“Tom Sachs: Tea Ceremony” is first solo show not by Isamu Noguchi in thirty-year history of museum (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Noguchi Museum
9-01 33rd Rd. at Vernon Blvd.
Wednesday – Sunday through July 24, $10 (free all day Fridays)
718-204-7088
www.noguchi.org
tomsachs.com
“In Space Program, we dampen our destabilizing heart-brain feedback system by getting outside of ourselves in service to others through an ancient process called tea ceremony,” narrator Pat Manocchia says in Van Neistat’s 2015 film A Space Program, which details Tom Sachs’s Mars expedition based on his 2012 immersive installation in the Park Avenue Armory. Once on Mars, Lt. Sam Ratanarat and Cmdr. Mary Eannarino reconnect with their earthly ways by sitting down for some tea. That tea ceremony, or chanoyu, is the subject of its own exhibition at the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, where “Tom Sachs: Tea Ceremony” continues through July 24. DIY bricolage artist Sachs’s work is structured around process, ritual, and technique, using found objects and items that can be bought in any hardware store or rummaged from the street, including plywood, glue, nails, Con Ed barriers, and latex paint. The Noguchi Museum show features several rooms of works both associated with the tea ceremony directly and representative of Sachs’s oeuvre as a whole; part of the museum’s thirtieth anniversary, it is the first solo show by an artist other than Isamu Noguchi to be mounted there. “Sachs, like Isamu Noguchi, is a cultural synthesizer committed to the traditional American dream of a pluralistic, crazy quilt society,” senior curator Dakin Hart writes in the Tea Manual that serves as a kind of exhibition catalog. “Both believe that our best futures have at least a foot in the past; that technology should affirm craft; that the most sustaining serenities are tinged with chaos; that polarities like East and West can exist harmoniously in productively ambiguous relationships; that the conceptual and the formal are not hand and glove but earth and atmosphere; and that the balkanization of creativity into categories such as ‘art’ and ‘design’ is nonsense.”
Tom Sachs works on “Tea Ceremony” at Noguchi Museum (photo by Genevieve Hanson)
“Tom Sachs: Tea Ceremony” is divided into such rooms as “Tea Garden,” “Sachs’ Culture of Tea,” “The Prehistory of Tea in Space,” and “A Capsule Retrospective,” with works arranged much like Noguchi’s have been since the museum opened in 1985, largely organized so visitors can walk around the sculptures on the floor. The centerpiece is the Tea Garden, which features an entrance gate, waiting arbors, a hibachi, a bonsai tree, a stupa, a koi pond, an incinerator toilet, and a tea house with a Japanese scroll painting of Muhammad Ali among other objects, in addition to several sculptures by Noguchi. During the run of the exhibition, the museum hosted a handful of live ceremonies with tea expert Johnny Fogg and Sachs, for whom this is no mere lark. “Mourning the loss of spirituality in our capitalist environment, we admire Tea’s integration of humility, prosperity, and spirituality. In the studio, it serves to sanctify our ritual of bricolage,” Sachs writes in the manual. “Despite the elitism, there are many beautiful, transcendental elements in the formality of Tea. Its core values: purity, harmony, tranquility, and respect ring true across time and space.” Of course, this being Sachs, his vast sense of humor is also on display, though always touched with a genuine sincerity and, at times, playful political statements. A tool cabinet holds a fire extinguisher, bottles of vodka topped by Jimi Hendrix heads, and a knife labeled “Beelzebub.” A Yoda Pez dispenser stands like a Buddha surrounded by the candy. “The Eleven Satanic Rules of Earth” advises that “if a guest in your lair annoys you, treat them cruelly and without mercy.” A pair of pieces reference Star Wars and Star Trek, and a white foamcore McDonald’s mop bucket, perhaps the most ergonomically functional example of that object ever made, resides nobly in a corner. It’s all an enchanting combination of fun and reverence, of veneration and mirth. But nothing is included merely for the sake of being included. “I don’t look at art as something separate and sacrosanct. It’s part of usefulness,” states the eighth of ten reasons listed in “Why ‘Tom Sachs: Tea Ceremony’ at the Noguchi Museum? A Formal Proof in Noguchi’s Words.” An expanded edition of the exhibition will travel to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco in September, where Sachs will also debut “Space Program: Europa,” a bricolage journey to Jupiter’s icy moon. And you can catch “Tom Sachs: Boombox Retrospective, 1999-2016” at the Brooklyn Museum through August 14.