Tom Sachs is an American contemporary DIY artist, a self-proclaimed “handyman” working in New York City. His art commingles with disposable consumer culture, objects, appropriation, identity and all of its complexity surrounding representation.
He is acclaimed for blurring the line between fashion and fine art, more specifically, high fashion and lowbrow.
Despite his critique of commercialism and luxury, as evident in several of his high-profile works, Sachs has worked with mega-brands like Nike since 2009.
Even teaming up with Virgil Abloh for a collaborative Off-White T-shirt, displayed at the MCA Chicago “Figures of Speech” exhibition just a few months ago.
Sachs’ studio, which has been occupied for 30 years, is named “Allied Cultural Prosthetics”. The name was taken from the previous tenant, “Allied Machine Exchange” — implying that contemporary culture has become nothing but a prosthetic for real culture.
Sachs’ major breakthrough came in the late 1990s, with his first major solo show entitled
Cultural Prosthetics (1995–1996)
Tiffany Glock and HG (Hermès Hand Grenade) are both non-functional sculptures, made out of Hermès and Tiffany packaging, cardboard, thermal adhesive, and ink.
Works from the show are a blend of fashion and violence. This theme would also bleed into
Prada Death Camp (1998)
Sachs writes,
“…[It’s] also an expression of loss of identity. The victims of the Holocaust had their identities stripped from them involuntarily by the Nazis. The coercive power of advertising steals our identities and replaces them with false promises…To suggest that the Holocaust and advertising are equal would unacceptably trivialize the horrors and destruction of the Third Reich.
The focus here is on the parallels in the subjugation of identity…My sculpture is an expression of the contradictions that make up who I am.”
— from “Thoughts about Prada Death Camp”
For someone that seems to fetishize over luxury and brand names, he argues that “money is an illusion” and “that’s why it’s important to make as little money as you possibly can”. This is the very contradiction he is directing our consumerist society’s attention to. Works like Prada Toilet are what he calls — a genuine fake.
In the clip, Sachs unpacks his use of Sympathetic Magic to find his own internal standards of excellence. Sympathetic Magic, an anthropological term, means that by physically copying things, you make them real or make them function in some way like the real thing, or possess the power of the thing, like a voodoo doll.
By creating a cardboard chain saw using Chanel packaging, and a space program using hot glue gun and plywood — Sachs is building the world not the way it is, but how he wants it to be.
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