Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/666019
190 culturedmag.com n "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," Sigmund Freud honed in on the human compulsion to revisit, restage and repeat formative experiences or traumatic events. For the American artist Tom Sachs, it is not enough to revisit. He literally remakes. Sachs' relationship with objects and creativity is swaddled in emotions. He remembers being five or six years old and trying to make his father a much-desired Nikon camera—a sweet but forbidden gesture since his parents were afraid of tools and banned him from making things. Sachs' ability to weld came about through a failed college relationship after a girl taught him how to put fire to metal before breaking his heart. "Welding gives me a sense of emotional, almost psychosexual, gratification through the physicality of metal work," says Sachs. "It has a macho quality because you're literally bending steel like Superman." Sachs remembers being a "real loser" before figuring out his talent lay in making things. Objects have defined his experiences, and so he has learned how to master them. "The objects I've made are filled with empowerment and domination over the universe. I've found my own standards of excellence—it's how I've been able to bring myself to the game of this short life," he says. "It's not bragging if you can back it up, and I can back it up: I am the Michael Jordan of plywood, I am unbeatable, it's one of the few areas of life where I have that kind of mastery. Everything else feels so uncontrollable. You have to surrender to the conditions of your life, to other people's actions, your personal demise, the demise of the planet, the weather. It's all very dark. But in the studio, that's where I gain a sense of strength and confidence. In the one area in which they are expert, that's what artists do." For his exhibition at the Noguchi Museum in Queens, New York—the first major exhibition dedicated to a single artist other than Noguchi in the institution's 30-year history—Sachs has staged a Japanese tea ceremony like no other. Working in his signature bricolage style—the deliberate cobbling together of functional objects from existing materials to create something new—Sachs presents an alternate version of the tea ceremony. Every element, from large structures like the tea house itself to smaller accoutrements such as hundreds of tea bowls, has been monomaniacally reimagined by Sachs and his studio team using diverse materials such as plywood, tennis balls and even Yoda from Star Wars. His is an idiosyncratic take: A bronze bonsai tree, for example, is made from more than 3,600 individually welded castings of tampon tubes, Q-tips, toothbrushes and enema nozzles. "There comes a time in every college-educated, middle-aged Jewish man's life when he understands that Japan is where it's at, which is why you see so many Zen gardens, koi ponds and Asian second wives," Sachs says. "The 'Tea Ceremony' show is my version of that midlife crisis." Sachs has, I realize, used that joke in other interviews, an appropriate form of recycling given his work's focus on remaking, remodeling and reusing. His is an art of dogged labor, equal parts discipline and eccentricity and the antithesis of the ready- made. While Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp were his college heroes, Sachs appreciates without appropriating. "I admire Duchamp and his balls in just putting a urinal on a pedestal, but I've never had the confidence to make that gesture," he says. "Rarely have I seen it executed well—besides Duchamp, it often feels weak and lazy." He always wanted to "make perfect objects like Duchamp or an iPhone," but tried and had "mostly a lot of failure. At some point I came to the understanding that it really wasn't practical for me to make perfect objects—an artist's advantage is his hands, his or her ability to make a mark." Now, Sachs leaves deliberate marks—globs of glue, stains where fingers have lingered, rough edges—human touches that say: "Tom Sachs was here." "Tom Sachs: Tea Ceremony" is an extension of Sachs' ongoing fascination with space missions that has resulted in projects including "Space Program 2.0: MARS," a mammoth 2012 installation at the Park Avenue Armory and a deadpan film about the install called A Space Program, which opened in New York in March at The Metrograph theater. "In the last scene, the two main characters have this fight. They're threatening to kill each other, but they have a détente using this amazing 500- year-old tradition," he says. For Sachs, both projects concern repetitive rituals that create spaces where differences can be reconciled and the more enlightened aspects of humanity can come to the fore. "If you had to bring art to another planet you could use the tea ceremony as a way of explaining all the great rituals of poetry and hospitality, architecture, philosophy and mindfulness, how we engage and respect nature," he says. In the end, it comes back to the objects: "The real reason I am in this is because I love making things. It makes me feel alive and it's something I have become good at," he says. "The tea ceremony is a fantastic armature for me to explore making things. Artistic activity is the complete human condition in all of its glories and miseries." "You have to surrender to the conditions of your life, to other people's actions, your personal demise. But in the studio, that's where I gain a sense of strength and confidence." —Tom Sachs I