Tag Archives: tom sachs

TOM SACHS: SPACESHIPS

Tom Sachs takes visitors on a fun and fascinating journey on the Upper East Side (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

TOM SACHS: SPACESHIPS
Acquavella Galleries
18 East Seventy-Ninth St. between Madison & Fifth Aves.
Monday – Friday through November 26, free, 10:00 am – 5:00 pm
www.acquavellagalleries.com
www.tomsachs.com
online slideshow

New York City native Tom Sachs continues his fascination with the final frontier with “Spaceships,” on view at Acquavella Galleries on the Upper East Side through November 26. Ten years ago, Sachs transformed Park Ave. Armory into the Red Planet for the immersive, interactive exhibition “Space Program: Mars.” He’s also hosted “Tea Ceremony” at the Noguchi Museum (with yet more NASA-style objects), activated his “Training” game at the FLAG Foundation, and blasted music for his “Boombox Retrospective, 1999–2016” at the Brooklyn Museum.

“Spaceships” consists of two rooms of miniature sculptures, drawings, paintings, and engineering plans relating to travel, from the tiny Mothership, Hercules, and Titanic to a Charging Station with an American flag on top, a Photon Drive, a Litter Robot (ask someone at the front desk if they can turn it on for you), a Docking station, and Generation Ship, a lunar module with a surprise video inside. Sachs also populates this outer-space journey with some of his trademark figures, including a Barbie doll, a Technics turntable, and a Chanel vacuum cleaner, that also reference his attraction to consumerism and analog technology. Be sure to look at everything closely to see what kinds of materials he has repurposed brilliantly. “There’s information from the materials’ past life — I’m not going to always be there to stand and tell it, but if I’m successful, the viewer will feel that story, whether that’s a mop bucket or a Chanel suit,” he says about his work.

Tom Sachs exhibit features different kinds of ships (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

He adds, “There are three reasons people do anything — spirituality, sensuality, and stuff. Spirituality is asking the big questions: Are we alone? Where do we come from? Sensuality is going where no man has gone before: exploring space, the g-force of excitement, climbing the highest mountain, the smell of the tatami, the touch of the kimono . . . Stuff is the hardware: a spaceship, a cathedral, a tea bowl. That’s what we make. Our priority is sculpture, but it doesn’t mean shit without the ritual and without the spirituality and the reasons behind it. You’ve gotta have all three.” And once again, he does.

FOR THE BIRDS

Chen Chen & Kai Williams’s Blue Heron Triangle floats on the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Japanese pond (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

FOR THE BIRDS
Brooklyn Botanic Garden
900 Washington Ave. at Eastern Parkway
Through October 23, $25-$30 (children under twelve free), 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
718-623-7200
www.bbg.org/forthebirds
online slideshow

One of the most delightful outdoor exhibits of the year is “For the Birds,” concluding this weekend at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. The show consists of more than three dozen birdhouses created by artists, architects, and others, placed throughout the garden’s fifty-two-acre expanse. Even with a map, finding each creation can be a bit like a treasure hunt as you make your way through the Native Flora Garden, Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden, Magnolia Plaza, Ginkgo Allée, Shakespeare Garden, Bluebell Wood, Herb Garden, Belle’s Brook, Rose Garden, Bamboo Grove, Cherry Esplanade, and other lovely locations.

Each birdhouse is accompanied by a sign identifying the title, artist, and materials and including a brief background on the work. A Palace for the Eastern Bluebird by SO – IL, Dalma Földesi, Jung In Seo, and Eventscape was “inspired by the intricate and haphazard way that birds weave their nests. We chose to make a birdhouse made of 3D-printed clay because it can produce textures evocative of woven structures. We are interested in seeing how birds, particularly the eastern bluebird, will interact with this kind of material. We hope that the earth tones of the clay will be highly attractive to them.”

Kevin Quiles Bonilla’s Pal’ campo honors his Puerto Rican heritage (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Nina Cooke John’s Oh Robin! “is an abstracted interpretation of the robin’s act of nest weaving. Robins have become invisible to us, like the grocery store cashier, Amazon delivery worker, bus driver, and other workers who are critical to the running of our city but have faded into the background of our lives. The robin shows us its scrappiness by making its nest almost anywhere.” Tom Sachs says about his contribution, Swiss, a red plywood version with a white Swiss cross, “To find home or shelter in Switzerland is the dream. If those damn birds are so above it all, why not let them share our burden? Let’s ground the birds in that reality.”

Andy Holden’s The Auguries, a kind of miniature avian sculpture park, was made by cast resin from 3D prints of waveforms created by recordings of rare bird songs. Shun Kinoshita + Charlap Hyman & Herrero’s simply named Birdhouse “is for all birds, including the spirits of birds long gone.” Kevin Quiles Bonilla’s dazzling Pal’ campo honors his family home in Puerto Rico and explores “the idea of both birds and humans as migrating beings, the memories we keep during our travels, and the notion of what home is to those who move from one place to another.”

Julie Peppito’s United Birds of America (E Pluribus Unum) is a condo of curiosities (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Others pay tribute to the downy woodpecker, the Carolina wren, little bluestem grass, Olivier Messiaen’s use of birdsong in his compositions, scarecrows, the blue heron, the barn owl, and others while taking on climate change and extinction, envisioning birdhouses as safe havens and sanctuaries.

Many of the birdhouses are beautiful works of art all by themselves. Chen Chen & Kai Williams’s Blue Heron Triangle floats on a raft constructed of bamboo reeds tied to empty plastic containers. Sourabh Gupta’s woven offers multiple birds a place to gather. Jessica Maffia’s A Home for Flickers features a trompe l’oeil blue sky with clouds and surreal hands emerging as if holding out protection. Also look out for Pat McCarthy’s Batloft, Joey’s Coop, Babylon Coop, Niknak’s City Cart, funkmaster George Clinton’s Come Fly, Flock Together, Barry McGee’s Untitled, Luam Melake’s Descendants, Suchi Reddy’s The Nest Egg, Amy Ritter’s Safe Space, and Julie Peppito’s wildly engaging United Birds of America (E Pluribus Unum), “one big bird condo [that is] a metaphor for the United States, because we must learn to live together or divided we fall,” a robotlike form filled with tiny delights.

Sourabh Gupta’s woven hides out in BBG’s Overlook (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

In addition, most of the birdhouses are accompanied by a tune as part of the Birdsong Project, curated by Randall Poster, with specially selected songs by Michael Penn, Balmorhea, Kurt Vile, Dan Deacon, Uwade, Terry Riley, Suzzy Roche, Loudon Wainwright III, Laurie Anderson, Beck, and others. “So while in quarantine, I became much more aware of the birds and the birdsong around me,” Poster explains on the website. “I spent a lot of time listening to the birds singing. I was not alone. It was something that we began to talk about. The beauty of birds, the joy and mysteries of birdsong. Given that the situation in the fall of 2020 was sad, strange, and frightening, as plagues tend to be, this fascination with the birds was a magical distraction. Thank God for the birds. . . . And so we are building a community, joined to celebrate and protect the birds. We are birds.”

Finally, as They Might Be Giants advised once upon a time, “Make a little birdhouse in your soul.”

TOM SACHS: TEA CEREMONY

“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.

TOM SACHS — BOOMBOX RETROSPECTIVE: SUMMER DJ BOOMBOX RESIDENCIES

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.

TOM SACHS: TRAINING

Tom Sachs, “Training,” synthetic polymer paint on plywood, 2016 (image courtesy the artist)

The FLAG Art Foundation
545 West 25th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves., ninth floor
Wednesday, July 6, free with advance RSVP, 6:30
212-206-0220
flagartfoundation.org
www.tomsachs.org

In his operation manual for his 2006 installation “The Island,” New York City native Tom Sachs quotes Yoda: “Do, or do not. There is no try.” Sachs does. And he has a lot of fun doing it. The Bennington College graduate takes a DIY approach to his art, displaying a wry sense of humor in such works as “Chanel Guillotine,” “Prada Toilet,” “Nutsy’s McDonald’s,” “Barbie Slave Ship,” and “Hello Kitty Nativity.” In 2008, he went up against the Neistat brothers in a hilarious power boat race. In 2012, he staged an intricately planned trip to the red planet in his massive interactive Park Avenue Armorny exhibition “Space Program: Mars,” which was later turned into a 2016 film. Currently, “Tom Sachs: Boombox Retrospective, 1996 – 2016” welcomes visitors to the Brooklyn Museum, while “Tom Sachs: Tea Ceremony” offers an immersive experience at the Noguchi Museum. On July 6, Sachs will be at the FLAG Art Foundation in Chelsea, activating “Training,” his contribution to the group show “Summer School,” which consists of playful works by such artists as John Baldessari, Dan Colen, Tara Donovan, Mark Grotjahn, Tony Matelli, Marilyn Minter, Vik Muniz, and Ugo Rondinone. “Training” is a helicopter rescue game / wall sculpture that involves riddles and such game pieces as a bag of McDonald’s fries and an Apollo command module. Sachs and his studio team will participate in a live tournament that will put the finishing touches on the work. Admission is free, but advance RSVP is recommended; as a bonus, whiskey and wine will be served. The tournament starts at 7:00, but be sure to get there at 6:30 to check out “Summer School” as well as the tenth-floor exhibit, Patricia Cronin’s “Shrine for Girls, New York.”

A SPACE PROGRAM

Lt. Sam Ratanarat is one of two astronauts going to Mars in A SPACE PROGRAM (photo by Josh White)

A SPACE PROGRAM (Van Neistat, 2015)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Opens Friday, March 18
212-660-0312
metrograph.com
zeitgeistfilms.com

In the late spring of 2012, I wandered through the vast Wade Thompson Drill Hall at the Park Avenue Armory, accumulating experiences so I could become officially indoctrinated into artist Tom Sachs’s massive DIY installation, “Space Program Mars.” I was unable to attend the actual lift-off and exploration of the Red Planet that concluded the month-long show, but Sachs and his longtime collaborator, Van Neistat, have captured that special event in the new film A Space Program. With his crack team of artisans, New York City native Sachs, whose inaugural “Space Program” in 2007 at the Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles went to the moon, has built nearly all the functional (if not precisely space-worthy) elements needed to send two women to Mars. But Sachs’s method is as much about process than anything else, insisting that the labor reveals itself, that his decidedly low-tech practice be evident everywhere. “Our space program is handmade, guided by the philosophy of bricolage,” deadpan narrator Pat Manocchia explains early on. Sachs’s method relies on bricolage, which he defines as “repair or creation with available resources.” The first part of A Space Program reveals how it all was built, using found materials, items bought in a regular hardware store, metal, and lots and lots of plywood. Then the team — consisting of Echo Mike (Evan Murphy), Charlie Bravo (Chris Beeston), Poppa Mike (Pat McCarthy), November Delta (Nick Doyle), Kilo Hotel (Dr. Kevin Hand), Juliet Lima (Jeff Lurie), Juliet Victor (Jared Vandeusen), Gulf Mike (Gordon Milsaps), Bravo Poppa (Bill Powers), and Sierra Victor (Sarah Vasil), each of whom has a very specific job to do — comes together to send Lt. Sam Ratanarat and Cmdr. Mary Eannarino into space in the life-size Lunar Excursion Module. The attention to detail borders on the obsessive as well as the whimsical, but Sachs has made sure to include every possible element, from a working toilet to a shelf of booze. In his first feature film, Neistat, who has made many shorts with his brother, Casey, and Sachs — Sachs also appeared on several episodes of the brothers’ wildly inventive HBO show, The Neistat Brothers, including those involving the cult-favorite miniature boat races — follows all the action centered around Sachs’s fully operational (yet forever grounded) Mission Control setup, where multiple monitors track the women’s progress, and emotions heat up when problems arise.

It all plays out like a real mission with real consequences, and that’s exactly how Sachs and Neistat see it, and want you to see it. But as much as it’s about the space program — as you watch the film, you’ll find it hard not to think about how much the government has cut funding for NASA, even though that’s not the point Sachs is trying to make — it’s also about the creation of art, about the handicraft of making things. Sachs previously worked as a welder and an assistant to Frank Gehry, so he demands that his art be functional as well as artistic. In the past, his work has concentrated on branding, merging high-tech and low-tech ideals and culture in such pieces as “Chanel Guillotine,” “Prada Toilet,” and “Hermés Value Meal” (okay, those might not have been fully functional) as well as his “Bronze Collection” series, consisting of large-scale bronze sculptures of Hello Kitty, My Melody, and Miffy, painted white to look as if they’re made purely of lightweight foamcore. With A Space Program, Sachs, who cowrote the film with Neistat, who serves as director, cinematographer, and coeditor (with Ian Holden), took all of those methods and put them to fascinating use, immersing the viewer firmly into NASA’s world of space exploration, with all the same fears and hopes as if you’re observing an actual mission, complete with the requisite potential danger. On the film’s official site, there’s a twelve-point list titled “How to Watch This Film.” Number 1 says, “This movie proves that you don’t need an education to understand — or to make — art,” number 3 explains, “This movie is NOT A DOCUMENTARY. It’s an INDUSTRIAL film like the safety videos they make you watch in high school shop class so you don’t cut your fingers off. Some say it’s a comedy,” and number 10 points out, “This movie is a love letter to the analog era.” It’s also a love letter to the power of the imagination and just what you can accomplish when you put your mind — and your bare hands — to it. A Space Program launches March 18 at the brand-new Metrograph movie theater on Ludlow St., where Sachs and Neistat will be on hand for opening-night screenings at 7:00, 9:00, and 11:00. Starting next week, you can catch Sachs’s “Tea Ceremony,” which developed out of “Space Program,” March 23 through July 24 at the Noguchi Museum, the first solo show there by an artist other than Isamu Noguchi, while “Tom Sachs: Boombox Retrospective, 1999-2016” comes to the Brooklyn Museum from April 21 through August 14.

THE HOLLYWOOD CLASSIC BEHIND WALKERS: THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, and Cybill Shepherd prepare for adulthood in THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Saturday, December 26, and Sunday, December 27, $12, 7:00
Series runs through December 27
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us

Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show is a tender-hearted, poignant portrait of sexual awakening and coming-of-age in a sleepy Texas town. Adapted from the Larry McMurtry novel by the author and the director, the film is set in the early 1950s, focusing on Sonny Crawford (Timothy Bottoms), a teenager who works at the local pool hall with Billy (Timothy’s brother Sam), a simple-minded boy who needs special caring. Sonny’s best friend, Duane Jackson (Oscar-nominated Jeff Bridges), is dating the prettiest girl in school, Jacy Farrow (Cybill Shepherd, in her film debut), who is getting ready to test out the sexual waters, sneaking away on a date with Lester Marlow (Randy Quaid), who takes her to a naked-swimming party in a wealthier suburb of Wichita Falls. Meanwhile, Sonny breaks up with his girlfriend, Charlene Druggs (Sharon Taggart), and becomes drawn to the sad, unhappy Ruth Popper (an Oscar-winning Cloris Leachman), the wife of his football coach (Bill Thurman). The outstanding all-star cast also features Oscar-nominated Ellen Burstyn as Lois, Jacy’s mother; Eileen Brennan as a waitress in the local diner who makes cheeseburgers for Sonny; Clu Gulager as a working man who has a thing for Lois; Frank Marshall, who went on to become a big-time producer, as high school student Tommy Logan; and Oscar winner Ben Johnson as Sam the Lion, the moral center of the town and owner of the pool hall, diner, and movie theater, which shows such films as Father of the Bride and Red River. Cinematographer Robert Surtees shoots The Last Picture Show in a sentimental black-and-white that gives the film an old-fashioned feel, as if it’s a part of Americana that is fading away. Bogdanovich also chose to have no original score, instead populating the tale with country songs by Hank Williams, Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, Lefty Frizzell, Tony Bennett, and others singing tales of woe.

In many ways the film is the flip side of George Lucas’s 1973 hit American Graffiti, which is set ten years later but looks like it’s from another century; it also has a lot in common with François Truffaut’s 1962 classic Jules and Jim. Nominated for eight Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director, The Last Picture Show is an unforgettable slice-of-life drama that will break your heart over and over again. It is screening December 26 & 27 at 7:00 in the Museum of the Moving Image series “The Hollywood Classics Behind Walkers,” which is being held in conjunction with the exhibition “Walkers: Hollywood Afterlives in Art and Artifact,” consisting of Hollywood-related photography, drawing, sculpture, print, and video by such artists as Francis Alÿs, Richard Avedon, Jim Campbell, Gregory Crewdson, Douglas Gordon, Isaac Julien, Ellen Mark, Tom Sachs, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and many others. Also screening December 26 & 27 is Sam Peckinpah’s classic Western, The Wild Bunch.