A visit with my Friend Tom Sach's...
Mar 16, 2009 at 12:00 PM 
I visited Tom Sach's this last week. He has an amazingly cool studio in down town NYC. You arrive at the address of his studio, and the door is locked behind gates. There is a small hand written sign which tells you to enter 2 doors down. The address the sign points you to is a Chinese Laundry? WTF? The folks working there say..."You want Tom? He's behind that Door.". The door is a small blue door, far in the back of the laundry house, that has a sign that reads "NASA". Homeboy is famous for buying a grip of stuff from James Brown's estate...than re-packaging it and re-selling it. You got to love the guy who rocks James Brown's "diabete's allergy alert bracelet".
Definently a trippy experience. Tom's work is amazing. He is hard core, hand's on and relentlessly crafty. I sat with him for a couple of hours, and we waxed on all things and consumerism. If you don't know of his work and philosophies, you should. He's a gamechanger for real. His new projects and idea's he is working on are amazing. Really ambitious dude. I like that. From building exact replica's of the Lunar Lander...to giant bronze Hello Kitty's...this guy goes big. His new project ambitions...make all that stuff seem really small. :)
Peep more flicks from my camera, here.
From Wiki...below...
Tom Sachs is a contemporary artist who lives and works in New York.
Born in New York City in 1966, Sachs grew up in Westport, Connecticut and attended Greens Farms Academy for high school. He attended Bennington College in Vermont. Following graduation, he studied architecture in London before deciding to return to the States and started making sculpture and other art objects. In 1994, Sachs created a Christmas scene for the windows at Barneys New York entitled "Hello Kitty Nativity" where the Virgin Mary was replaced by Hello Kitty dressed in Chanel and Nike. This contemporary revision of the traditional nativity scene received great attention and demonstrated Sachs' interest in the phenomenona of consumerism, branding, and the cultural fetishization of products. In 1997, with the perspective that all "products" are equal, Sachs created Allied Cultural Prosthetics - thereby giving his studio a formal name - and began to utilize logos and design elements from major fashion houses and other instantly recognizable brands in his work.
Interested from the beginning in "bricolage" or "do-it-yourself" in French, Sachs organized an exhibition at Sperone Westwater in 2000 entitled "American Bricolage" that featured the work of 12 artists from Alexander Calder to Tom Friedman. The exhibition's catalogue describes the "bricoleur" as one "who hobbles together functional contraptions out of already given or collected materials which he re-tools and re-signifies info new objects with novel uses, but more importantly, which he regenerates into a new, oscillating syntax: one of loss, gain, and more than anything, one of play.
After several solo exhibitions in New York and abroad, Sachs showed his major installation "Nutsy's" at the Deutsche Guggenheim in 2003. According to one art critic who experienced the installation: "Like Grand Theft Auto, Tom Sachs' current installation for the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin offers a miniature likeness of a reality steeped in the laws of consumerist society. It comes as no surprise that Sachs, a video game enthusiast, ignores the boundaries between "high" and "low": without comment, modernist icons stand as equals next to the flagships of global consumerism and symbols of contemporary leisure culture. Just like in a computer game, visitors to the exhibition get a chance to relinquish the passive role ordinarily accorded to them and become actors in this gigantic bricolage by driving one of the racing cars through the installation."
In 2006, the artist had two major survey exhibitions mounted in Europe, first at the Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst and next at the Fondazione Prada, Milan. His work can be found in major museum collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
As Germano Celant writes in his recent monograph on the artist published by the Fondazione Prada, Milan, "The images and objects that make up the militarized space of consumption and fashion are at the very heart of Tom Sachs's visual passion."
Reader Comments (3)
I've noticed over the past few months, more and more young adults wearing shirts or blouses with military stripes on the shoulders. As a veteran of the United States Army, I found this to be extremely disrespectful. One must earn the right to wear those stripes. I did, and so did many others before and after me. The use of military ranks and insignias should not be used as a fashion statement. When I see some young punk wearing a shirt like this, I feel everyone that has a ever put on the uniform in the Armed Forces is being dishonored. I noticed that your brand is one of the lines selling these shirts. Maybe you'll do something about this, maybe you won't, but if I hadn't said this I would be letting all my brothers and sisters in arms, past and present, be dishonored.
Cpl. V. Sanchez
United States Army Veteran
In other words, Art + Design should be censored to make you feel better. Why do you have to interpret the design as disrespect?
I completely understand your position on the use of military stripes in pop fashion Cpl. V Sanchez. And you're absolutely right that you have to earn those stripes, which requires a lot of hard work and commitment. As a veteran, you would know this better than anyone.
But looking at this from the viewpoint of the "young punks", I'm absolutely convinced that in a majority of cases their intent is not to disrespect honorable men like you. Not at all. Rather, I believe their true motivation for wanting to associate themselves with military symbols of various kinds is that they actually harbor a deep-seated respect for what the military/army mean to them: structure, dedication, order, purpose and believing in/fighting for a greater cause that's bigger than themselves. These are values that are becoming more and more pronounced in times of great uncertainty. So while I understand your sentiment, you could actually choose to look at the proliferation of military symbols in popular culture as a testament to the respect that people have for what the military stand for...and the things men like you have done for them.
/Fredrik