The flair of the ghetto, the aura of conspiracy, and the
obvious fascination with violence that Sachs communicates with his
loudspeaker boxes, cardboard hand grenades, and weapons constructed from
plumbing materials and found objects certainly did nothing to harm this
enthusiasm – on the contrary. "We really like his work,” Pandora Asbaghi
from the
Prada Art Foundation said a few months before Sachs' exhibition
Creativity is the Enemy – shown1998 in New York with Thomas Healy and
1999 in Paris with
Thaddaeus Ropac – and provided Sachs with an unlimited supply of shoe
boxes. Entirely by chance, the opening date at Ropac's in Paris coincided
precisely with the city's haute couture shows, attracting wealthy fashion
enthusiasts to the gallery who were now able to purchase unauthorized
product families from the very labels whose stores they had just visited.
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Chanel Guillotine, 2000, © Sperone
Westwater, New York
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When Sachs' 1999 show Haute Bricolage sent his
gallery dealer at the time
Mary Boone to prison for a night, his reputation as the "next big money
bad boy” of the art world seemed sealed: the "genuine” 9-mm bullets in a
glass bowl, available to guests at the exhibition opening to take home in
"forged” Hermés bags bearing Sachs' initials, were in clear violation of
gun laws. Now legendary, the anecdote about Mary Boone's arrest not only
speaks volumes on the PR mechanisms of the art establishment, but also
articulates, as though by chance, one of the most important issues of
Sachs' work. If it weren't a matter of legal details but of an object's
actual utilitarian value, charges could have been brought against any of
the artist's dealers for illegal trade in arms, when one considers that
the handmade weapons in Sachs' exhibitions are indeed fully functioning.
The fact that Sachs' pieces work, that it's possible to understand how
they're built and that this inspires imitation, makes them more
"dangerous” for the art establishment than a bullet.
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Koka Kola Gun, 2001, © Tom Sachs, New
York
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The aura of breaking existing laws, rules, and norms
surrounding both the illegal possession of arms and bricolage is
inseparable from the economic and social conditions that give rise to a
variety of "do-it-yourself” forms. "But it's very pretentious for a white
upper middle-class person like me, with all the resources to build
anything, to be doing bricolage,” Sachs said in an interview with
Christina Villaseñor. "Because traditionally the style of work I'm doing
here is done by people with fewer resources. Bricolage is something,
generally, that's done by people who can't afford to buy things new or
have them restored.” In his essay for the catalogue Nutsy's, Glenn O'Brien
formulates it even more clearly: in the urban ghettos and the Third World,
"bricolage” means the same as "business,” and primitive working methods
and globally functioning economic models are combined.
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"It's very common to see something like leather or gold or
snakeskin – these very expensive materials – being finely crafted into
perfection, but to see a thousand chewing-gum wrappers woven into a
handbag by an artist in prison is so much more inspirational.” When Sachs
admiringly remarks that hobby craftsmen and prisoners work with the
simplest of means and without any special training, but that they
compensate for this through perseverance, it's reminiscent of the respect
that a white middle-class boy has for a Gangsta who's racked in millions
with a rap song. Sachs' provocative statements, such as "Hello Kitty and
guns, that's my folk” have often been taken for mere affirmations of a hip
lifestyle, whereas it's frequently been overlooked to what degree of
consistency he's carried his principles of "do-it-yourself” from the area
of mass culture into the art establishment.
Sink Test Module, 2000, © Sperone Westwater, New York
Sachs has always stressed that he's more interested in media and technology
than art; he calls himself a "bricoleur” or "do-it-yourself repairman” in
order to set himself apart from the traditional professional term of
artist. As early as 1994, he issued a polemical
manifesto claiming that to preserve art's integrity, it was time to resort
to arms and kill all "artists.” If art were illegal and subject to the
death penalty, then only those willing to sacrifice their lives for their
work would carry on, and all this postmodernist regurgitation and remixing
of obsolete styles and ideas would finally come to an end.
Sony Outsider (Gajin) from 1999 is a true-to-scale replica of the
"Fat Man” atom bomb dropped on
Nagasaki – covered in a high-gloss, white plastic covering and sporting a
Sony logo. Inside it is a "hotel room” upholstered Sony-style in white
leather and equipped with a bathroom, urinal, DVD player, and a Dolby
stereo set. In the press release to Outsider, Sachs remarked: "We're doing
the same thing today with fashion and other industries that people were
doing with war 40 years ago. Now, if you want to kill a country, you don't
bomb them, you just give them VCRs. It's the same kind of domination and
violence, just without the bullets. You're basically bombing out their old
culture and putting in this new, homogenized one…."I think we're in the
adolescence of technology culture. Even with all this information fewer
people know less and less. Brands and their power are one of my interests.
They're in right now in fashion and my work kind of consecrates it. I mean
you can either criticize it or consecrate and I think my work kind of
consecrates it."
Land O Lakes Butter, 2003, © Sperone Westwater, New York
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