Art - 10 Bullets (Tom Sachs)

Designed for members of the Tom Sachs studio team. Required viewing for all employees and studio visitors.

Curated by Jason Forrest

Total Runtime: 0:21:07

Art2000sartdesignknollknollingmaking ofnyctom sachs

"Working to Code" is a movie series designed for members of the Tom Sachs studio team. Required viewing for all employees and studio visitors.

ALWAYS BE KNOLLING.

Featured at the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo. More information at:
http://www.emnomedosartistas.org.br/

http://tenbullets.com.

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Life and early career

Born in New York City on July 26, 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 at London's Architectural Association before deciding to return to the States, where he spent two years working in Frank Gehry's L.A. furniture shop. It is here that he began using the term knolling.

Sachs moved from L.A. to New York City around 1990 and found a studio in the disappearing machinery district downtown. His studio, Allied Cultural Prosthetics, took its name from the previous tenant—Allied Machine Exchange—implying that contemporary culture had become nothing but a prosthetic for real culture.^[1]

For a few years Sachs worked odd jobs, including lighting displays at Barneys New York. In 1994, he was invited to create a scene for their Christmas displays and titled it Hello Kitty Nativity, in which the Virgin Mary was replaced by Hello Kitty with an open Chanel bra, the three Kings were Bart Simpsons, and the stable was marked by a McDonald's logo. This contemporary revision of the nativity scene received great attention (not all of it positive^[2]) and demonstrated Sachs' interest in the phenomena of consumerism, branding, and the cultural fetishization of products.

Career

In the mid and late 1990s, Sachs' career began to take off. His first major solo show, "Cultural Prosthetics"[1], opened at New York's Morris-Healy Gallery in 1995. Many works from the show conflated fashion and violence, as with HG (Hermés Hand Grenade) (1995) and Tiffany Glock (Model 19) (1995)[2], both of which were models made with Hermes or Tiffany packaging. Although these sculptures were non-functional, another piece - Hecho in Switzerland (1995) - was an actual working homemade gun. Sachs and his assistants would make similar guns and sell them back to the city as part of New York's gun buyback program (for up to $300 each).^[3]

His next major show, "Creativity is the Enemy", opened in 1998 at New York's Thomas Healy Gallery and Paris' Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac. It built on the discourse established in "Cultural Prosthetics" with sculptures like Chanel Guillotine (1998)[3] and Prada Deathcamp (1998). Other pieces, like Hermés Value Meal (1998)[4], moved away from explicit references to violence and paired fashion with other successful brands, like McDonald's. Also included in the show were gaffer's tape versions of Piet Mondrian's famous compositions [5][6]. Like the Hermes sculptures, the Mondrian paintings were things Sachs desired but could not have. So he made them instead. As Sachs puts it, "making it is a way of having it.^[4]"

Similar shows opened the following year at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Salzburg, Austria and Mary Boone Gallery in New York, where Boone was famously arrested after Sachs allowed visitors to take live ammunition from an Alvar Aalto vase.^[5] Around the same time, Sachs' SONY Outsider (1998) opened at SITE Santa Fe in New Mexico. The sculpture was outwardly a full-scale model of the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, and was a leap from handmade art into expensive outsourced fabrication. Ultimately, it was not well received by critics or even the artist himself - he later published a zine titled "The Failure of SONY Outsider"^[6]). For many, including Roberta Smith, the well-known New York Times art critic, the piece "bore no trace of Mr. Sachs's hand" and "could have been the work of several other artists.^[7]" As Sachs says about the piece: "At the time I didn't fully grasp the value of my handcrafted things... I should leave it to Sony or Motorola to make those perfect things.^[8]"

Learning from this experience, Sachs fully embraced the practice of "bricolage". For Sachs, a bricoleur is 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 the failure of Sony Outsider, Sachs began to focus on leaving visible traces of his work, saying this a few years later:

"We have our system of making things out of certain materials... and of showing the scars of our labor and the history of our efforts... We have the 'your way', 'my way', and 'the right way,' and I must insist everything is done my way, even if it takes longer.^[9]"

On a related note, Sachs organized an exhibition at Sperone Westwater in 2000 entitled "American Bricolage" that featured the work of 12 artists including Alexander Calder, Greg Colson, and Tom Friedman.

After several solo exhibitions in New York and abroad, "Nutsy's" opened at the Bohen Foundation (New York City) in 2002 and Deutsche Guggenheim (Berlin) in 2003. The large-scale installation covered a whole floor, and invited viewers to interact by driving remote-controlled vehicles on asphalt tracks throughout the installation. Several of Sachs' most famous works debuted at this exhibition, including Unité, Nutsy's McDonald's, and Barcelona Pavilion. Unité, in particular, is one of Sachs' masterpieces—a 1:25 recreation of Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation made completely out of foamcore. The Neistat Brothers, who began their careers working for Sachs, were instrumental in the operation of "Nutsy's".

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 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."

The Des Moines Art Center and Rose Art Museum hosted a solo exhibition titled Logjam featuring the artist in 2007.

Architectures: Frank Lloyd Wright, Johnson Wax Admin Building

French documentary in English about one of Wrights most impressive buildings

Curated by Jason Forrest

Total Runtime: 0:27:08

architecturedesignfrank lloyd wright

23 episode documentary, each focusing on one distinguished building and its architect, from the 19th and 20th centuries.
Directrd by Frédéric Compain
--
Johnson Wax Headquarters is the world headquarters and administration building of S. C. Johnson & Son in Racine, Wisconsin. Designed by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright for the company's president, Herbert F. "Hib" Johnson, the building was constructed from 1936 to 1939.^[3] Also known as the Johnson Wax Administration Building, it and the nearby 14-story Johnson Wax Research Tower (built 1944–1951) were designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1976 as Administration Building and Research Tower, S.C. Johnson and Son.

Design

An example of streamlined design, the building has over 200 types of curved red bricks making up the exterior and interior of the building and Pyrex glass tubing from the ceiling and clerestories to let in soft light. The colors that Frank Lloyd Wright chose for the Johnson Wax building are cream (for the columns and mortar) and "Cherokee red" for the floors, bricks, and furniture. The furniture, also designed by the architect, and manufactured by Steelcase, Inc., echoes the curving lines of the building.

One approaches the building by walking underneath the Johnson Wax Research Tower and through a low parking lot, which is supported by steel-reinforced "dendriform" (tree-shaped) concrete columns.^[3] The parking lot ceiling creates a compression of space, and the dendriform columns are echoed inside the building, where they rise over two stories tall, supporting the structure's roof. This rise in height when one enters the administration building creates a release of spatial compression. Compression and release of space were concepts that Wright used in many of his designs, including the playroom in his Oak Park Home and Studio, the Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, and many others. The largest expanse of space in the Johnson Wax building is the Great Workroom, as Wright called it. This open area has no internal walls and was intended for secretaries of the Johnson Wax company, while a mezzanine holds the administrators.

Construction

Interior, "Great Workroom", of the Johnson Wax Headquarters building

The construction of the Johnson Wax building created controversies for the architect. In the Great Workroom, the dendriform columns are 9 inches (23 cm) in diameter at the bottom and 18 feet (550 cm) in diameter at the top, on a wide, round platform that Wright termed, the "lily pad." This difference in diameter between the bottom and top of the column did not accord with building codes at the time. Building inspectors required that a test column be built and loaded with twelve tons of material. The test column, once it was built, was tough enough that it was able to be loaded fivefold with sixty tons of materials before the "calyx," the part of the column that meets the lily pad, cracked (crashing the 60 tons of materials to the ground, and bursting a water main 30 feet underground). After this demonstration, Wright was given his building permit.

Additionally, it was very difficult to properly seal the glass tubing of the clerestories and roof, thus causing leaks. This problem was not solved until rubber gaskets were placed between the tubes, and corrugated plastic was used in the roof to seal it, while mimicking the glass tubes. And finally, Wright's chair design for Johnson Wax originally had only three legs, supposedly to encourage better posture (because one would have to keep both feet on the ground at all times to sit in it). However, the chair design proved too unstable, tipping very easily. Herbert Johnson, needing a new chair design, purportedly asked Wright to sit in one of the three-legged chairs and, after Wright fell from the chair, the architect designed new chairs for Johnson Wax with four legs; these chairs, and the other office furniture designed by Wright, are still in use.

Despite these problems, Johnson was pleased with the building design, and later commissioned the Research Tower, and a house from Wright known as Wingspread. The Research Tower is no longer in use because of the change in fire safety codes, although the company is committed to preserving the tower as a symbol of its history.^[3]

Architectures: Frank Lloyd Wright, Johnson Wax Admin Building

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Jason Forrest

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Art - 10 Bullets (Tom Sachs)

Designed for members of the Tom Sachs studio team. Required viewing for all employees and studio visitors.

Life and early career

Career

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A film, made in 1972, that expresses Charles Eames' approach to the design process.

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