Tom Sachs (artist) - Hello Kitty Gun

Tom Sachs (born July 26, 1966) is an American contemporary artist who lives and works in New York City.

Life and early career

Born in New York City on July 26, 1966, Sachs grew up in Westport, Connecticut, and attended Greens Farms Academy for high school. He attended Bennington College in Vermont. Following graduation, he studied architecture at London's Architectural Association School of Architecture before deciding to return to the States, where he spent two years working in Frank Gehry's L.A. furniture shop. It is here that he began using the term knolling.

Sachs moved from L.A. to New York City around 1990 and found a studio in the disappearing machinery district downtown. His studio, Allied Cultural Prosthetics, took its name from the previous tenantâ€"Allied Machine Exchangeâ€"implying that contemporary culture had become nothing but a prosthetic for real culture.

For a few years Sachs worked odd jobs, including lighting displays at Barneys New York. In 1994, he was invited to create a scene for their Christmas displays and titled it Hello Kitty Nativity, in which the Virgin Mary was replaced by Hello Kitty with an open Chanel bra, the three Kings were Bart Simpsons, and the stable was marked by a McDonald's logo. This contemporary revision of the nativity scene received great attention (not all of it positive) and demonstrated Sachs' interest in the phenomena of consumerism, branding, and the cultural fetishization of products.

Career

In the mid and late 1990s, Sachs' career began to take off. His first major solo show, "Cultural Prosthetics"[1], opened at New York's Morris-Healy Gallery in 1995. Many works from the show conflated fashion and violence, as with HG (Hermès Hand Grenade) (1995) and Tiffany Glock (Model 19) (1995)[2], both of which were models made with Hermès or Tiffany packaging. Although these sculptures were non-functional, another piece - Hecho in Switzerland (1995) - was an actual working homemade gun. Sachs and his assistants would make similar guns and sell them back to the city as part of New York's gun buyback program (for up to $300 each).

His next major show, "Creativity is the Enemy", opened in 1998 at New York's Thomas Healy Gallery and Paris' Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac. It built on the discourse established in "Cultural Prosthetics" with sculptures like Chanel Guillotine (1998)[3] and Prada Deathcamp (1998). Other pieces, like Hermés Value Meal (1998)[4], moved away from explicit references to violence and paired fashion with other successful brands, like McDonald's. Also included in the show were gaffer's tape versions of Piet Mondrian's famous compositions [5][6]. Like the Hermes sculptures, the Mondrian paintings were things Sachs desired but could not have. So he made them instead. As Sachs puts it, "making it is a way of having it."

Similar shows opened the following year at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Salzburg, Austria and Mary Boone Gallery in New York, where Boone was famously arrested after Sachs allowed visitors to take live ammunition from an Alvar Aalto vase. Around the same time, Sachs' SONY Outsider (1998) opened at SITE Santa Fe in New Mexico. The sculpture was outwardly a full-scale model of the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, and was a leap from handmade art into expensive outsourced fabrication. Ultimately, it was not well received by critics or even the artist himself - he later published a zine titled "The Failure of SONY Outsider"). For many, including Roberta Smith, the well-known New York Times art critic, the piece "bore no trace of Mr. Sachs's hand" and "could have been the work of several other artists." As Sachs says about the piece: "At the time I didn't fully grasp the value of my handcrafted things... I should leave it to Sony or Motorola to make those perfect things."

Learning from this experience, Sachs fully embraced the practice of "bricolage". For Sachs, a bricoleur is one "who hobbles together functional contraptions out of already given or collected materials, which he re-tools and re-signifies 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, one of play." After the failure of Sony Outsider, Sachs began to focus on leaving visible traces of his work, saying this a few years later:

"We have our system of making things out of certain materials... and of showing the scars of our labor and the history of our efforts... We have the 'your way', 'my way', and 'the right way,' and I must insist everything is done my way, even if it takes longer."

On a related note, Sachs organized an exhibition at Sperone Westwater in 2000 entitled "American Bricolage" that featured the work of 12 artists including Alexander Calder, Greg Colson, and Tom Friedman.

After several solo exhibitions in New York and abroad, "Nutsy's" opened at the Bohen Foundation (New York City) in 2002 and Deutsche Guggenheim (Berlin) in 2003. The large-scale installation covered a whole floor, and invited viewers to interact by driving remote-controlled vehicles on asphalt tracks throughout the installation. Several of Sachs' most famous works debuted at this exhibition, including Unité, Nutsy's McDonald's, and Barcelona Pavilion. Unité, in particular, is one of Sachs' masterpiecesâ€"a 1:25 recreation of Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation made completely out of foamcore. The Neistat Brothers, who began their careers working for Sachs, were instrumental in the operation of "Nutsy's".

In 2006, the artist had two major survey exhibitions mounted in Europe, first at the Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst and next at the Fondazione Prada, Milan. His work can be found in major museum collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

As Germano Celant writes in his monograph on the artist published by the Fondazione Prada, Milan, "The images and objects that make up the militarized space of consumption and fashion are at the very heart of Tom Sachs's visual passion."

The Des Moines Art Center and Rose Art Museum hosted a solo exhibition titled Logjam featuring the artist in 2007.

Sachs is represented by Sperone Westwater, New York and Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris and Salzburg.

Space Program

Sachs had built numerous space-related sculptures throughout his career (such as Crawler, 2003 and Lunar Module (1:18), 1999). His obsession with space, and specifically the Apollo program of the 60s and 70s, culminated with his Space Program in 2007. Sachs built a 1:1 model of the Apollo lunar module, a mission control with 29 closed-circuit video monitors, and outfitted two female astronauts with handmade Tyvek space suits. In October 2007 at Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles, Sachs launched his spacecraft, landed on the moon, and explored its surface. This video made by Sachs and the Neistat Brothers captures the event.

While the Apollo program was source of precedent, much of Sachs' Space Program is historically inaccurate, often humorously. The Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) was built full scale, but had many modifications that were probably not on any Apollo mission, including a fully stocked Vodka bar and a library (with titles such as Woman's Almanac). After the astronauts' first step, they used Sachs' handmade shotguns to "patrol the surface", before planting a flag and taking rock samplesâ€"by drilling into the gallery floor. Much of Apollo's TV footage was restaged using special effects sculptures that Sachs made himself, including ones that reproduced the Saturn V takeoff, the moon landing, and the reentry of Apollo's capsule in Earth's atmosphere.

Sachs continues to work on developing the Space Program, noting after the exhibition in 2008, "The Space Program continues in full force... Such is the nature of improvised construction technique.". After collecting twelve pounds of "moon rock", Sachs named each significant piece and encased them in carefully constructed display boxes, like with Florida. In addition, Sachs allows followers to download an up-to-date "Moon Rock Report" that includes detailed information on each collected sample.

In May 2012, Sachs opened the Space Program 2.0: MARS exhibit at the Park Avenue Armory in New York. Much of the 2007 Space Program equipment was included, as well as new bricolage sculptures for the challenges of colonizing Mars: Terraforming with poppy plantsâ€"and an accompanying opium tea ceremonyâ€"a Mars rover, and a solar-powered boombox.

Bronze Collection

In 2008 and 2009, the artist's Bronze Collection was shown at Lever House, Baldwin Gallery (in Aspen, CO), and the Trocadero in Paris. The collection featured large white bronze casts of foamcore Hello Kitty and Miffy foamcore sculpturesâ€"a particular style distinctive to the artist. In addition, unpainted casts of battery towers, a skateboarding halfpipe, and Le Corbusier's lamps were also shown. As of April 2010, the Wind-Up Hello Kitty sculpture is still up at Lever House.

External links

• Tom Sachs official website
• Tom Sachs at Lance Armstrong 2009 Charity Exhibition "STAGES"
• This Is His Life: A Blue Whale and Hello Kitty, Hilarie M. Sheets, New York Times, May 4, 2008.
• Tom Sachs; A Visit to Nutsy's, C International Contemporary Art, #77, Spring 2003.
• McDonough, Tom (1 July 2003). "A day at the races". Art in America. 91 (7): 58. (subscription required (help)). 
• Tom Sachs. Disaster, at www.paris-art.com (French)
• The way we live now: 3-10-02: questions for Tom Sachs, Deborah Solomon, New York Times, March 10, 2002.

Notes

References

• Celant, Germano (2006). Tom Sachs (2nd ed.). Fondazione Prada. ISBN 88-87029-37-7. 
• Fleming, Jeff (2007). Logjam. Des Moines Art Center. ISBN 978-1-879003-49-1. 
• Sachs, Tom (2008). Space Program. Gagosian Gallery. ISBN 978-0-8478-3226-2.