SEOUL — For now, the artist tom sachs he’s used to people suggesting that the way he runs his studio has some parallels to how cults work. “A cult just means, when you look it up, it just means a group of people with shared, idiosyncratic values,” Sachs said in an interview here one recent afternoon. “Everyone is welcome to leave whenever they want.”
Sachs, 55, was taking a break from putting the finishing touches on her show. “Tom Sachs Space Program: Indoctrination” at Art Sonje Center, one of the three individual exhibitions he was preparing in the South Korean capital. To do it all, he had flown in five members of his 25-person New York-based team, who were identifiable by his Sachs-branded clothing and Nikes (he just designed an exhausted model; a relaunch arrives in August).
Visitors to Art Sonje have the opportunity to learn some of the studio’s guiding principles (called “the code”): be on time, keep to-do lists, pay fines for various infractions (for a party fund), and be evaluated in to them. After completing a quiz on such rules, students who pass become members of Sachs’ “Space Program”; those who fail can see a 10 point video and other re-education materials (all quite entertaining) and try again. “We’re indoctrinating Korea in studio values,” Sachs said cheerfully.
The close cohesion that Sachs fosters has allowed her cult to embark on wildly ambitious projects for many years, such as a series of simulated space missions that she has staged in museums and galleries. They went to the Moon from Gagosian in Beverly Hills in 2007 and to Mars from the Park Avenue Armory in 2012, always with a fervent attention to detail. (The Martian Landing sculpture was made primarily of plywood and screws.) Many people have “built their own lunar module,” Sachs said, “but I’m the only one who built it without a center column,” which requires precision assembly of its cantilevered landing gear.
At Sonje, there are space suits, model spaceships, and cleverly juried dioramas that use cameras, monitors, and the occasional fog machine to simulate rocket launches and segments of your group’s journeys around the solar system. (in terrestrial representations). These intricate works amaze, especially since they have obviously been created by hand.
Lurking beneath the charisma of Sachs’s inventions is a nostalgic melancholy. Decked out in American flags and NASA logos, they nod to a time when the country could pursue great goals, when it could dream. Its sturdy, DIY construction is also an unspoken response to the built-in obsolescence of so many products today. “His criticism is not really direct,” said Sunjung Kim, artistic director of Art Sonje, who organized the show. “It’s a turnoff, and it also has humor.” (When asked about the origin of her DIY sensibility, Sachs mentioned a grandfather who grew up during the Depression, whose father was “a rags-and-bones man” on the poor Lower East Side. “He would come home with four flat tires,” Sachs said; her grandfather helped patch them.)
Billionaires have been embarking on their own space programs in recent years, but “I’m not interested in their small penis contest,” Sachs said. His interests are grounded and avant-garde. “You don’t go to other worlds because you have ruined this one and are looking for a new home,” he said. “You go to other worlds so that you can better understand your resources here.”
Sachs’ art celebrates what people can achieve when they come together, roll up their sleeves, and refuse to give up. “The reward for good work is more work,” she likes to say. Recently, she has been hugging NFT enthusiastically inviting collectors to conceive three-part digital rockets with each component bearing the insignia of a brand like Budweiser, Tiffany or Campbell’s Soup. They are parodies of how identities are formed, or aspired to, perhaps through consumerism. Sachs and company assemble the toy projectiles, launch them, and ship them to buyers. “If you’re in any doubt that it’s not a performance art, building 500 rockets is an endurance art,” he said, using a swear word to emphasize the work involved. (Rocket Pop paintings by him will be on view through August 20 at the Seoul branch of gallery owner Thaddaeus Ropac.)
Mainline art types have criticized the aesthetic value of many nft creations, and Sachs too, but he was enthusiastic about his experience in the field. “I have finally found my people,” he said. “This is the first grassroots art movement that I have been an active participant in.” At the Oil Tank Cultural Park in Seoul, his team launched about two dozen rockets to a sizeable crowd.
Rocketmen take pride in their strange line of work. Sachs’s studio manager, Erum Shah, noted that they had recovered all the ones they had airdropped. “There’s a rocket with a part missing,” he said. “It was Chanel’s nose cone, and it’s on the Seine. I think that’s a bit poetic.” During a launch a few weeks ago in Chicago, one got stuck in a treetop; the four-hour rescue mission included drones and tree-climbing attempts.
“In the end, we went to Home Depot, got a ladder and a saw, and cut the limb,” Sachs said last week.
After some 16 launch events in the last year, Sachs is finalizing them, “so we can focus on the next chapter, which is world building,” he said. We are building planets on Mona. On that metaverse platform, collectors will be able to convert Sachs-made NFT rocks from Mars into digital worlds, a process he called “transubstantiation.” (The cutoff for creating a physical rocket is July 24 at midnight; digital ones can still be assembled after that.)
The naked commercialism of the crypto universe is a feature, not a bug, for Sachs. “I think the smart contract, or Web3, is really about money, and it’s about if everyone is an artist, and that includes bankers, it’s the art of faith,” he said. Lately, that faith is being tested. NFT sales are down and Bitcoin and Ethereum prices have plummeted. The recession, Sachs said, “will eliminate all the garbage. Only artists who are willing to do it for the sake of doing it will prevail.”
Meanwhile, reports of crypto scams and thefts have continued to proliferate. “Negativity is so easy and delicious and fun,” Sachs said. But that is not his worldview; he presents himself as a true believer. “I don’t care about that,” he said. “I am interested in making the world the way I want it to be. It’s the only way we can survive.”
Sachs clearly relishes the opportunity to work across the borders of the contemporary art industry, where “there is an elitism that is really offensive to me and petty, and I even think it’s there to cover up ill-formed and formless ideas,” she said. . A teenager in Connecticut in the 1980s who frequented hardcore punk shows, he now has a zest for populist crossovers, leading to productive friction. He has designed an unauthorized chanel guillotine and the very real Nikes; the athletic company advertised its new stripped-down sneaker as “a sneaker to do more.” A shoe of his own. Sachs described it as “a sculpture that’s on your foot,” and wants his space sculptures to be equally accessible. “You don’t need a text on the wall to explain them,” he said.
What may be Sachs’s most crowd-pleasing production in Seoul, through 9/11, is a survey of 13 homemade boomboxes (of many more he has created) at Hybe Insight, a museum space at the headquarters of hibe, the self-styled “entertainment lifestyle platform” behind BTS. They are eye-catching devices, constructed of wood and paint, and adorned with Hello Kitty figurines and other accessories. In some cases, their dial markings are drawn by hand and their wiring is visible, proudly revealing how they were made. “I called them ear sculptures,” said the show’s curator, Yeowoon Lee.
most boomboxes plays a 24-hour mix that was compiled by multimedia artist and DJ Nemo Librizzi. It amounts to “a story of how freedom was found in American music, primarily by the underclass,” Librizzi said by phone from New York. There’s blues, gospel, jazz, rap. The day after the show opened, Little Junior Parker’s “It’s funny how time flies” they filled the space as young people passed by, posing for photos and perhaps becoming Sachs fans.
Sachs started building loudspeaker systems in his youth, which is also when he started launching rockets. He traded a copy of Led Zeppelin’s “Physical Graffiti” album for a stolen car stereo, which he hooked up to his family’s old Plymouth Volare pickup. “I discovered it by myself, just by desire,” he said. That ingenuity has evolved into an exhilarating do-it-yourself art, of functional objects that are greater than the sum of their assembled parts.
At one point, Sachs started talking about how “DIY is in everything, if you’re a little more open to define what that can mean”, mentioning the concept of kluge — use mismatched elements to design an unlikely solution. It’s the scientific community’s term for DIY, “when something doesn’t go as planned,” he said. “But there’s a fine line between kluge and just making the best of what you’ve got, and I think that’s what we’re all trying to do.”