In Sachs' work, the story of postmodern globalization
appears as a continuation of an endless history of war testified to less
by "art” than by the media- and technology-imbued products and
architecture determining our everyday lives. In a 1999
interview with Jason Forrest, he said:"Art history is written by museum
people. It doesn't tell the real story like a cathedral or a battleship
does about the people or culture that built it. Art only tells a little
bit."
All the Modern Things
To this date, the
biggest scandal in Tom Sachs' career was his contribution to the
controversial exhibition
Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery / Recent Art, which took place in 2002 at
the
Jewish Museum in New York.
Prada Death Camp from 1999 was a model of an imaginary concentration
camp mounted on a folded-out Prada hat box which enraged and shocked
Holocaust survivors and the heads of Jewish institutions (read the
extensive interview Cheryl Kaplan held with the exhibition's curator,
Norman Kleeblatt). When Sachs stressed that he wasn't concerned with
delivering a historical commentary on the horrors of the Holocaust, but
that he was using Holocaust iconography to draw attention to the role
fashion plays, critics accused him of sensationalism and cynicism. The
fact is often neglected that Sachs' model is not an authentic
reconstruction of a concentration camp, but a simulation of a camp created
with the simplest of means – even if the barracks and barbed wire fences
possess a frighteningly high resemblance to reality.
"Fashion, like
fascism, is about loss of identity… I am interested in the hardware of
horror and death," as Sachs explained to the journalist Deborah Solomon of
the New York Times
Magazine. "The death camps are examples of amazing German engineering
and design. And there are strong links between military products and
consumer products. During World War II,
Westinghouse developed parts for the atomic bombs, and I
BM made machine guns."
One look at the list of links Sachs has
put together on his homepage makes it clear that the question of how and
why people produce things is one he pursues uncompromisingly and without
"moral" prejudice: barring all categorization or comment, he unites the
internet addresses of toy firms, American Nazi groups, record labels,
government offices, arms manufacturers, porno sites, high-speed courts,
and fashion firms, providing a mirror of Western culture in the process.
"Indeed, his sculptural vermin, made with Tiffany's boxes or Balthazar
matchbooks, have proved uncannily suitable accoutrements for a generation
all too aware of the insidious nature of high-end consumerism, but who
remain nonetheless trapped in the dilemma of wanting to have it all,"
Paper Magazine wrote shortly after the scandal surrounding the Prada
Death Camp. In Sachs' cosmos, the inhabitants of the First World,
faced with the overload of consumer goods, information, and media imagery
that Western civilization produces, adopt a role similar to that of Third
World cultures, who are "bombarded" by these consumer goods. Sachs'
"cultural prostheses" reveal the way they've been made; they also reveal
an absurd expectation of redemption implicit in the hymn to the power of
the commodity. Like in allegedly "primitive" cultures, the idea propagated
by marketing and advertising that the really desirable goods entered the
world in a "finished" form – without manufacture, without development, and
without any connection to social processes – also reigns in the industrial
nations.
It comes as no surprise that Sachs compares his work to
aspects of the
Cargo cult: in the Cargo cult movements of Melanesia, a prophet announces
the imminent end of the world – a catastrophe that will destroy
everything. After that, the ancestors will return and some god or friendly
power will appear and bring all the goods the people have been wishing
for, which the white traders, soldiers, and administration officials
inexplicably have access to, without any apparent effort on their part. A
rule of eternal happiness begins. This is why the people are preparing for
the day the Cargo will arrive, setting up cultural organizations in time,
building landing areas and ports as well as warehouses for storing the
cargo. Airplanes are built, money printed, and cricket clubs are founded
with clearly laid-down hierarchies and club activities. (Also visit the
homepage of the John Frum movement, an active cargo cult located on the
island of Vanuatu in the Pacifc Ocean.)
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Hello Kitty Made in Japan Soft Type, 2000 ,
©Sperone Westwater, New York
In the
Cargo cults, the longing for freedom from oppression and slavery connected
to the wish for the redistribution of all consumer goods experiences a new
and fairly pragmatic extension in Tom Sachs' work. In Nutsy's, he presents
a summary of his artistic activity of the past ten years: the model of a
bared world in which things appear divested of art and the myths created
by designer labels, and in which absolute democracy reigns. In Nutsy's
do-it-yourself world, there is no empirical difference between a Mies van der
Rohe chair, a rapid-fire weapon, or a toilet bowl. Everything is the
object of one gigantic bricolage, and everything can be sold, reused,
recombined.
Lil' T's Toilet Town, 2000, © Sperone Westwater, New York
"Well, I'd like to see all those things in the same oeuvre," Sachs said in a
conversation with Jason Forrest in 1999. "Things like
Monster trucks and sneakers being really big, as gestures, and people like
Pollock and
Kline being small – because they give things 'the look.' They're not
really revolutionary. Like
Mondrian: What is the culmination of Mondrian – a
L'Oreal bottle." With Nutsy's, we've reached the end of culture. And now,
all the modern things get their turn: it's no longer people waiting for
the redistribution of commodities, but the commodities themselves that are
waiting in a state of unfulfilled hope.
Translation: Andrea
Scrima
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