Of all the nerd maguses among recent art world phenoms, there may be none quite as uber as Tom Sachs.
Tom Sachs
Born in 1966 and raised in Westport, Connecticut, he must have been one of those kids completely entrameled in the world of model kits, remote-controlled racers, and out-back garage workshops: he still is. After a stint at Bennington College, architectural studies in London, and then a couple years out west in Frank Gehry’s furniture shop, in 1990 he transplanted himself into the very heart of the fast disappearing machinery district of downtown Manhattan, where he launched into his career as a self-styled “bricoleur,” which is to say one who, in his own words,
hobbles together functional contraptions out of already given or collected materials which he retools and resignifies into new objects with novel uses, but more importantly, which he regenerates into a new oscillating syntax: one of loss, gain, and more than anything, play.
Oh dear: we will have to forgive Mr Sachs the French-flecked academic jargon, an occupational hazard which appears to have blighted his entire generation of artists and critics—though this should be relatively easy to do in Sachs’s case since, apart from anything else, his work is so damn fun to engage (albeit not entirely without the occasional whiff of menace).
Chanel Guillotine
Early on he conflated the worlds of fashion and violence with such inspired confections as the HG (Hermes Hand Grenade), a Tiffany Glock, and the Chanel Guillotine. From there he went on to commemorate a whole other slew of modernist icons—rendering scale models of Mies van Der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion out of foamcore and plywood; Le Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation out of cardboard and thermal adhesive; and perhaps most inspired of all, a complete functioning McDonald’s mobile cart (fashioned out of standard hardware store paraphernalia) capable of exuding a first-rate order of fries.
Nutsy's McDonald's
With the passing years, his New York City studio, off Centre Street, has become ever more semi-mock fanatically regimented, a process documented across a series of antic short films generated by his celebrated protégés (and onetime employees) the Neitstadt Brothers, most notably in the “Ten Bullets” (as in bullet points) training film, compulsory viewing for any would-be assistants (“The studio is a complex and enigmatic working environment full of precise rules and principles; we call these rules and principles The Code: as an employee you must familiarize yourself with these rules and principles in order to advance within the studio hierarchy”), and available to the rest of us by way of the Sachs website.
From out of this roiling hive of activity have emerged such other urgently necessary inventions as the Incinilot (a toilet that—well, you get the idea) and the Wafflebike (“a fully weaponized mobile waffle-making machine complete with a call-to-prayer public address system and two live caged hens laying eggs.”) Along with all sorts of other cool stuff.
Nothing as cool, to my mind, however, as Sachs’s Space Program, a 1:1 scale model recreation (meticulously fashioned out of his standard hardware store lexicon) of NASA’s Apollo lunar landing module, guided by a mission control station with 29 closed circuit video monitors and manned by two female astronauts outfitted in handmade Tyvek space suits, which alighted in October 2007 at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills. Following the landing, the astronauts presently opened their capsule’s portholes, gingerly emerged and carefully made their way down ladders to the surface of Richard Meier’s hyperelegantly designed high-gloss gallery cement floor, which they then proceeded to bore into with high power pneumatic drills, returning at length back up the ladders into the capsule, bearing a trove of recovered “moonrocks.” (You can see a video documenting the whole momentous achievement on the Sachs website.) Back on earth (or rather at the Center Street studio), Sachs’s team meticulously documented each cement shard, dubbing each with its own distinctive name- “Flagstaff,” “Oscar,” “Florida,” “Gibraltar,” “Turtle,” “Bruno,” and the like and characterizing it as exactingly as possible (“Sample includes bottom slab and small portion of top slab; top slab area bears close resemblance to the state of Florida. This powerful rock is ovoid in elevation and has a wedge shape from above”). Click for the full, detailed, 105-page report.
1:1 Apollo Lunar Landing Module
Whereupon the entire set was sent over to Brooklyn College for further advanced petrographic analysis, after which the trove was disbanded, entering “a variety of distribution channels,” as Sachs parses matters delicately, not excluding “the commercial.” One private collector, for example, owns a specially mounted set entitled The Twelve, currently valued at $250,000. (Admittedly less expensive than a similar number of moon rocks from the actual Apollo program which, according to Wikipedia, “are currently considered priceless” and at any rate have never been put up for sale.)
Sachs’s team retained a clatch of their own moonrocks for further study as part of their latest endeavor—their most ambitious yet. Next year, in collaboration with scientists from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Sachs team will pivot from commemoration of past icons to anticipation of future ones, staging a full scale Mars landing in the bowels of New York City’s capacious Park Avenue Armory. Which is what Tom and I will be talking about at this year’s Festival, flanked by two of his JPL collaborators. It should be a hoot, though, as with most of Sachs’s work, considerably more than that as well.
Francis W. Parker School - Diane and David B Heller Auditorium: Nov. 6, 4:00 PM
Tags: Tom Sachs, art, architecture, Frank Gehry, fashion, NASA, Apollo, Jet Propulsion Lab, scale model
