Gone Bananas

As we've been talking about color and its relationship to time, we examined Stefan Sagmeister's installation of 7,200 bananas. I really enjoyed your reflections on this piece, especially Mary Ellen's astute comment that self-confidence does not always produce fine results. I wanted to post his statement about the piece that I found on another blog:



Because of the wonderful willingness of so many New York designers to write into our fogged up windows at Deitch (considering they all gave up 3 hours of their time I wanted to be there when they started) I spent quite a bit of time in the gallery and had a chance to observe many visitors. I had the impression that lots and lots of people were delighted by the banana wall, - during the 4 week run of the show hundreds and hundreds came through. Because so many visitors clearly enjoyed a banana with their eyes and with their nose, I was so surprised to learn you hated the smell. I myself absolutely loved it.

Why did I do this?
I wanted a formal device, that would allow the content of the sentence (“self-confidence produces fine results”) to appear and disappear, just like my own self-confidence comes and goes.

As a medium I chose bananas because their ripening process allows for this appearance/disappearence to happen, because they are an absolutely beautiful fruit, because they smell sweet and luscious as they turn brown, because they carry significant visual baggage (Andy Warhol’s banana cover for the Velvet Underground ever so slightly connected to our work for Lou Reed - who came by and loved the bananas by the way), because they fit neatly with our inflatable white monkeys, because glued to a wall bananas form a pattern reminiscent of a knitted sweater working tightly with our needle stitch typography.

Are these reasons good enough to “waste” almost $ 2000.00 dollars worth of bananas? I could have created the same size wall utilizing custom wallpaper, designed a vector graphic in illustrator, paid $ 8000.00 for printing it out and likely would have avoided upsetting anybody. I think it would have been weaker.

The bananas will come down on Sunday. If anybody from the blog wants to see them in real life, Saturday from 12:00 - 6:00 is the last chance. We’ll throw the brown bananas out. I donated double the cost of the bananas to the coalition for the homeless in New York.

— Stefan Sagmeister