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Portrait of TOM SACHS. Photo by Mario Sorrenti. All images copyright the artist; courtesy the artist and Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo.
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” On numerous different occasions, Tom Sachs has cited this aphorism, made popular by astronomer Carl Sagan. To Sachs, the quote suggests how, in making room for the “extraordinary,” science overlaps with and in many ways has engulfed religion and art, which historically in the West represented religious experience. Over his nearly-two-decade study on what has replaced, or perhaps more accurately, adopted the guise of spirituality in culture, he has in turn been transforming countless ordinary objects into extraordinary simulacra of “prosthetic” substitutes for the spiritual. In particular, Sachs creates bricolage copies of equipment used in space expeditions, reflecting on science’s quest for the unknown, and humanity’s connection with cosmic forces. Sachs’s “Space Program,” launched in 2007, is an immersive fictional scenario that imagines various intergalactic missions via performances and sculptures. The program has involved the manufacture of equipment including launch platforms, suiting stations and various vehicles designed to traverse the surfaces of the Moon, Mars, and Jupiter’s moon Europa, from everyday materials such as plywood, foamcore and cardboard. In one of the project’s iterations, Space Program: Mars (2012), Sachs incorporated the Japanese tea ceremony, where two performers make and sip tea from sculptures of cups within a space shack replete with tatami mats, conjuring the hypothetical intergalactic export of human culture.
Sachs’s first solo museum exhibition in Japan, “Tea Ceremony,” at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, centered and further developed this exercise at a larger scale. First presented at the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, New York, in 2016, the exhibition recreated a full set of environments, from Japanese gardens to a tea house, in the same aesthetic of Sachs’s interplanetary space missions. Audiences were invited to experience Sachs’s version of a Japanese tea ceremony. On the occasion of the show, AAP sat down with the artist to discuss the works on view, as well as Sachs’s interest in the tea ceremony, and the idea of cultural prosthetics.
Why did you incorporate a tea ceremony in your “Space Program”?
We wanted to bring the best that earth has to offer. The two cultural offerings that we would export to other planets would be music from Africa, in particular of the African diaspora, through the American experience. We were also looking at art that could express the best of man-made things, and the tea ceremony, spanning philosophy, architecture and art, encompasses that in the broadest and most complete sense. The ceremony also involves hundreds of things, and so it was a perfect armature for creating sculpture.
You might think at first that the show was about tea ceremonies because it looked like it. But if you look closely it’s more about sculpture, bricolage and making. Every decision had a connection with how we built the “Space Program,” and sculpture in general.
Talking about sculpture, a block-shaped object with two holes appeared repeatedly in the show. It seemed to be an important clue to understand the exhibition. What is it?
That’s a cinder block. When the Europeans went to the New World, they knocked down the round buildings, which were built in harmony with nature, and replaced them with square buildings, which were the symbol of Europe. Their main construction material was the brick, which is an industrial object. In the show the cinder block is a symbol of imperialism.
We built our space station with cinder blocks. I’ve been invited to Japan as a gaijin to talk about my work and the values of tea ceremonies, but I wouldn’t be authentic if I didn’t bring at least an acknowledgement of what the West does to other parts of the world. When we go to other planets, there is the same issue. We have to be careful and respectful. The cinder block is the first step in acknowledging that.
You typically use everyday, found materials in your sculptures, so it was a little surprising to see bronze in the show, particularly in your remake of a Japanese-style stupa. Why is this?
To me, the keyword is transition. You take clay, you fire it in a kiln, and it hardens. It’s the same with human relations. Transitions are where we grow stronger and bond, or break apart. The process of transforming a raw material into a finished thing is where all the lies and magic happen. And I’m interested in that transformative power. Bronze is meaningful because it’s money. Money is a total illusion, but we all live and die in this illusion. It’s a reminder that the illusion of art is in everything. It could be in the smallest detail to the largest sculpture. The kettle in the first room, Kama (2013), is also in bronze. There were three lined up: the original iron, my paper model, and the bronze copy. The three embody the whole project—from concept, process to the elevated object.
That reminded me of a statement you once made about art being a cultural prosthetic for real culture. Could you speak about that?
That is what I said perhaps 30 years ago, but I still stand by it today. Culture for the West has been religion, but religion has been eclipsed by science, so we don’t have great cathedrals anymore, and the Catholic Church is no longer the main patron of Western arts. As things became diverse and distributed, art got a little screwed up. But there are many examples of people who have found and made art even within this context. The best example is the art of the African diaspora. People stole from Africa to bring to the New World and people were forced to move in the most tragic way to build this country—a continued source of pain for every American. The best art of the American experience isn’t Pablo Picasso, Walt Disney or Marcel Duchamp, but is James Brown and Louis Armstrong. When you lose a leg you get a fake leg, when you lose a culture you need prosthetic culture, an artificial culture that is made up yourself. When I named my studio “Allied Prosthetic Culture,” I was actively looking for things in culture that replaced spirituality. I think that’s why I’ve always been interested in sneakers because it’s a real cultural phenomenon. It says who you are.
You collaborate with the brand Nike. How did this partnership come about? Their mass-produced goods seem opposite, in a way, to your hand-made, bricolage works.
It took five years of thinking to understand how Nike and I could collaborate authentically. I have no interest in decorating a sneaker, but I have a huge interest in using industry as a tool. We agreed on doing something that I can’t do without them and they can’t do without me. So for the latest shoe we made together, for example, I got a sneaker mold about ten years old, colored it in special Kodak yellow, and hand-cut the instep, which Nike would not have done otherwise. Showing the hand of the producer has never been part of their culture. And that is my specialty, choosing the wrong two things (to put together). Then they made the shoe in a slightly off color so I had to paint over it. As a result, there are two tones, neither of which have ever existed before in the Nike world. The failure was transparent. This was a lucky mistake—the evidence of the process is there.
Installation view of TOM SACHS’s The Kiss, 2016, plywood and steel hardware, 81.2 × 33 × 27.9 cm, at “Smutshow,” Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo, 2019.
At the beginning of your career you examined the systems of the world, such as consumerism and politics. In your “Space Program” and “Tea Ceremony,” your subject for observation is one’s inner world, or spirituality, and its systems. How did this transition occur?
I am critical of consumer culture but I’m also part of it. I’m an active consumer and I actively produce objects for consumption. In this context, the priority must be to take care of our things, our body, our relationships with the people close to us, and the planet around us. A tea ceremony is a great metaphor for this because there are two parts; the host and the guest. One way to save the planet is by being a good host, another is being a good guest. Japan, where the tea ceremony comes from, is very sensitive to this. Japanese culture has always been respectful to the natural environment and material resources in general. It’s a model for the way the rest of the world could be. I make sculptures of the world in the way I would like or wish it to be. Everything at the show is something that I want but cannot have, so I make it myself—that’s my main strategy. I would love to have a Constantin Brâncuși sculpture for example, but I would have to work at a bank for that. So I made one, The Kiss (2016), myself. And in a way my Brâncuși is more authentic than a Brâncuși bought by someone who has no time to enjoy it. Showing my fingerprint and touch is important, as that’s what separates artists from industry. The hand-made.
Tom Sachs’s “Tea Ceremony” is on view at the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery until June 23, 2019.
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