Tom Sachs

b. 1966, New York, USA
lives and works in New York City

Tom Sachs invites the spectator into a hand-made world of consumption, mass production, luxurious commodities and social contradictions even social injustice. It is about “branding”, how the individual is captured inside a complicated system of temptation and desire. His work is also a story about Modernity.

The world of Tom Sachs is an ambitious and focused enumeration of things and phenomena that characterize our standardized way of living.

In times of distantiation and appropriation, adopted or factory produced art works, Tom Sachs returns to the personal expression. He defines his style or formalistic language (how the forms are drawn) as “bricolage”. An artistic expression where the hand of the artist is clearly visible. He uses what is available of “cheap materials”, without value in themselves, cardboard, ink, adhesives, foamcore construction, wood, wood from the “NY police barricade”, and converts or recycles them into objects as altered ready-mades. With these basic materials he creates an expression in first person, an “inherent flows”. With the use of “bricolage” as an artistic expression he returns to the expression of the “self”. The spectator sees and feels that it is the artist who speaks, giving the appearance of the forms a double meaning. By making an object in first person it becomes not only a description or a representation but also an appreciation about the object itself. The artist speaks through the material and the form of the material, a spiritual transcendence is passed on to the spectator.

The notion of “bricolage” is nowadays mostly known and understood with reference to the theories of “bricolage” of Claude Levy-Strauss. But beyond such a structuralist reflection, it is interesting to consider that the beginning of Tom Sachs “bricolage” lies as well within the tradition of Modernism. Tom Sachs, who studied at Bennington College, was deeply influenced by his modernist training and the atmosphere inspired by some of the most important masters of Modernism. And even though Tom Sachs was fascinated by artists like Warhol and Koons, his modernist education won out in the long run as a source of inspiration and corresponded better to his pragmatic and empirical working methods. In fact, the artistic production of Tom Sachs incorporates very much all the basic elements of Modernism. It aims to be inventive, create a new vision, go beyond and extend the notion of art. Behind the work is an artist with clear intentions who creates and constructs forms, objects and figures. Conditioned by a humanistic attitude, far away from all nihilism, the artist emphasizes the real mechanism of the object. Nothing is hidden away, all is visible, showing the ingenuity of the artist. This is what we see in the works of Tom Sachs. The technology, down to every screw, is visible, (and in fact an important element of the esthetic appearance of the work), and more than that, in most cases the art works are functioning: guns, McDonald’s  deep fryers, refrigerators etc. They are not only representations of machines, they are functioning machines!

Beauty of a “bricolage” object is the contrary to standardized beauty which refers to a consensus of what is beautiful. The “bricolage” object is always a proposition of a new personal beauty relying on the available materials and the work and the craftsmanship of the author. The aesthetics of the “bricolage” objects lies close to the “degré zero” of re-presentation, and has a clear link to the aesthetical reflection of the Fluxus artists (and even their humor and playfulness), in the effort to abolish the distinction between “art and life”. But even though the artist is seeking the neutrality of the everyday object, we have to acknowledge that, with time and insistence, by repeating the “creative gesture”, the artist brings about the expression of his own style. In the works of Tom Sachs, beyond the physicality of the materials, his aesthetical perception includes also the scale and the relationship with the body.

Tom Sachs does not accept a philosophy of “reduced personalities” or diminished identity of the author. Being “real” and being “true” adds to the physical appearance. The aesthetic of Tom Sachs is very much about morals, loading the object, formalistically and thematically, with a personal message about honesty and personal experience, implicating the spectator into thoughts of self-consciousness and a social awareness.

Tom Sachs is a political artist. He has seemingly doubts about aims and possible results of multilayered enterprises that rule and control the economy and the social system. He is critical of fad and the fading out of the self-expression, he is skeptical towards the “throw-away” mentality and overwhelming consumption, he fears the oppression of the individuals by dominating “visionary” corporations and brands.  But at the same time he is fascinated by their well-structured and functioning mechanisms. He is not fighting the capitalist system, he is more eager to point out the things that go wrong and to repair them.

Tom Sachs has a special position within the American contemporary art scene. He is an artist of his own time, but he is not a part of an art movement. He is, rather, because of his personal artistic language, his special skills, use of “bricolage”, and his obsession for the hand made, an outsider. Tom Sachs, who expresses a very personal connection to the objects and to the world in general, belongs in a context of artists with a clear individual position in their artistic language, their humanistic scope and their political and social commitment.

GBK