Opposite page Stefan Sagmeister The Happy Film packaging, 2016 This page Stefan Sagmeister The Happy Show, Contemporary Arts (ICA), Philadelphia, 2012
We may marvel at and geek out over it, but can design really make us happy? I met a few who claim it can: London-based artist Lakwena, Brooklyn firm Karlssonwilker and designer Morag Myerscough. I also watched graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister’s 2016 movie release The Happy Film several times over on my quest for radiance and warmth. Despite its title, The Happy Film is one hour and thirty-three minutes of saturated angst. Wearing his heart on his sleeve, Sagmeister stars in this honest, confessional love quest (for him, happiness is an affair of the heart). It starts with him unsuccessfully trying to take to the skies, tied to balloons, and ends with him reflecting that the film is, perhaps, a failure. In between he splits up with his long-term girlfriend of eleven years, his director Hillman Curtis dies, his mother dies and he briefly falls in love again. It’s an unravelling midlife crisis. Arguably more successful as an outcome was The Happy Show, at the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art in 2012.
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Happy by Design
The exhibition features in the film, and in this habitat, Sagmeister’s whimsy and sense of belonging come alive. I asked Jan Wilker, the cofounder of Karlssonwilker, about the impact of The Happy Film. He met Icelandic designer Hjalti Karlsson while working in Sagmeister’s New York studio, and the pair set up Karlssonwilker in 1999. “I think it was important in the way that a designer can do something like that,” he observes, “showing that it’s possible to make a film of this quality. When I see him it’s great entertainment, but in a bigger sense, for the happiness of the New York design scene? I think it would be putting too much on it.” I am speaking with Wilker in the agency’s new studio. They moved from a space above a Dunkin’ Donuts store in Lower Manhattan to a former knitting factory in Ridgewood, Brooklyn. It is a far cry from the former chaos. “Alcohol consumption was rampant; an important and integral part of it all,” says Wilker, “I don’t think we could have done it without it.
But then you just can’t anymore; you’re seeking other things. This [new studio] is all my wife’s doing, she found this building. Sitting here just looking at greenery has such a big impact now, I don’t think we all would’ve enjoyed this ten years ago. “In summer we leave the doors open, we just assume it’s safe. I live upstairs, above the shop like a tailor,” he says. The studio is keen to give something to the community; not to be a faceless interloper. They’ve designed a hatch in the façade and are thinking about running some kind of café from the premises. They have made firm friends with the local butcher. Since the move Karlssonwilker’s work has shifted from the piercing to the sublime. Remai Modern, a recent client, has a particularly calm and meditative essence. This new museum of modern and contemporary art is in Saskatoon, a small city in the remote wilderness of the Canadian Prairies. The agency has just finished the branding and identity.