Tom Sachs’s boomboxes will be put to good use on upcoming Thursday night programs at the Brooklyn Museum (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
THURSDAY NIGHTS
Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Thursday, July 7, 21, 28, August 4, free, 6:00
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org
Tom Sachs is one busy guy. In March, Van Neistat’s film about Sachs’s 2012 Mars Space Program installation at the Park Avenue Armory opened at Metrograph and “Tom Sachs: Tea Ceremony” began its four-month run at the Noguchi Museum; in April his exhibit “Tom Sachs: Boombox Retrospective, 1999-2016” opened at the Brooklyn Museum; and since June 9, his wall piece “Training” has been included in the FLAG Art Foundation group show “Summer School.” On July 6, the DIY bricolage artist, who prefers such basic and found materials as plywood, tape, glue, batteries, wires, and foamcore, will be at FLAG to play the last “Training” game. And on July 7, the Brooklyn Museum will host the first of four free Thursday nights in which DJs will use his boomboxes for dance parties. “Like many suburban lonely guys, I’ve been making sound systems for myself, to impress friends, and mostly to bore and alienate beautiful women with long talks about high quality electronics . . . just ask my wife,” New York native Sachs, who has been making portable sound systems since he was fifteen years old, explains in the accompanying handout. The show, which continues through August 14, comprises more than a dozen of his boomboxes, all of which are operative, from the small “McDonald’s Boombox,” “Clusterfuck,” and “AAU (Acoustic Amplification Unit)” to the massive ninety-six-square-foot “Toyan’s” and a pair of large-scale speakers, “Euronor.” On July 7, Natasha Diggs teams up with #SoulintheHorn, Mursi Layne takes the reins on July 21, and Juliana Huxtable will spin the black circle on August 4, all as part of “Summer DJ Boombox Residencies.” In addition, on July 28, for the Guest Bodega Clerk Series, Acyde and Tremaine Emory will take over Sachs’s life-size bodega boombox, where visitors can buy candy, granola, and other real items as well as take out cash from an ATM that dispenses a zine as a receipt. “In movies, 70% of what you understand comes from the sound. The rest is just pictures,” Sachs notes in the handout. “In sound systems, the opposite is true: the way things look influence the way things are heard. We spend with our eyes.” Sachs’s boomboxes both look and sound great, with a low-tech feel but a high-tech concept.