The Happy Show was a 2012 traveling exhibition by the New York design firm Sagmeister & Walsh. Spearheaded by Stefan Sagmeister, the show premiered at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Philadelphia in August 2012. In addition to being a personal narrative of Sagmeister’s quest for happiness through meditation, therapy and pharmaceuticals, The Happy Show also looked at happiness through social data with factors such as age, gender, race and money. Sagmeister’s work employed graphic design, graffiti, bright yellows, free gumballs and activity cards suggesting things such as cutting out of the show early to go home and have sex.
Video was also a feature of that exhibition. Three of those films are now available in a limited series of boxed USB drives. Each box was written on by Sagmeister; they bear individualized therapeutic reminders to be present, flexible and to ask for what you want. The USB drives themselves are made of ceramic and resemble horns, or tentacles or worm specimens. They look like exhibits taken from the mental health wing of the natural history museum.
Physical media is dead. The conventional wisdom among people who produce this soon-to-be-ancient material is that physical media works best when it enhances the experience of the song or video contained within. Within the last decade we’ve seen musicians release albums that are pressed on X-ray images or are part of a vast alternate reality game. Sagmeister, who has worked within the music industry creating album art for musicians such as Lou Reed and OK Go, seems to be working with similar logic as he created a highly-personalized artifact from his exhibition that draws the experience of his work forward, even if you’re only viewing it from your home computer.
Bill Rodgers is a Contributing Editor at CFile.
Above image: Limited edition USB drives of films from The Happy Show, by Stefan Sagmeister and Sagmeister and Walsh. Photograph courtesy of the designers.
Limited edition USB drives of films from The Happy Show, by Stefan Sagmeister and Sagmeister and Walsh. Photographs courtesy of the designers.
Exhibition photographs from The Happy Show by Stefan Sagmeister. Photographs courtesy of the artists.
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