Life and Early Career

Born in New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

 on July 26, 1966, Sachs grew up in Westport, Connecticut

Connecticut

Connecticut is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States. It is bordered by Rhode Island to the east, Massachusetts to the north, and the state of New York to the west and the south .Connecticut is named for the Connecticut River, the major U.S. river that approximately...

 and attended Greens Farms Academy for high school. He attended Bennington College

Bennington College

Bennington College is a liberal arts college located in Bennington, Vermont, USA. The college was founded in 1932 as a women's college and became co-educational in 1969.-History:-Early years:...

 in Vermont

Vermont

Vermont is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. The state ranks 43rd in land area, , and 45th in total area. Its population according to the 2010 census, 630,337, is the second smallest in the country, larger only than Wyoming. It is the only New England...

. Following graduation, he studied architecture at London's Architectural Association before deciding to return to the States, where he spent two years working in Frank Gehry's

Frank Gehry

Frank Owen Gehry, is a Canadian American Pritzker Prize-winning architect based in Los Angeles, California.His buildings, including his private residence, have become tourist attractions...

 L.A. furniture shop. It is here that he began using the term knolling

Knoll (verb)

Knolling is the process of arranging like objects in parallel or 90 degree angles as a method of organization.- Origin :The term was first used in 1987 by Andrew Kromelow, a janitor at Frank Gehry's furniture fabrication shop. At the time, Gehry was designing chairs for Knoll, a company famously...

.

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 tenant—Allied Machine Exchange—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

Barneys New York

Barneys New York is a chain of luxury department stores headquartered in New York City. The chain owns large stores in New York City, Beverly Hills, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Dallas, Las Vegas, and Scottsdale, and smaller stores in other locations across the United States.Brands sold include...

. 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

Hello Kitty

is a fictional character produced by the Japanese company Sanrio, first designed by Yuko Shimizu. She is portrayed as a female white Japanese bobtail cat with a red bow. The character's first appearance on an item, a vinyl coin purse, was introduced in Japan in 1974 and brought to the United States...

 with an open Chanel

Chanel

Chanel S.A. is a French fashion house founded by the couturier Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel, well established in haute couture, specializing in luxury goods . She gained the name "Coco" while maintaining a career as a singer at a café in France...

 bra, the three Kings were Bart Simpson

Bart Simpson

Bartholomew JoJo "Bart" Simpson is a fictional main character in the animated television series The Simpsons and part of the Simpson family. He is voiced by actress Nancy Cartwright and first appeared on television in The Tracey Ullman Show short "Good Night" on April 19, 1987...

s, and the stable was marked by a McDonald's

McDonald's

McDonald's Corporation is the world's largest chain of hamburger fast food restaurants, serving around 64 million customers daily in 119 countries. Headquartered in the United States, the company began in 1940 as a barbecue restaurant operated by the eponymous Richard and Maurice McDonald; in 1948...

 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

Consumerism

Consumerism is a social and economic order that is based on the systematic creation and fostering of a desire to purchase goods and services in ever greater amounts. The term is often associated with criticisms of consumption starting with Thorstein Veblen...

, 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"http://tomsachs.com/exhibition/cultural-prosthetics, opened at New York's Morris-Healy Gallery in 1995. Many works from the show conflated fashion and violence, as with HG (Hermés Hand Grenade) (1995) and Tiffany Glock (Model 19) (1995)http://tomsachs.com/work/tiffany-glock-model-19, both of which were models made with Hermes 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

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac

The Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac was founded in 1983 and has specialized in European and North American contemporary art.Today the gallery’s headquarters are housed in the magnificent Villa Kast on Salzburg’s Mirabellplatz. In 1990, a gallery featuring over 600m2 of exhibition space was opened in Paris....

. It built on the discourse established in "Cultural Prosthetics" with sculptures like Chanel Guillotine (1998)http://tomsachs.com/work/chanel-guillotine-breakfast-noo and Prada Deathcamp (1998). Other pieces, like Hermés Value Meal (1998)http://tomsachs.com/work/herms-gift-meal, moved away from explicit references to violence and paired fashion with other successful brands, like McDonald's

McDonald's

McDonald's Corporation is the world's largest chain of hamburger fast food restaurants, serving around 64 million customers daily in 119 countries. Headquartered in the United States, the company began in 1940 as a barbecue restaurant operated by the eponymous Richard and Maurice McDonald; in 1948...

. Also included in the show were gaffer's tape versions of Piet Mondrian's

Piet Mondrian

Pieter Cornelis "Piet" Mondriaan, after 1906 Mondrian , was a Dutch painter.He was an important contributor to the De Stijl art movement and group, which was founded by Theo van Doesburg. He evolved a non-representational form which he termed Neo-Plasticism...

 famous compositions http://tomsachs.com/work/victory-boogie-woogiehttp://tomsachs.com/work/composition-c-composition-with-. 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

Mary Boone

Mary Boone is the owner and director of the Mary Boone Gallery and was instrumental in the New York art market of the 1980s...

 Gallery in New York, where Boone was famously arrested after Sachs allowed visitors to take live ammunition from an Alvar Aalto

Alvar Aalto

Hugo Alvar Henrik Aalto was a Finnish architect and designer. His work includes architecture, furniture, textiles and glassware...

 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

Nagasaki

is the capital and the largest city of Nagasaki Prefecture on the island of Kyushu in Japan. Nagasaki was founded by the Portuguese in the second half of the 16th century on the site of a small fishing village, formerly part of Nishisonogi District...

, 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

Roberta Smith

Roberta Smith is an art critic for the New York Times and a lecturer on contemporary art.Born in New York City and raised in Lawrence, Kansas, Smith studied at Grinnell College in Iowa. Her career in the arts started in 1968 while an undergraduate summer intern at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in...

, 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

Bricolage

Bricolage is a term used in several disciplines, among them the visual arts, to refer to the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things that happen to be available, or a work created by such a process...

". 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 info 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

Alexander Calder

Alexander Calder was an American sculptor and artist most famous for inventing mobile sculptures. In addition to mobile and stable sculpture, Alexander Calder also created paintings, lithographs, toys, tapestry, jewelry and household objects.-Childhood:Alexander "Sandy" Calder was born in Lawnton,...

, Greg Colson

Greg Colson

Greg Colson is an American artist best known for wall sculptures constructed of salvaged materials. Colson has had solo exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe, including Sperone Westwater , William Griffin Gallery , Galleria Cardi , Kunsthalle Lophem , Konrad Fischer , and the Lannan...

, and Tom Friedman

Tom Friedman (artist)

Tom Friedman American conceptual sculptor known for his work employing everyday material, such as toothpicks or sugar cubes in intricate geometric arrangements. Friedman was born in St. Louis, Missouri and attended Washington University in St. Louis, receiving his Bachelor of Fine Arts in graphic...

.

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' masterpieces—a 1:25 recreation of Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation

Unité d'Habitation

The Unité d'Habitation is the name of a modernist residential housing design principle developed by Le Corbusier, with the collaboration of painter-architect Nadir Afonso...

 made completely out of foamcore. The Neistat Brothers

Neistat Brothers

The Neistat Brothers, Van Neistat and Casey Neistat , are filmmakers based in New York City. Their self-titled television show, The Neistat Brothers, debuted on HBO in 2010...

, 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

Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a renowned art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, located on the eastern edge of Central Park along Manhattan's Museum Mile, is one of the...

, New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is a well-known museum located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States. It is the permanent home to a renowned collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern, and contemporary art and also features special exhibitions...

, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art

Whitney Museum of American Art

The Whitney Museum of American Art, often referred to simply as "the Whitney", is an art museum with a focus on 20th- and 21st-century American art. Located at 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street in New York City, the Whitney's permanent collection contains more than 18,000 works in a wide variety of...

 and the Centre Georges Pompidou

Centre Georges Pompidou

Centre Georges Pompidou is a complex in the Beaubourg area of the 4th arrondissement of Paris, near Les Halles, rue Montorgueil and the Marais...

, Paris.

As Germano Celant

Germano Celant

Germano Celant is an Italian art historian, critic and curator, mostly renewed for being one of the founding members of the "Arte Povera" movement in 1967....

 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

Rose Art Museum

The Rose Art Museum, founded in 1961, is a part of Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, USA. Named after benefactors Edward and Bertha Rose, it offers temporary exhibitions, and it displays and houses works of art from the Brandeis University art collections...

 hosted a solo exhibition titled Logjam featuring the artist in 2007.

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 60's and 70's, 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

Gagosian Gallery

Gagosian Gallery is a contemporary art gallery owned and directed by Larry Gagosian. There are currently eleven gallery spaces: three in New York; two in London; one in each of Beverly Hills, Rome, Athens, Paris, Geneva, Hong Kong and Moscow.-1980s:...

 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 samples—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.

The artist appears to be working on another iteration of his Space Program.

Bronze Collection

In 2009, the artist's Bronze Collection was shown at Lever House

Lever House

Lever House, designed by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and located at 390 Park Avenue in New York City, is the quintessential and seminal glass-box skyscraper built in the International style according to the design principles of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Completed in 1952, it was...

, Baldwin Gallery (in Aspen, CO), and the Trocadero

Trocadero

The stylish connotations of the name "Trocadero" derive from the Battle of Trocadero in southern Spain, a citadel held by liberal Spanish forces that was taken by the French troops sent by Charles X, in 1823...

 in Paris. The collection featured large white bronze casts of foamcore Hello Kitty and Miffy foamcore sculptures—a particular style distinctive to the artist. In addition, unpainted casts of battery towers, a skateboarding halfpipe, and Le Corbusier's

Le Corbusier

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier , was a Swiss-born French architect, designer, urbanist, writer and painter, famous for being one of the pioneers of what now is called modern architecture. He was born in Switzerland and became a French citizen in 1930...

lamps were also shown. As of April 2010, the Wind-Up Hello Kitty sculpture is still up at Lever House.

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

Toms Sach's Bronze work is done exclusively by Arizona Bronze in Tempe, AZ. Jeff Wilson is his sculptor and primary producer.

External links

• Tom Sachs official website
• Tom Sachs Google Chrome theme
• 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.
• A day at the races, Tom McDonough, Art in America, July 2003.
• 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.