T-10 MINUTES TO LIFTOFF AND COUNTING - TOM SACHS
Interviewed by Christie’s Amy Cappellazzo
with photography by Zen Sekizawa
I first met Tom Sachs in 1996, introduced by a mutual friend at a party. We were both young and wily in those days, but there was something about Tom that was already whole and fully formed in his artistic thinking. He understood the post-Warholian way the world processed images and media. His work prefigured consumerism as a full on endurance sport. Wryly, Tom’s take is that art history can be viewed as a branding exercise of movements and artists.
Tommy’s relationship to the handmade is tender without being sentimental. His visual language is all his own, and I don’t think his work has ever been mistaken for someone else’s. If anything, I see the next generation out of art school starting to imitate his strategies and lexicon.
This unique artistic idiom speaks powerfully in Tom’s new work included in his recent show at Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles: Space Program. He presents a Nasa space station, complete with a space shuttle, space suits and an elaborate ground control unit, constructed entirely of simple everyday media including foam-core, glue and found objects. Revisiting the most famous elements of an organization that was once a beacon of American greatness, a symbol of our scientific exploits and technological advancement, and, to borrow Tom’s word, ‘dubbing’ them using very ordinary materials, Tom creates an original system all his own that inspires a reappraisal of Nasa and its role in contemporary society. What has happened to the space program since the glory days of the space race? What is its position in today’s collective consciousness? And what does the growing lack of interest in space travel, in reaching neighboring planets and perhaps discovering new life forms outside of our own, say about the current state of American imagination and ambition?
Today, the desire to acquire the most coveted designer hand-bag, the most expensive ‘bling,’ or the fastest car, far surpasses the drive to penetrate a new galaxy. It seems possessing unlimited buying power and, consequently, the ability to be ever-fashionable, has succeeded as the veritable American dream. Tom is renowned for his witty subversion of the branding and advertising webs that fuel the consumer frenzy, and this theme continues in his current project. Instead of putting major labels front-and-center as done in the past however, Tom this time undercuts the power of the brand in a quieter manner. Miuccia Prada designed the space station’s lab coats. Nike supplied the astronaut boots. Yet without the fanfare, what of it? The celebrated designer fashion is simply another recreated element in Tom’s larger fabricated homage to Nasa, the neglected organization which Tom considers to be, “…the ultimate status symbol.”
Talk to me a little bit about this recent exhibition at Gagosian Gallery and how you’ve furthered your fascination with space, space technology, and space metaphors in this work.
Well, it’s a space program from scratch and we built the lunar module and mission control, space suits and as many details as we could jam in in a year. After researching it for twenty years this is the ultimate project in learning about the space program. In our program we do go to the Moon, we bring back a lunar sample and analyze it, which is the same project that NASA does. There’s really not a lot of difference. Instead of using rockets we use models, but everything is exactly the same. We have all the same issues with.. funding..
laughs a bit…
…with technological development and improvisation when things go wrong, with public relations, advertising. There are people in our life for every one of the things that NASA have that we have.
It seems that your work is always based on this interesting juxtaposition of appropriating something that exists in the world and fully recapturing and reinventing it. So there’s a percentage of this particular project for example that is based quite a bit on the actual lunar module and what it looks like, and the scale and the proportions of the equipment and the space inside for the astronauts to move around in, but then there’s a lot of pure Sachsian invention that’s a part of this. Could you talk about this hybridization of ideas – the value of copying something, duping it but then in a sense mixing it to be all your own.
Well, reggae was invented when people in Jamaica heard rhythm and blues and soul songs that were broadcast off of Texas and they could barely hear them and so the signal was really weak. The guys in Jamaica would hear the songs a little bit and do their own interpretations of them or someone would have a record and bring it to a party and one guy would go to that party and listen to the record. These were records that were extremely valuable cause he had the good songs, he had the good parties, he had the good girls, he got the best attendants. It was money, it was war, and in fact there were battles over who had the best parties. The next day you would go back to your studio, record that song yourself, and release it on your sound system.
From memory.
From memory, if you were genius like, Lee Perry for example. He could do that, and that’s why he invented this. This is sort of the origin of reggae and dub music because it’s a double, it’s a copy. When you do that you can do it perfectly but you add things to it that make it your own. In the work of the space program we try and do that by building things that show aspects that are important to our production like transparency, craft, juxtaposing two different things, because sometimes one plus one equals a million.
And with the duping factor there’s a matter of pure invention in the moment and improvisation that happens when you’re trying to fix or modify, or make a solution for something.
I would replace the word dupe with dub. Dupe’s interesting because it’s duplicitous and sinister and I like that too but dub is a copy. I think when copying you get all these accidental, residual things that in time, with reggae music it became mannerism but sometimes you’ll find things like if you go down to Canal street you’ll find idiosyncratic errors in a copy of a bag. I saw someone that had a pair of sneakers that they brought back from China that had both Adidas stripes and a Nike swoosh on them.
Laughs… Excellent, excellent! Let’s talk about your fascination with NASA because we grow up in one of the last generations that were raised to believe in the future. That the future offered a kind of promise that would be better than our current lives. The future held better and greater things for Americans down the road. Obviously that idea has been thrown into question but part of what gave me the sense of believing in the future was NASA and the space program. As a child in my first-grade art classroom there was a poster that Robert Rauschenberg had done for NASA and that was extremely valuable and meaningful as I was coming of age and had an idea of what NASA meant. Talk to me about this being an intense inspiration, it’s been a theme in your work throughout. As you said this is a twenty-year project in the development but NASA is at such a critical juncture here it’s almost been rendered extinct by the current administration. There’s not a lot of spending going toward it. I’ve always believed that NASA was completely connected to our ability to believe in the future.
NASA does represent the possibility for the future and I think NASA only has itself to blame for not picking up more creative solutions than going to the Moon. Mars is not as sexy as going to the Moon. It’s a necessary step technically to keep the thing going, but it wasn’t sold well and I think that’s the problem. I chose NASA because in so many ways it’s the ultimate status symbol. If you look at my earlier work it was all about juxtaposing status icons with violence and things like that. But for me NASA is the ultimate status symbol in technology, the highest technology. When we went to the Moon we got all this residual cool stuff like Teflon but it was really just about this dream as old as the ages of going to another planet. So from an adventurer’s standpoint it’s the ultimate thing. It is a new world and it’s that same kind of spirit that explores other continents or the bottom of the sea that explores outer space. For me I’m more like Q in James Bond’s world. I’m the guy the makes the stuff. That’s my gratification; helping other people to go to those places. That’s
the part that I’m interested in. When we did our demonstration I was in mission control helping the astronauts work the spaceship from Earth and that’s where we kind of organized things.
This work is completely emblematic, a complete symbol of everything that your work is about for
