Stefan Sagmeister, 'Deitch Steam Room', installation, 2008. (posted on 7/5/12)

Stefan Sagmeister, 'Deitch Steam Room', installation, 2008.

Stefan Sagmeister is a very well known Austrian Graphic Designer who lives and works in New York. Through out his career, Sagmeister lectures regularly and he has worked across all kinds of platforms, from the Casa da Musica identity and Lou Reed's record sleeves to Aiga Detroit poster and various large scale, public or site specific installations.

As part of his show called 'Things I have learned in my life so far', which was shown at Deitch Projects on Grand Street in New York's Soho district, Sagmeister and his team created a small steam room in the storefront of the gallery that kept the windows permanently fogged up. They invited an entire array of New York designers (each one every hour) to come and write any of the exhibition's maxims (such as: assuming is stifling or worrying solves nothing) into the steamed up windows.

Stefan Sagmeister, 'Deitch Steam Room', installation, 2008.

In my view, it is fascinating how this installation works in conjunction to the rest of the show, or as a sort of viral performance for the exhibition. Apparently, the theme of the exhibition is about things that the designer learned in his life and have kept in his diary -as he had pointed out repeatedly while giving lectures. In that respect, the whole show was a visualisation of these things, which came out of his diaries as statements, e.g. 'Everybody thinks they are right' or 'Trying to look good limits my life' and so on, so forth. What is more, it's a very interesting notion if one thinks about how the installation was 'visualised' since it's very concept is about memories, experiences, life and death, oblivion, desperation, struggle, salvation, story-telling, remembrance, redemption etc. All of these things can fit in the conceptual or literal context and circumstances of that small steam room.

Nikos Georgopoulos
London,
May 2012