGE20. Everybody who is honest is interesting.
I AM NOT VERY INTERESTING – HONEST
But were we supposed to take Sagmeister’s maxims at face value in the first place? For one thing, they’re all presented in elaborately constructed photographs, suggesting an extraordinary amount of artificiality. Here’s the piece that conveys the message “Trying to look good limits my life”:
On first glance, everything here seems to be invoking images of nature — all leaves, sticks, and cacti. But what about this?
A Sun Valley swimming pool, perfectly landscaped. But the word is spelled out in what appears to be some kind of tubing — the septic hose from an RV? How “natural” can this scene be? Suddenly the landscaping itself looks limited and limiting, vain and artificial.
As if to reinforce the point, SS and Co released a limited edition of 50 belts with the maxim emblazoned on them, for the privileged few (in this case a video collaborator) to show off to their online viewers. It’s fashion (makes you look good), but it’s on a belt (it’s fashion that limits!). Get it? You can … for only $140, which seems a steal, at least in my neighborhood market.
The celebrated Duc de la Rochefoucauld began his famous collection of Maxims (1665) with this one: “Our virtues are more frequently vices in disguise.” And so, I think, we can expect Sagmeister to expect us to read his maxims ironically. (“Everyone thinks …” the enormous blow-up monkey outside the gallery announces; “… they are right,” the dismembered twin inside the gallery completes the thought.)
The video portion of this exhibit makes the irony all the more blatant, invoking Confucius, or at least a cliched notion of Eastern wisdom:
If you know I read diaries for a living, you may understand why I find that piece humorous.
Even so, I found the dominant piece of the Deitch show to be almost moving:
That would be over 7000 bananas, an entire gallery wall of tropical fruit, the green ones offering their wisdom.
When I saw the piece, though, more than two weeks after the opening, it looked more like this:
When you enter the gallery, you’re hit by the smell of bananas, as if you’ve walked into a giant scratch and sniff sticker. Miraculously, there are no fruit flies.
There is, however, a sense of mortality — of the mortality of art, just as much as of the artist. It’s a terrifically subversive piece, from the pun on “produce” to the reality that things rot. All art rots, the same way artists do. Furthermore, maxims are rot. Shouldn’t this be depressing? Perhaps it would be, if there weren’t inflated angry monkeys presiding over the whole affair, as if to remind you that you should take pleasure in all this — greet it like an angry child.
Stefan Sagmeister
Things I have learned in my life so far
Through February 23, 2008
76 Grand Street, New York
What I find most interesting about this exhibit is the division between the people who think he is a genius and the people who are like: excuse me but this emperor has zippo clothes. It sounds like Sagmeister’s maxims represent some kind of easy, chicken soup for the intellectuals. They are allowed an exercise in irony that also smacks of a deep seated desire to shed that irony. It is safe to sneer and secretly believe at the same time. Yet as your post states, great irony is always subtle, always allows the reader a bit of personal interaction and mental work to get at an insight. When the person and the art feels to obvious, the viewer is left with nothing much to do except marvel or deride. I appreciate you bringing in the banana work and your take on it. It was probably more credit that it deserved.
by the way, my favorite maxim of last week was spoken by Christian on Project Runway: You can help people and at the end of the day, their work is still bad.
I really enjoyed this, Bryan.
scathing, fascinating, gossipy…
perfect reading for a monday.
I really did like the banana wall and keep thinking about it. It’s so unusual to walk into a gallery and *smell* the piece on display.
Thanks for breaking the comments silence, you two.
You know, I also keep thinking about the video piece on diary keeping — how odd it is that this bit of text is a) being carried out by stereotypical chinese labor — another nod to the artist’s privilege? b) flammable/incinerated. It’s as if his diary keeping habits suddenly mean some poor schmucks on the other side of the planet have to break their backs dragging his word sculptures around. Another piece of disposable art, too, a bit like the banana wall.
oh, one more, in case anyone felt the wall of bananas was a tad self-indulgent (given homeless people still live even in SoHo). I read somewhere that the invites to the opening were hand-delivered to critics on bananas with the text printed onto stickers.
plus they had crates of bananas sitting by the door for people to take when they left. in case the smell hadn’t ruined their appetite for bananas for a few weeks.
Great post! I wonder if anyone can deliver a maxim without being ironic, if only on an unconscious level. The maxims of Franklin are a great example. One of my favorites from The Autobiography is “Lose no Time. Be always employ’d in something useful.” This after he’s just delivered a lengthy, digressive, self-indulgent account of his own life. Another good one is “Rarely use Venery but for Health or Offspring.” What other possible “use” could one find for venery?
I suppose my next self-question is this: If I discovered this on my own, without your opinions to make me think one way or the other, would I think this is genius or ridiculous?
Nah. There’s nothing original here. No new refreshing ideas in his words, and no new presentation of the words, either. He’s just obviously got a lot of money and a lot of time. Who forms words in ponds with construction materials, then takes pictures of it and expects to be taken seriously? It’s like kids writing on foggy bus windows or etching words in the snow. They do it because they’re bored and they find it amusing, not because they want to convey some “profound” message.
funny you should put it that way, because writing on steamy windows was a good portion of the exhibit. he got major names in the design world to sit in a room writing his maxims in the steam to be read on the sidewalk outside.
if you click on the first link in the post, you’ll be taken to an SVA grad student podcast. (the best part: the vlogger calls the place DEETCH projects rather than DIEtch.) anyway, play the video and you’ll see milton glaser or massimo or someone scrawling words in the steam.
Who forms words in ponds with construction materials, then takes pictures of it and expects to be taken seriously?
They do it because they’re bored and they find it amusing, not because they want to convey some “profound” message.
a couple assumptions here that need questioning, though: does art (not to mention that this guy is a “graphic designer” by trade — he’s most famous for album covers and event posters) have to transmit a profound message? do critics have to discern one?
i think part of the banana wall’s message is that he expects to be taken very seriously. and guess what? it worked!
finally, boredom is probably less a motivation here than making money, though we’re to be reassured that money won’t make him happy.
Or rather than Deitch Projects.
Kate, it doesn’t seem that Sagmeister really meant to convey particular “profound” thoughts with his maxims. The exhibit (I haven’t seen it) seems to be about maxims themselves, and about communication itself, particularly the kind of quick, high-impact, attention-grabbing communication that graphic designers prize above all other kinds. People who take the maxims to heart and people who subject them to snarky critique on the Internet are all missing the point.
Have you all seen Sagmeister’s famous poster?
… which would be his own body, carved with an exacto knife to promote a show.
when i mentioned artists & art rotting (like bananas), i had this image in mind.
what did you mean, dave, when you said “rather than Deitch”? I was trying to spell it out phonetically.
Oh, got it. I thought the vlogger was, you know, writing it out, but vloggers of course don’t write, they speak.
heh heh. i just thought: the poster dave linked to gives pandora’s invocation of the phrase “the emperor’s new clothes” new meaning.
ps — re: #6, thanks, gale, for dropping in the franklin! those are perfect.
#9 I think this question of what art is supposed to do is a really provocative one.
We went to a photography exhibit the other day (at a small college in WI, I can’t remember the artist’s name, sorry!) that featured two pieces that generated a lot of conversation. One showed a corner of a construction site with a few random stansions and nothing else. The title was something like “world trade center after 9.11.” OK, so the title, the emptiness, you can read a lot into it, but only because of the juxtapostion of the image and title, the photo alone would have meant nothing. Another collection of shots were of various isolated parts of people and things, stacked in a vertical arrangement, an obvious modern take on the totem pole. The pieces were completely compelling with or without the title “totem” – deconstructing images of the city and presenting them as both ordinary and sacred much like the images of fish or birds for the Native Americans.
Clearly one resonated with me more than the other. What sparked the discussion was whether or not art should stand on its own visually or need a title prompt to make sense? Was the title of “9.11″ a gimmick or a thoughtful observation completing the experience? Were we being manipulated in our surprise at what we were actually looking at? Isn’t all art about some kind of sensual jolt? Isn’t the point that we talked about it the point?
The banana smell lingers . . .
Bry –
Oh my lord. And I don’t mean Sagmeister. Is this guy for real? (Loved the entry, btw.)
When I read the list I couldn’t believe how immature his moral sense was. My kids have a more grounded view of life and would consider his “lessons” the equivalent of ethical pig Latin. (Did I say that right? LOL!).
I did get excited glancing at #4, but then realized “Organizing” was not “Orgasming.” Damn.
Anyway…
I think “someone” has an overdeveloped need for attention. Maybe THAT can be Sagmeister’s epitaph with a ‘downward pointing arrow’ underneath it.
One question: Who the hell does he know to get so much unmerited attention? And if there are some that compare him to Jesus Christ, I know of at least one self proclaimed prophet here in Utah that could give him a run for his money. Re-incarnated Christ trumps only being compared to the original.
But what do I know. I’m just small town hick with a graduating class numbered less than those freaking bananas. Although, I think we gave off an odor a bit more pleasant. Well, at least in our bunch. Hah!
it’s funny how bugged people get by contemporary art.
In an odd coincidence I ran into Morley Safer today. Back in 1992 he did a piece on 60 Minutes about how silly the art world is. The funny part was how the insecure little art world got all bent out of shape by his criticism. A bunch of big wig museum people went on Charlie Rose to defend this decadent little sphere.
Dave Hickey wrote a great essay on the whole thing called Frivolity and Unction. I spoke to Mr. Safer today about it and recommend he read it.
And to you that think this show is silly and dumb I say “So what?!” Baseball is silly and dumb. Running marathons is silly and dumb. Most everything in life is silly and dumb.
This show is just as dumb as when Edward Ruscha covered 300 sheets of paper in chocolate and hung them in a room at the Venice Biennale in 1970.
http://artnews.info/news.php?i=180
This sort of thing is AT LEAST as interesting as the Giants winning the Superbowl.
I love them both.
I’m not expecting real insight from the maxims, and one of the things I like about this — and maybe it’s one of the things that made me want to write about it — is hey, I think it’s kind of fun to live in a neighborhood where someone can glue 7000 bananas to a wall and get all kinds of celebrities to show up for his opening. (Plus, I do find it conceptually interesting — oops, there’s that word again — as I hope was implicit in my reading above.)
I wound up heading over to Deitch the other day as part of a failed attempt to create a neighborhood art walk for my kids. They wound up staying home, but I wanted to see what they would have seen, and ended up sending them cellphone photos of this exhibit, which at least one of them is now keen on seeing. My walk also would have included Walter De Maria’s Earth Room, which we stopped in to see (my first time in several years, actually). Still a big room full of dirt. And once again, makes me feel like I live in a fun place. We had fun talking to the guy who’s worked for the last 18 years watching, watering, and raking the dirt.
Maybe we’ll actually get the kids to LaMonte Young’s Dream House sometime … nothing like a permanent architectural/musical installation by a direct descendant of Brigham Young …
gotta love new york!
#17 — sweet. (heh heh)
20 is ban-worthy.
semi-sweet, actually
hey Bryan,
Thanks for this post. I wish I’d seen that show. Serendiptously, we rented the documentary Helvetica last weekend which was my first real introduction to Sagmeister’s work as he is one of the two dozen or so graphic designers interviewed for the movie.. It’s really useful to look at this new show with the context of Helvetic. Like Dave said, Sag seems to be principally concerned with graphic art which is way the movie treats him–as a designer working/reacting against the tyranny of helvetica. I know that unfairly reduces the scope of his work, but it might help some of the readers here to think of him and his work as a reaction part of that ever evolving conversation about Fonts and the way we represent words and the politics of those representations. He’s done a very interesting thing. Plus, as Lane said, it’s just really fun. God, a wall of bananas and giant monkeys. Awesome.
Oh, and Bry, I didn’t see any problem with the ventilation duct floating in the swimming pool. That felt as “natural” to me floating in a swimming pool as twigs caught up in barbed wire. But, I’d like to have a longer discussion about it over some beers. Let me know when there’s another show like this in your hood so we can do that. cheers.
Gondry is at Jeffrey’s other gallery. Wanna come up and see the movie this wkend and catch the show too?
I read this post yesterday morning, and thought about it a number of times during the day. Are the maxims simplistic and unoriginal, ironic, or not art? As I was considering this, I thought about a collection of quotes which I’ve been assembling for years, which seem similar to maxims. Quotes are like art, in that they touch people differently. While a quote from Eleanor Roosevelt may be meaningful to me, a quote from Oprah may mean as much to someone else.
I wasn’t really sure what you meant by this phrase-
They were didactic, but they also carried within them a sense that they might be more multivalent than their stabs at universalism would first allow.
The post left me wondering if his art is truly ironic, or is it ironic that people think it is?
Last thought- my wife being an artist often contemplates how her art will be perceived, especially as art is often connected with an artists sense of self.
AND, I’ll bet putting one’s art in public is similiar to writing a post (wondering what reactions it will envoke)…
I meant that they exist to instruct others on how to behave, but they often carry with them some sign that they could be read multiple ways — perhaps even beg to be — or that they might be taken ironically. the examples gale provided from franklin make the point better than i did, i think.
So I just took the girls to see the banana wall, which comes down on Saturday. A good time was had by all. For good measure I also took them to the Earth Room, which they thought was weird, though they had really smart readings of it and asked the curator great questions about organic life. (It used to have worms and centipedes, but they died out once the nutrients they needed had been depleted; there are smaller micro-organisms living there still, but they will die off too in a hundred years or so.)
We also went to see what the Gondry installation was — and it looks like a lot of fun! They’ve created several film sets you can use to make your own movies. You schedule a slot, bring a group of friends, workshop your story ideas, storyline it, and then spend about an hour filming. You make a case for your video and put in the storefront (the gallery is designed to look like the store from the film). Visitors can “rent” your film and watch it in the gallery. I think we’re going back with Slade and co. Details here.
since i provided half the comments on this post, i’ll throw out another, which picks up on farrell’s mention of _helvetica_ — here’s a neat little discussion from the film’s director about obama’s use of the font Gotham.
good night, everybody.
amen