Böcker utgivna av ICA UNIV OF PENNSYLVANIA

An artist's attempts at achieving personal happiness, from meditation to pharmaceuticalsAustrian-born, New York-based graphic designer, typographer and artist Stefan Sagmeister (born 1962) often tests and transgresses the boundary between art and design, through his imaginative implementation of typography. The Happy Film Pitch Book both documents Sagmeister's touring exhibition, The Happy Show, and anticipates his ongoing feature length film, The Happy Film. In both projects, Sagmeister undergoes a series of self-experiments (each experiment lasting three months)--with meditation, cognitive therapy, and mood-altering pharmaceuticals--attempting to improve his personal happiness. I am usually rather bored with definitions," Sagmeister says. "Happiness, however, is just such a big subject that it might be worth a try to pin it down." The Happy Show, Sagmeister's first museum show in the United States, documents his adventures in video, print, infographics, sculpture and interactive installations, most of which were custom-made for this exhibition. Here, Sagmeister offers his own witty and poignant thoughts and reasons for his ten-year exploration of happiness. Throughout the book, Sagmeister's trademark maxims serve as access points to a larger exploration of happiness, its cultural significance, our constant pursuit of it and its notoriously ephemeral nature.

Conceptions of "nothing" are one of the driving themes of twentieth-century art. One thinks of Piet Mondrian's reductivist approach to abstraction, Marcel Duchamp's contention that art resides in ideas, not objects, Mark Rothko's painterly reach for the sublime, Andy Warhol's affirmations of the vacuity of Pop culture. "The Big Nothing" will focus on themes of nothing, nothingness and negation in contemporary art and culture, surveying the legacy of these and other manifestations of absence made manifest in contemporary art. Artist include Gareth James, Jutta Koether, Louise Lawler, Richard Prince, Yves Klein, Bernadette Corporation, John Miller and James Welling, among others. Given its broad connotations, "nothing" provides general audiences with immediate access to looking at and thinking about the art of today. Part of a pan-Philadelphia cultural event initiated by the ICA, in which the city gives itself over to the art of nothing.