Controlled chaos:
Tom Sachs' Installation Nutsy's
at the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin
From July 24 to October 5, the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin is presenting
Nutsy's, the latest room-sized installation by the New York artist Tom
Sachs. McDonald's, Le Corbusier, sculpture park, and racecars: Maria
Morais on Sachs' vision of a world in which the ordinary boundaries
between "high" and "low" have been annulled.
Tom Sachs, Nutsy's, Installation in der Bohen Foundation, Foto: Van Neistat, ©
Tom Sachs Studio
The scene is a classic:
the hero is making his way through a busy street, hunted down by invisible
pursuers. Bumping into passers-by and skaters, he knocks people over and
leaves a trail of devastation behind him. Suddenly, he waves down the next
car, jumps in, pulls a weapon on the shocked driver, and forces him to
flee – and they take off to the sound of music booming from the car radio.
It's Gangsta time, and we're in the middle of Vice City, one of the
most popular electronic locations of recent years and the virtual setting
of the successful computer
game Grand Theft Auto – rife with an abundance of satiric wit, jabs
at advertising, weapons freaks, running shoes, and boy bands.
Bass-heavy Reggae rhythms boom out of oversized 10,000-watt speakers,
models of
Le Corbusier's
Unité d'Habitation (1947–52) in Marseilles and
Villa Savoye (1929–31) in Poissy can be seen side by side with a fully
functioning McDonald's
, deejay cabins, and a modern art park bordering on a ghetto neighborhood –
and all of this connected by a gigantic racetrack with remote-control
model cars zipping around, crashing into each other, or knocking each
other out of commission. Welcome to Nutsy's World!
Tom Sachs, Nutsy's, Installation in der Bohen Foundation, Unité d'Habitation,
Foto: Van Neistat, © Tom Sachs Studio
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Like Grand Theft Auto,
Tom Sachs' current installation for the
Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin offers a miniature likeness of a reality
steeped in the laws of consumerist society. It comes as no surprise that
Sachs, a video game enthusiast, ignores the boundaries between "high" and
"low": without comment, modernist icons stand as equals next to the
flagships of global consumerism and symbols of contemporary leisure
culture. Just like in a computer game, visitors to the exhibition get a
chance to relinquish the passive role ordinarily accorded to them and
become actors in this gigantic bricolage by driving one of the racing cars
through the installation.
Tom Sachs' Studio, Foto: Tom Powell, ©
Tom Sachs Studio
Speeding past apartment
buildings, containers, ghetto bars, bank machines, and miniature
Brancusis and Calders
in the sculpture park, exhibition visitors bit by the game bug can drive
their car through Nutsy's cosmos, catching their breath for a
moment, perhaps, at the McDonald's drive-in. Indeed, this urge to play
was what inspired the idea that gave rise to this installation, which is
made on a scale of 1:25 and copies its models from real life down to
every last detail. Yet then Sachs "started thinking about what our lives
are like, and the themes that are interesting to me are how the world's
fed… McDonald's, planned obsolescence, global housing… Corbusier, music.
So I thought, 'What's our "GTA" (Grand Theft Auto)? What's our
mission here?' And we started combining these things."
For a
long time, bricolage served as a derogatory expression for improvised,
slapdash workmanship. Yet ever since 1962, when
Claude Leví-Strauss described the concept in his book on primitive
cultures, "La pensée sauvage," as an ability to use myths and
superstitions to create ever-new overall contexts in meaning from
available props, the term's value has been enhanced considerably. And
although Sachs likes to stress how alienated he is by everything
mysterious and esoteric, he seems to be carrying on his own form of
bricolage in precisely this sense: "So in a way, we're imbuing a
temporary material with high status. Like with Foamcore – it's a very
low material that we're polishing and refining. The idea of making a
silk purse out of a sow's ear is very attractive."
Tom Sachs, Nutsy's, Installation in der Bohen Foundation, Nutsy's Barcelona
Pavillon , Foto: Tom Powell, © Tom Sachs Studio
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