“The reward for good work is more work.” – Tom Sachs
Intermission Magazine recently posted an interesting interview with Tom Sachs, artist. (read the interview here). His thoughts are reflections on "object" making, both as consumers, viewers, and voyeurs. What do our objects mean?
"I’m trying to communicate transparency. I’m looking to show the scars of labor and the evidence of construction. I can’t afford to make things that are perfect – if you look at your phone, or your computer, everything that you buy looks as though it was miraculously hatched out of thin air. One way of making things special is to make them by hand. That’s what people look for in your jewelry as well; it’s hands-on, which is part of its charm. I would like to be an advocate for this particular politic of building. Being a builder, I think ideas translate beyond the realms of painting and sculpture. We’re seeing a global recession because we’ve been making terrible shit, terrible cars and so on, and as a result the chickens have come home to roost. But if we create things showing how they’re made, showing transparency, we’ll know how to fix them if they fail. And maybe they won’t fail because we’ll be able to see the cracks before it happens."
"TOM SACHS is a sculptor, probably best known for his elaborate recreations of various Modern icons, all of them masterpieces of engineering and design of one kind or another. In an early show he made Knoll office furniture out of phone books and duct tape; later, he recreated Le Corbusier's 1952 Unité d'Habitation using only foamcore and a glue gun.
Other projects have included his versions of various Cold War masterpieces, like the Apollo 11 Lunar Excursion Module, and the bridge of the battleship USS Enterprise. And because no engineering project is more complex and pervasive than the corporate ecosystem, he's done versions of those, too, including a McDonald's he built using plywood, glue, assorted kitchen appliances. "
Tom Sachs here..
Read the interview here.
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