Weapons, Status, Shopping
Tom Sachs' Ultra-Democratic
Model Worlds
With his studio
"Allied Cultural Prosthetics" Tom Sachs has created a home-made cosmos
complete with models and building components that work amazingly well – a
spitting image of the real world. In his installation Nutsy's in
the Deutsche Guggenheim, modernist utopias compete with the reality of
global ghettos and contemporary consumer culture. Oliver Koerner von
Gustorf on the work of the New York artist Tom Sachs.
"
All the modern things
Have always existed
They've just been waiting
To come out
And multiply
And take over
It's their turn now…"
Björk: The Modern Things, Post, 1996
Prosthetics
Sometimes certain things are in the air. Maybe it's the smell of snow,
maybe it's a fashion style, a label, an idea, possibly an intimation of
imminent social upheaval that will forever change the way things appear.
Sometimes, however, certain things are lying right out in the open, for
example in a window display on Madison Avenue, and all of a sudden we feel
like we've discovered them at just the right time and in just the right
place.
Hello Kitty Nativity Scene, 1994,© Tom Sachs, New York
Tom Sachs is considered to be someone with a reliable sense of irony and
timing: the Christmas decoration he designed for a storefront window at
Barney's in the winter of 1994 unleashed a veritable scandal. It marked
the end of his affiliation with the prestigious department store and
simultaneously paved his way with bravado into New York's gallery scene.
The Nativity scene he constructed combined the Japanese merchandising
wonder "Hello Kitty”
as the newborn Christ Child,
Bart Simpson in the role of the Three Wise Men, and a pregnant
Madonna Ciccone as the Virgin Maria.
Along with reading,
travelling, and baking homemade cookies, a relatively harmless creed of
the "Hello Kitty” figure is that one of the best things in life for every
girlie is to win new friends; when Sachs combined this with his own
capitalist version of the biblical Holy Story, it earned him murder
threats. In reaction to the installation, right-wing Christian groups
leaped onto the barricades, the allegedly "blasphemous” manger made it
onto the front page of the
New York Daily News, and the controversial ensemble was hastily removed
only one day later. Sachs' talent, however, attracted the attention of the
art dealers
Paul Morris and
Thomas Healy. They gave him his first one-person show in their Chelsea
gallery in 1995, whose title Cultural Prosthetics referred to his
Lower Manhattan workshop Allied Cultural Prosthetics, where he and
a team of assistants have been producing art since the early nineties.
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Super Dynamite Soul, 1998, © Sperone
Westwater, New York
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It might come as no accident that the inception of Sachs'
career coincided with the dawn of the digital revolution and the New
Economy, or that his working techniques and strategies are rooted in the
areas of furniture design and the fashion industry. He'd already produced
a large number of related commissions prior to the controversial design
for Barney's. After completing his studies at
Bennington College in Vermont and continuing his education at the
Architectural Association in London, Sachs, born in 1966, assisted
Frank O. Gehry in the production of a series of
chairs for Knoll, worked for the English star designer and later
Habitat man Tom Dixon
, designed shopping carts for
Dries van Noten, and created a clothes rack for Azzedine Alaia, soldered
together from 22,000 pennies.
Invention, teamwork, handicraft –
these were the elements Sachs would adopt for his later artistic
production. Together with Allied Cultural Prosthetics, he went on
to counter the design teams, PR departments, and creative think tanks of
the "high fashion” industry with an alternative "low fashion” model: a boy
gang that implemented found or available means of production, combining
functioning with completely useless objects and investing them with a new
purpose using hot glue guns, foamcore, and materials from the home
improvement store. Collectors and do-it-yourself men who have adopted the
concept "Bricolage” (a French term roughly meaning homemade), preferring
amateur improvisation to the norms of industrial production.
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Hermes Handgrenade, 1995 © Tom Sachs, New
York
This tactic developed out of a
particular necessity: "When you lose an eye or a leg, you get a glass eye
or a peg leg. And when you lose culture, you get some of the things we do
here… I'm trying to make a substitute for the things that are missing in
my life,” Sachs remarked on his workshop's production. Andy Warhol's
prophecy from the sixties that the museums of the future would look like
department stores and department stores like museums was to experience a
contemporary and radical extension through the homemade supply of wares
Allied Cultural Prosthetics had to offer. Soon after the scandal at
Barney's, Sachs' work would cease to be a decoration designed to stimulate
the purchase of luxury articles and itself become a luxury article – a
coveted art prosthesis for all the needs that firms like
Hermés, Tiffany
, Chanel,
or Prada are unable to
fulfil.
Chanel Value Meal, 1999, © Sperone Westwater, New York
Weapons
In an interview with the curator
Maria-Christina Villaseñor in 2003, Tom Sachs saw the miniature highway
running through the urban landscape of his current installation Nutsy's
in the
Deutsche Guggenheim as a "way of connecting these themes that I'd been
working on for years: sound systems, weaponry, status, shopping,
dwellings.” Nutsy's is a world extending over 1,400 square meters in a
scale of 1:25 that includes models of
Le Corbusier's gigantic residential complex
Unité d'Habitation,
Mies van der Rohe furniture, a
McDonald's restaurant, a 10,000-watt loudspeaker system, a ghetto, a
modernist sculpture park, and a deejay headquarters. While Sachs developed
a complete infrastructure for Nutsy's, his works still appeared
throughout the nineties as single prototypes or as sets of objects
referring to a coming world.
Chanel Chainsaw, 1999, © Sperone Westwater, New York
"Imagine a society", Anne Slowey wrote in 1997 in
W Magazine ," in which a few huge conglomerates manufacture
everything-from fast food to military equipment to haute couture-and
cross-merchandising has run amok. MacDonald's fries are served in
black-and-white cardboard packets with Chanel's interlocking double Cs,
and bright orange
stealth bombers boast conspicuous Hermés logos on their sides. This is the
world according to Tom Sachs, where corporate emblems are the ultimate
status symbols- and Chanel chainsaws, Hermés hand grenades and Prada
plungers are the accessories of choice."
Not only the art
scene proved impressed by works such as the ten foot-high, fully
functioning Chanel Guillotine (Breakfast Nook) from 1998, the 1997
Prada Toilet model constructed from original packages, or the Hermés
"Value Meals.” The extraordinary logic and aggressive wit with which Sachs
transposed the aura of unaffordable luxury onto handmade weapons,
household objects, toys, sanitary appliances, and "cheap” materials
actually harmonized with those concerns whose logos he'd appropriated
without permission.
Prada Toilette, 1997, © Tom Sachs, New York
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