I make stuff.
I don't care if it's a painting or a poem or a podcast or a book.
It's all sculpture to me.
Tom Sachs is an artist.
He's a sculptor.
He is a designer.
The prolific New York-based artist whose work defies categorization.
A very, very human artist.
Beneath that is this idea of the power of storytelling. despise the elitism of the art world.
There should be a sign on every work of art on the wall that says you don't need to read the sign to understand this art.
Authenticity is everything.
Artists do not have a corner on creativity.
What are the kind of things that I want to make?
What are the stories that I want to tell?
It's a real honor to have you here.
I've wanted to meet you for quite a long time.
I've been a fan at arm's length for many years.
One of your banger quotes is, if at first you don't succeed, give up immediately.
Yes.
So important.
So important.
And this is, if anything comes from a place of privilege, it's that.
Because we don't always have time.
Sometimes we have to get through the problem. and make a decision.
But if we have a little bit of extra time, giving up immediately is the equivalent of sleeping on it.
If you have a problem and you sleep on it, sometimes your subconscious mind can work on the problem.
So this is how, if at first you don't succeed, give up immediately works.
Work the problem until you get stuck.
Give up immediately and move on to another problem, another project.
Work that problem until you hit a wall.
Move on to the third project.
Work that project and problem until you hit that wall.
Then circle back to the first one.
Your subconscious mind, while it was working on the first two projects, may have worked on that first one and you may be able to readdress that problem or wall or crisis or situation through the information that you gleaned through the hard work and lifting of the second two.
And you loop around.
Of course, it all depends on you having enough time.
It might be an all-nighter, so you might not be able to sleep on it.
But what it does is?
It breaks the reptilian linear thinking and helps turn it into a circular thinking pattern.
And the tautology and looping around of solving, of not knowing the answer, and circling around something helps.
Literally circling around the problem helps you see it from different perspectives.
You have to indulge the unconscious mind to solve the problem that your direct approach is not able to.
And the only way to do that is to redirect your attention onto something else.
Yeah, and that's also the power of psychedelics.
I mean, drugs are an incredibly powerful dangerous tool, but they help us and are really just a window to what we can achieve through work.
And that's why output before input's so important, because it is a psychedelic state that's naturally made.
That's not harmful, that everyone does every day, but we have to make an effort to prioritize it because we're being blocked by our phone, which is irresistible because it's got everything that we think we want on it, or everything that we think we need everything that we want, but nothing that we need.
And that perspective shift and the efforts towards non-linear reptilian thinking is an incredible discipline.
And if we can take the time to do it, we can achieve so much more and cut out so much noise from our life and have a much more gratifying experience.
I think the most counterintuitive of your bold statements is creativity is the enemy, like that is not a sentence that you would expect to come out of the mouth of any artist.
Yeah, and there's nothing i'm.
I stand 100 behind that statement.
Creativity is absolutely the enemy.
But what I mean is eliminate caprice, indulgence.
Do the work and just do the work.
Find the value in the work.
Do not change the project midstream.
Do not change your intentions midstream.
Otherwise, you're bound to repeat past results.
You must be Totally persistent and consistent and keep going.
Creativity is inevitable.
It will come in.
But it's kind of like chili pepper.
If you put a little bit, it makes it spicy and delicious.
But if you put too much, it ruins it.
Yeah, I think the corollary that you've said on this topic is that creativity is not a leading strategy.
Use only when necessary.
Right.
So creativity is sort of a byproduct of being engaged in this process.
It will percolate up as a consequence of the doing, but the important piece is like the assembly aspect of it.
Yeah, I mean, just because you can doesn't mean you should.
Like, just a little bit.
A little bit.
It'll sneak in there.
It's irresistible.
But try and eliminate it, because that's why we have all these disgusting industrial design, unnecessary curves and things that are designed to sell things.
It takes great temerity and courage to have something that's less.
As an industrial designer, and industrial design is my hobby.
The only thing that I do that very few other people do is less.
That's my one thing.
I just try and do less.
How do you reconcile that obsessive aspect of your perspective on your work with having a different or an interesting relationship with perfectionism?
Because what you do and the way that you do it can never be perfect in the kind of conventional wisdom idea of what that means.
I think you just try your question right.
I think it's a little bit like sports, I mean you're still mostly failing.
You're just failing a little bit less than the other guy.
If you win, and in baseball, if you hit it one out of four times, you're in the major leagues.
If you hit it one out of five times, you're in the minor leagues.
If you hit it one out of three times, you're like the greatest of all time.
They're all still mostly losers.
You're still mostly missing it.
You're just missing it a little bit less.
But in that world, it's a very objective metric of success and failure.
And what you do is evaluated subjectively.
And you go into these projects, like the art you make is the most tactile form of art possible.
You approach it with this obsessive kind of perspective.
And yet, at the same time, What makes it uniquely you yours, and uniquely valuable, is the human fingerprints that are on it.
It's not about creating something with a shiny veneer, as much as it is an artifact that reveals the process of how it was made.
There's a transparency.
If you look at the minutiae of your work, you can see how it was assembled and perhaps the mistakes or redirects along the way in order to create it.
I'm not sure I'm going to answer it right, but I'll try.
All those failures, those failure points, they have evidence and artifacts.
So if I put a screw in the wrong place and back it out and there's a hole and I fill it with resin, that was kind of like a miss.
But I get a little bit of with the style in the way I make things, but I get a little bit of evidence for it.
So there's some credibility, authenticity artifact from my fuck-up.
And I think that's why I use the athletic analogy, because it's just about keeping showing up and just doing kind of the best you can.
And the kind of work that I love most is when it shows up, When those errors and marks show, because in a way, it's like an expression that I am somebody, that I was there, that it's got a fingerprint, that it is that I exist, versus something like an iPhone that has no evidence of a human being being there in any way, including the software.
That's its strength.
It's lack of humanity.
Yeah.
The way I reflect upon your work is that it is as much about what you're trying to express through your art as it is about the art of living.
Like, I see you as almost this Werner Herzog of the art world, who has a lot to say about the art of living.
And you have a very specific canon when it comes to how you live a principled life.
How do you articulate your overarching life philosophy?
Which is a big question, I get.
Well, everything that will follow is laced with paradox.
So on one side, I want the finished product to be the best thing it can be.
But it's also important that the experience of making it be rewarding.
I have a lot of friends like you who are professional athletes, and that's like an apex lifestyle.
And Engaging the flow state, the athletic flow state in my sculpture is something that I aspire to.
And I use all of my efforts to try and put myself into that position, a place where time stands still and I'm only with the materials.
And it takes a tremendous effort to get to that place.
And there's a lot of bureaucracy and mechanisms to do that, especially in sculpture, because A sculpture just takes but a moment to conceive and then many, many man hours to execute.
That's why I really believe that you don't need a huge studio with assistants.
All you need is a piece of paper and they're just the right pencil.
Pentel P209.
Because in drawing, the idea happens the fastest.
It's instant.
It's the fastest possible way, including Photoshop and Procreate and any digital medium, or maybe words, depending on what the idea is.
So my goal is just to get as much time and go as deep as I can into the raw sensuality of making stuff.
Also, it doesn't mean shit without a good idea.
Right.
So there is conceptualizing it and the discipline of the ideas behind it and making something that resonates first with me.
And then, if I'm lucky, it resonates with the people around me and in my studio my family and friends, and and then the people who are paying attention enough to this podcast that are listening and aren't clicking away.
And the sphere of influence expands farther and maybe perhaps, becomes less intense as it gets farther from the core.
But as long as the intent is authentic and direct, it's hard to bungle a good idea.
Yeah, among the paradoxes are, it's sort of a Zen koan.
Like.
On the one hand, you have to have this very blue collar workmanship attitude about the thing that you do.
You show up and you do it.
You show up on time.
You have an organized workspace.
You treat it as something that is almost sacred.
And yet, At the same time, in order to be able to kind of fulfill your potential and say the things that you want to say, you have to make room and space to engage with the unconscious, with the organic world and the messiness of the other aspects of life that ultimately are informing the expression, that is kind of downstream, of the workmanship aspect of what you do.
Yeah.
So if you ask any of the people close to me, they'll tell you that I'm really into the idea of being on time.
Yet I'm late all the time.
And that's an ongoing struggle because I think there's no excuse for being late.
It's completely rude and disrespectful.
The times that I'm late are because I have completely immersed myself in the process and have gone into a different dimension where time doesn't exist.
And I forget.
That's not an excuse or an explanation, but that is the paradox, right?
Between completely submitting to the subconscious mind and not worrying about time, which is important to do, and being on time to change diapers and do all the things we have to do in our lives.
It's a great paradox, but an artist's best work lies beyond their ability to understand it.
So we must constantly make huge efforts to engage our subconscious mind and put bills and bookkeeping and feeding your body and all the responsibilities out of your mind so that you can connect with your intuition.
Because only through connecting with our intuition, entrusting ourself, can we have the courage to make just the right wrong decisions.
Because that's where where the ideas in art really lie.
I mean, if it was just engineering, but even that, even in engineering there's incredible innovation and ideas that don't exist.
People come up with things all the time the right kind of crazy, just the right wrong thing.
But this is why I practice output before input every day.
So before looking at my phone every morning, like everyone else, because I'm completely addicted.
Where is it?
It's over there.
I'm nervous about it.
I know, right?
It'll be waiting for you.
Thank you.
Before looking at my phone.
Every day I do output which is touch clay, write in my journal, draw something where the thoughts come out of my mind through my hands onto paper or clay or something.
And the reason I do that is because every day we have a psychedelic experience that's deep and profound, followed by immediate amnesia, and that's called our dream state of sleep.
That's the place where our subconscious mind makes sense of the nonsense of our regular day.
There are even some cultures that believe that the dream is the real life and our waking time is the subordinated state.
The truths that come through our dreams help us make sense of the insanity of our everyday lives.
When we think about the wonderful and horrible things that happen to us every day.
There's no way to explain it.
Why does God let Bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people.
We live in a world of this.
So our dream state is how we make sense of it.
Or we have some problem about some interpersonal thing and our dreams tell us the truth.
Anyway, my strategy always is to immediately access my subconscious mind upon waking, even if I'm doing something as non-intellectual as touching clay, so that I have a connection with that.
Sure as shit, email, Instagram, even online shopping, whatever it all come into my day.
It's unavoidable.
But to take a moment to just even mark with your pencil an X on a piece of paper tells me that for even a moment I'm better than my device.
I can have the discipline that I exist without this thing, because it's Definitely the phone doesn't help my art in any way.
It's a tool like anything else, and it's the best tool ever.
I use mine for scraping paint.
I love that iPhone that had the edge on it.
The new ones, you can't scrape paint as well.
It's definitely a hammer.
Always looking for the utility, the hidden utility in an object.
Like Adam Savage says, within every tool, there's a hammer.
Yeah.
Given that your livelihood is contingent upon the health of your imagination and your relationship with your unconscious, how can you delineate the importance of that for the average person who isn't living the artist's life?
I think it's a good time in this conversation to debunk the myth that I'm different from everyone else.
These are the we all have these.
These are universal problems.
Artists do not have a corner on creativity.
My lawyer is more creative than most artists that i know.
I know plenty of artists that are not creative at all.
They're just really persistent, and that's a form of art too.
I think these strategies that we use in the studio are universal.
Output before input works on everyone, because we all have problems to solve.
We all have inspiration.
We all have dreams.
We all have nightmares.
We all have goals.
Some of them are met and some aren't.
And the strategies are universal.
I think the reason why people look to artists is because what they do is so crazy and doesn't fit.
It's so non-conforming.
So you look at a piece of art and you're like wow, this person, Hieronymus Bosch, did this insane painting of all these crazy things.
It's really inspirational.
But it's no different from anybody else.
We've all got problems to solve.
I 100% believe that We're all creative beings.
And, I think, in our human proclivity to categorize people and set ourselves apart from other people.
This is something that happens a lot with artists.
It's like, those are those people.
They were born special.
They have a different relationship to the world.
And we can admire their work and respect their work and go to museums and see it, but they're not like me.
And I think I've had many people on the show over the years who have, you know, done their best to disabuse, you know, us of that idea.
And yet it's a pretty intransigent kind of like notion that, like your life is so different from ours.
Like what can we glean from how you see the world that would be applicable to ours?
And what you're saying is essentially like, no, it's no different.
I've created a career out of it or a profession out of it, but we would all benefit from nourishing ourselves in this same way, irrespective of whether you work in a cubicle at an insurance company or you go to a studio, like you do every day, and screw things together and saw wood and assemble These pieces.
Isn't it a lot like regular people and professional athletes?
Like you're a professional athlete.
Not really, no.
Wait, how do you say that?
I don't even know.
No, I'm definitely not a professional athlete.
Ultramarathon?
I'm a professional podcaster at this point.
But you've achieved... elite status in your athletics and you pursue that and continue to pursue it.
Sure.
But if you read Finding Ultra, you know like I.
You know I'm constantly banging on about the fact that, like I, don't think that I'm particularly talented at all as an athlete.
If there is, you know, a kind of attribute that I've taken advantage of that allowed me to succeed in that realm.
It's a certain degree of obsessiveness.
But it's not talent.
But talent is totally overrated.
It's all about persistence.
You don't need to be talented to be a great artist or athlete.
You just have to show up.
I mean, talent is one of the attributes and one of the qualities.
But if you look at an artist like Richard Serra, it doesn't scream talent.
It screams tenacity and courage and domination and largesse.
But you don't, that's not the first word that comes.
I mean, he in fact was also talented, but it kind of doesn't matter.
What matters is persistence.
And when you do an ultra marathon which is the crazy?
You must hate yourself so much in order to do that.
That's, but that's not true either.
Like there's a joy to it, you know?
There's a joy of indulging your obsessive tendencies and seeing where they will take you.
It's not a sustainable strategy for life, but in temporary doses you can discover the outer edge of your potential and capabilities.
And that's a beautiful thing.
That's art.
To me, that's exactly what art is.
The outer edge of your capabilities.
That defines it better than anything I've ever heard.
Do you think that you uh have to be, on some level, an obsessive personality to achieve great things?
Because when i i think about you and your work, like there is an obsession aspect to uh your, your relationship with what you do.
Like there is an obsessiveness and within that there's also like an objective sense of like what is right.
Like you pulled out your pencil, like this is the pen like objectively, this is the best pencil and if you're going to do this, this is the way you do it.
There are rules right that are kind of like locked in and you have the ability to put these blinders on and apply these rules in a certain way that has allowed you to persevere over many years.
But is that a necessity?
Well, it's something that works for me.
I don't know if it's for everyone.
And I think the thing that's maybe most valuable to come away from this podcast or reading Finding Ultra or reading the Tom Sachs guide is, or any self-help book not that they're strictly self-help books is that you're seeing the author's perspective.
Um, I love self-help books, but they're all, whether it's Dale Carnegie or my favorite is Uncle Bumblefuck, which is AVE Analog Versus Arduino.
He's my favorite podcaster.
He does breakdowns of machines.
He's the smartest idiot on the internet who does.
Probably by trade.
He's a hydraulic engineer for construction equipment who flies around the world fixing big machines, but you'll never see his face.
You only see his hands and his voice.
He lives in Canada.
And there's one self-help episode, and he says really clearly, all self-help books are the same.
Pick one and stick with it or write your own.
It's all about finding your discipline.
I don't think that creativity or obsessiveness are the only ways.
For me, I don't know how to define obsessiveness, but I will say this.
One of the strategies, one of the 30 things that I do is, before going to sleep at night, I meditate, into my subconscious, into my sleep, about what I'm going to do tomorrow.
That lulls me to sleep really quickly and I get excited about the next moves I'm going to make in my sculpture.
The next day is something that I love to do and it feeds me emotionally and sets the goal for the next day.
And sometimes if I'm lucky and things go well, I wake up excited to do that thing.
And not always.
How do you make sure that your obsessiveness doesn't start to infect the other aspects of your life that are important in negative ways?
Well, I mean, I told you the story about being late, right?
So that is a way that it's negative.
I'm 59 and I've got two kids.
We're the same age.
I have forever a sense of inadequacy now with kids because I'm never enough time for my children, never enough time for my studio.
There's never enough time for the dentist and the haircut and getting the CAT scan of my lungs that I'm supposed to do at this age and the colonoscopy and going to the Mayo Clinic to make sure that everything's going to be as good as it can be for as long as it can be, and all the insane opportunities that we have in our lives.
I just think that there's no way to win that.
There's always something that gets left off the edge.
And I think this is maybe the part of the conversation where I don't really know the answer.
But I think it lies somewhere in picking your battles and finding a sense of balance of what's important.
And there's no nothing's perfect.
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I want to talk about how you got interested in consumerism and aspirational brand iconography as your kind of tableau.
Everything speaks to our cultural relationship with consumerism and these ubiquitous brands that we all know, and trying to say something very specific about what that relationship means.
But what's the origin story?
How did you get interested in this as your subject matter?
As a child, the religious experience of my family was consumerism.
I grew up in Westport, Connecticut, an affluent suburb of New York City.
And The dinnertime conversation was mom's new Laura Ashley dress, dad's new used BMW.
If I mowed the lawn enough, I could save up my allowance and buy a pair of Nike waffle trainers.
That movie American Gigolo had just come out, and there was this relatively unknown fashion designer named Giorgio Armani made these clothes that Richard Gere wore.
And there were these elaborate shots of his closet in Beverly Hills.
And people like my father, who aspired to be like Richard Gere in American Gigolo, took the train in from Manhattan to Barney's, New York and bought Giorgio Armani clothes.
And Giorgio Armani became a gigantic international brand.
And the aspiration of the Mercedes SL convertible that he drove and the whole style was for that generation, a real icon of what became yuppie culture, like the ultimate yuppie uniform in the whole style.
And who's sexier than Richard Gere to represent those values of decadence and glamour and murder and intrigue and all of that stuff?
So that was kind of where I came from.
And then shortly after, in 1984, I was exposed to.
Really the only grassroots art movement that I've been really connected with well at the time was the American hardcore punk scene, which was very anti-consumerist in the values of the dead Kennedys, perhaps the most impactful about eschewing consumerism and eschewing the idea of finding our identity through our consumer products, followed by liberal arts, education and Marxism.
And so it kind of wove broke both back and forth, where I would find my identity with the kind of labels on my skis and skateboards and stuff, because it was aspirational.
You wanted a pair of sneakers so you could play basketball like Michael Jordan or whatever, so you could skate like Mark Gonzalez, and you'd want to get the associated value the clothes of Richard Gere, the wristwatch of James Bond and then rejecting all of that and then sort of finding my way back in New York City around the time that you moved there like 89 91, working at Barney's New York as a window display artist wearing punk clothing, being exposed to seeing the beauty of Hermes and Chanel and Margiela and seeing Virtue and those things.
I remember being really confused going to the Steven Sprouse boutique in Soho on Green Street and watching a video of the Minutemen who were wearing flannel shirts that they'd bought in the thrift shop just like I was wearing in that moment but then seeing a 600 flannel shirt.
And I was really confused, and it took me years to kind of unpack that.
But I didn't understand that that was cultural appropriation that Stephen Sprouse was stealing the cool from— the punk kids who are doing this to be free of that.
Or if you go back to their origins, they didn't, they didn't have any money.
So they were using safety pins to pin up their clothes and made that a virtue.
Instead of every one, safety pin of a hundred.
And it became a fashion, a gesture authentically.
So these are kind of some of the things that I was exposed to.
And they're very, very different.
And I think the kind of big breakthrough for me was when I was able to synthesize both perspectives.
Like.
I love the way Chanel makes my wife look really elegant, but I it's disgusting how it's advertising contributes to her body dysmorphia.
And, you know, by this dress, You'll get the man, look like this model, and you'll be happy.
All the lies of advertising is really disgusting and negative.
But at the same time, things look beautiful.
And I love high-quality things because they represent no limits to materials and construction.
That's the promise of couture, is that the really great things are made like art objects.
And if you see a couture...
And the options and the possibilities are no different from what I do.
And even a ready-to-wear, beautifully made piece of Alaya is, in my view, the same level as one of my sculptures.
It's just a different utility.
And when I work in industrial design capacity, I'm always trying to deliver best practices so that the 100 sneaker really uh can deliver like a you know uh, something of of much more cost, and so you can feel a greater connection with your stuff, so that maybe you're less likely to immediately throw in the landfill, maybe you're more likely to throw in the washing machine or get a new pair of shoelaces and Or you love it because it's been on a journey with you, so you rock the stain or you repair it.
How do you live with those conflicting emotions of allowing yourself to be uplifted and inspired by something well-made that is beautiful, while also being repelled or repulsed by the means of production and what that represents and the predatory aspects of that?
How can those two things... coexist and marinate together.
And your work is like an expression of that internal conflict.
Yeah.
I mean I give full credit to France and the great people, the great French thinkers, because they really helped me come to terms with the contradictions.
And I don't just mean like the structuralist writers of the 70s, like Roland Barthes and Foucault.
But I mean going back to Baudelaire and the beginning of surrealism, where paradox and contradiction are are paramount.
You know, walking a lobster on a leash in the tuileries to offend the petite bourgeoisie is hilarious and what a pain in the ass and difficult thing.
Or making a cup out of fur and imagine drinking out of fur and the disgusting nature of that.
But then seeing a beautiful cup.
Or displaying a urinal as as a fountain, calling it fountain.
These, all of these works of art have this um, this paradox to them.
Imagine in 1918, going to a fancy art exhibition at the Armory in New York City and seeing a urinal on a table and someone calling it Fountain.
It was on the front page of the New York Post, the shock and horror that this was accepted.
And I think that's true today.
I think that both can be true and it's important, speaking of uh, shock and horror.
So in your, in your, in this early phase of your career, i mean, like not for nothing also, like you're also speaking to like the, the cheekiness, and there's a comedic levity also to some of these pieces that uh infuses your work, like it's funny too at the same time.
But like, take care of the luxuries, the necessities will take care of themselves, just go for it.
That idea of going for it um, correct me if I'm wrong, but that was sort of you were struggling with that idea.
You went to London I think you were still in Bennington and you went to London to study architecture and thought, maybe I'll be an architect.
And there was some point at which your teacher or mentor was like let go of this bourgeois idea of like being somebody who's going to provide for your middle class family and like start being an artist and live your life.
And it seems like he not only encouraged you, but that he kind of opened up your eyes that there was another way of living that perhaps was more consistent with the bands that you were seeing at anthrax you know when you were in high school that spoke to you and and changed your lens on like how you wanted to pursue your artistic sensibilities well i that's pretty close to the way it happened the the only and this might sound like a little bit of a cynical like adjustment to the mythology and that's that I really wanted to provide, not just for my family that I didn't have and be a bourgeois contributing member of society, but I also felt like it was my duty to make the world a better place.
And when I was living in Thatcher's England, which was really broken, it was hard to eat and get through the day and stuff.
It was so bleak that at one point it wasn't a professor.
It was my own frustration with my existence.
Then I kind of said this world is fucked.
We're going to hell in a handbasket.
I'm just going to have the best time I can.
And that's when I really took my art seriously.
But like sympathetic magic happens, I wound up finding ways of making the world a better place through industrial design and sharing the real values of sustainability through my art and helping myself first and then hopefully others see how we can embrace paradox and find value and virtue and inspiration behind hard work.
So through the back door, I kind of got to my original ideas and also became really bourgeois.
So it worked that way.
You took that around the outside to get there.
I mean, that's the thing.
You never really know how it's going to turn out.
But you move back to New York and in the early phase of your career, when you're trying to figure it out, like you had all these odd jobs.
You were a janitor at Barney's.
But you have this opportunity to step in to designing one of their windows.
And this becomes like an inflection point.
And just for people that don't know, like during this period of time in the in the like late 80s, early 90s, like the Barney's, like window displays were like a big fucking deal.
They were the best window displays in the world at that time.
And also, it was a different time.
I'm sure there were great window displays, but we didn't have the internet.
So things like a Christmas window display.
It might sound really provincial now, but I remember one year because I worked there for many years.
One year we did a window display about Prince, the artist Prince.
And it was a fantastic Prince tribute.
I did another one about Madonna.
These were giant dioramas that we spent months working on.
So there were works of commercial art that people would really queue up and look at.
People took it really seriously.
It was a valid art.
And Andy Warhol did them and Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.
They all had careers doing that.
So walk us through this experience of creating this very transgressive window display.
So I think it was 1995.
And also, you have to remember that we are in the height of the AIDS pandemic.
It was a very scary time.
And people in my community, especially at Barney's, were dying of AIDS and Paris' burning had just come out.
It was a very heartbreaking and difficult time.
So there was a holiday window called Red Windows, which was they asked all these world-famous artists to make something to go on the holiday windows and it was going to be auctioned off and the money would go to Little Red Schoolhouse, which is a uh elementary school on sixth Avenue.
And because I'd worked so hard as a window display artist underneath Simon Doonan and Adamo de Gregorio.
Uh, they invited me to participate in this art show, even though I was totally unknown.
And I decided to make, because it was a Christmas windows, a crash.
And then the crash was, uh, Hello Kitty as baby Jesus.
Mother Mary was Madonna – was Hello Kitty, but as Madonna with the sex bustier with six breasts.
The Three Kings were Bart Simpsons.
And The Crash was inside of a McDonald's, and it was all made out of duct tape.
And I really tried my hardest to make an earnest – christmas nativity scene and it was called hello kitty nativity scene.
So opening night happened and there were two parties one for all, the elite artists like bryce martin, who and that was at someone's house and i was invited to that, and there was this other one for all, like the window display artists that was on the street.
We had hot chocolate and then the next day the letters started coming in, the death threats, the protests.
The Catholic League, which was an organization that was anti-gay, that was trying to ban condoms, that was insensitive to the AIDS pandemic, went after us and said that we were desecrating Christmas.
From my perspective.
I was just commenting on the consumerism of this holy day and there were 300 death threat letters, people i got phone calls.
It was very scary and on the front page of the new york post was away with a manger.
There's a picture of the nativity and and barney's capitulated and removed it from the show and offered a full page apology to all the people that were offended and that was kind of the first time that anyone saw stink.
And then for, you know, the Catholic Church to insert itself into this in the midst of what was going on culturally in New York City at the time.
It just it's it's.
It's hard in retrospect looking back to you know, understand Barney's capitulation to that and the apology that followed, and But I think in the context of the time I mean I don't know.
What is your perspective on that now?
Like it seems like they wanted to take advantage of, you know kind of the the, the happening artists of the time, without having to take responsibility for the message that makes that artist so palpable and relevant.
I mean, at the time, that's how I felt.
And I.
I still feel that.
I still don't think they took responsibility for it.
I mean, art is a hard job.
And I wasn't going out to offend a bunch of people.
I wasn't even thinking about the possibility of offending anybody.
I was just making a pure and true expression of my experience.
And I'd been watching The Simpsons a lot, so I was informed by this kind of cultural critique in seasons one through ten.
And I don't remember what year that was.
It was probably like season six or something or five.
If anything, I could be accused of being a derivative in my political outlook of Matt Groening and the brain trust that created those years of The Simpsons when they were so good.
And I remember feeling really betrayed because I really put my heart into this thing.
And I believed in my community at Barney's and the people that I worked with.
And I worked with them before and after for years.
It was part of those years in New York City.
And it was heartbreaking and also kind of scary.
But people even in my family were mad.
They said that I wasn't respectful to them.
Which I wasn't.
That wasn't a priority, to be respectful to the degradation of the highest.
I guess Easter is a bigger deal, right, because it's the resurrection.
But the birth of Jesus is a pretty big deal in Christianity and that's why we get Kelly bags and 9-11s and sneakers on Christmas.
Yeah.
But this puts you on the map as New York's new bad boy artist at the time.
Does it not?
I don't know.
It wasn't that overnight, but I did my first exhibition about a year later at a gallery called Morris Healy Gallery, which was one of the first galleries in Chelsea.
And I did my next exhibition there.
But it's gradual.
But yeah, I mean, I think people paid attention and i guess i'm kind of lucky that my first piece of art that people saw was something that i put a lot of time into.
Yeah, it's essentially just a, a critique, like you're just calling out, like what it is.
It's like okay, christmas is this just, you know capitalistic, you know kind of like mad rush, and this ritual that we all kind of like follow every single year is being driven by our consumer impulses at the cost of, you know the the, the sort of real origin story behind it, which isn't exactly, like you know, like a revolutionary idea.
No, but it's, if you think back about, if you care about christianity, like the god's son being born, that's a and that's like your main, like faith myth, that's a big deal.
But I don't think that anyone ever seems to talk about that part.
And they're just into the stuff.
Which is the way that you were raised.
I mean, didn't David Foster Wallace, he said something like, you know, we all worship something.
And essentially, like, consumerism has become ourselves.
Which is a core – that's like the theme of that piece and essentially so much of your work.
But it speaks to – And it still is.
Yeah, it still is.
And so beneath that is this idea of the power of storytelling.
Because when you – there is nothing like when you see whether it's that specific color of blue on a Tiffany box or a Nike swoosh or pick whatever lights you up.
It's amazing how that iconography can communicate such an exponential emotional response.
We associate it in our human brains as something aspirational that we want to embody.
And it causes us to spend money in order to get it, deluding ourselves that, if we have it, that we will then, you know, be able to kind of embody the ideal of what that iconography is trying to communicate to us.
And there's nothing else like it.
Like, it is so powerful in its ability to do that.
Just a color or a simple tiny symbol can have that impact on a single human being and on culture writ large.
It's a form of magic.
That form of magic is a cousin of sympathetic magic.
You haven't defined sympathetic magic, though, because this is like a key piece.
I will, but first I just want to define another term that's a little complicated, called associated value, which we talked about a minute ago, which is
James Bond's wristwatch, right?
Or a pair of... I always think the ultimate is a pair of Air Jordans, right?
Because they're basketball sneakers and they're the same ones that Michael Jordan wears.
And if you wear them, you can play.
The promise of advertising is that you get to play as well as the best player of his time.
And that's a form of magic because you're buying the association.
And even...
MJ had things like that that he would do like he would wear his special colored socks, or two pair of socks because he was insecure about his calves being skinny or whatever little.
Or the red and the black gave him color, helped him feel more powerful and confident.
And being a pro artist or athlete or whatever.
You have your little rituals that mean something to you and and if they work a little, that's a lot, because the advantage is you just need to have every little advantage you can because you've done everything possible.
So why not care about your sock color choice?
If it if, if you, if it matters, that's associated value.
And should i try and talk about sympathetic magic?
So, sympathetic magic?
Um has two definitions um.
The first one i'm not sure if it's the first or the second is um, is um proximity.
So uh uh, steal lock of your betrothed hair, pray to it so they fall in love with you, eat the heart of your adversary to assume their power.
Um, That's proximity, it's closeness.
The other one, the sympathetic magic, that is a little more complicated and that's more like build it and they will come, or a voodoo doll or an ex-voto.
Build a model of your ailing arm, bring it to your religious practitioner, who helps you find ways of praying to that arm, believing that you will heal.
If you believe you will not heal... you will not heal.
You will get sick and die.
If you believe that you will heal, you might heal.
And the idea of possibly achieving something, possibly healing, is infinitely better than not healing.
So the origin of sympathetic magic?
As I know it, it was after World War II in Papua New Guinea, when some evangelists anthropologists, came to study some aboriginal folks who were using stone axes and they came with and the, and the anthropologists and the missionaries came with iron axes and they traded and the.
The aboriginal people said well, what about those metal boxes that you have that are powered by propane, and you open it and food come out of them?
And they said well they, those come from the sky, from cargo parachutes, and it's called cargo cult is what this is called.
But and they said well, what?
Why can't those planes land here, or those ships that you get stuff from?
Why can't they land here?
And they said well, because you don't have runways and you need big docks for big ships.
And they said well, we'll just build them.
And the anthropologists laughed and said you're not going to build runways and they're not going to land on them.
But the local guys built runways and they built control towers and And anthropologists came not to land on them but to check out these control towers and runways and say wow, they are copying our methods as a religious form of magic.
And sure enough, what did the cargo planes bring?
They brought iron axes.
They brought propane-powered refrigerators and clothes and all this Western goods.
So not...
The thing about magic and any kind of magic, it doesn't always come out the way you intend.
But sympathetic magic is a way of building something out of faith because you believe in something.
And that's what everything in this book, it's all out of faith.
But it doesn't always come the way you intended.
Like I didn't expect my art career to take off by building that.
I just wanted to make the.
I had an opportunity to participate in this thing in my culture and do it with love.
And I gave 100% to this art piece.
And then did I want to have a career showing in galleries and museums?
Of course I did.
I didn't understand for a second that that would be the path.
That wasn't my intention.
It was just always do the work and make the world the way you want to be, make your life the way you want to be.
And you may succeed or you may die trying.
But the operative thing is the work that you do and you can't take that away from me or you or anyone.
It's the work.
Translation, if you say you're an astronaut, you are an astronaut.
And when Tom Sachs says I'm going to build my own space program and we're going to go to Mars, this is you practicing sympathetic magic on some level.
And I do that.
So explain that.
It's exactly the same.
That's a great connection because 20 years later, I'm asked to go to space with SpaceX.
I'm asked to go on a lunar mission.
Oh, is that right?
Yeah.
I'm asked to be the unofficial artist in residence at... So this may actually pan out at some point.
I don't even know if it's a priority for me, because it's like I don't think I really, But it speaks to the power of what you're trying to communicate.
Yeah.
And through my space program, I became the unofficial artist in residence of the entry descent landing team of Mars 2020 at JPL, which is the most pinnacle elite part of a gigantic scientific entity known as NASA.
I got to work with some great folks there.
I have a JPL pad here.
What I love about your art is that you have these incredible pieces that we can only see in installations or in museums, but you also can buy your own JPL notepad.
So why do you make this available for us to buy, Tom?
So I stole that from Tommaso Rivellini's desk at JPL.
Tommaso Rivellini is a very close friend who – invented the airbags that bounce Pathfinder down to Mars and the Skycrane that lowers the.
If you look Tommaso Rivellini up, you'll see the patent for a Mars landing device.
Entry-descent landing device.
And he and Kevin Hann and Adam Stelzner and Greg Vane all became friends.
But I stole that from Tommaso's desk because Tommaso is kind of like my Michael Jordan.
So Tinker Hatfield, the designer of the Air Jordan, sort of Michael was Tinker's muse.
And Tommaso is my muse.
So the shoe, the Mars Yard shoe, is for Tommaso to work in the Mars Yard in Pasadena at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
And also for him to go to headquarters in Washington DC to sneak around the hallways to try and get funding for the next mission.
It's a shoe for both of those realities.
So that JPL notepad is the paper that the smartest minds on planet earth, right?
Like the people from Caltech and JPL, the guys who land us in other worlds.
And they're the only people at JPL.
Are the really the only people that know how to navigate without satellites onto other worlds?
Like, landing on the moon is pretty easy because we've got tools to do that, but you had to be totally self-sufficient and autonomous to land on Mars.
So it's like pretty high-end stuff, and so that's the paper that you use to think it all up.
So if you want your own space program, you better have the right tools right, the right pencil and the right pad.
So this is this pad is, then?
This is a sacred object yes, in your mind, and it represents something you know very meaningful about uh, the human spirit and the, you know the striving to do something never before done.
Yeah.
And it's, it's, I mean, on the back of each of those pages is blank.
You can turn it upside down on its regular paper, but the front of that and it is it's an exact reproduction of the paper that they have at JPL.
I added some little information at the bottom about my studio, but it's available on my web store.
I think it's like 10 bucks or something.
But my point is you have the power through that paper to fulfill your dreams.
I do.
And I use that every day for my to-do list.
So every day before I look at my phone I do drawings and lists and my meditations and my dream interpretations or whatever I want to write down on that paper.
And I have three meters of binders of just that paper.
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We should clarify for the audience who doesn't know what we're talking about that Tom has created his own space program and done many installations with his creations and his collaborations with his studio team.
You've created your own lunar lander, your rover vehicle.
You've got all sorts of elaborate fabrications here to recreate your version of what a space program would look like in the Tom Sachs aesthetic.
Last night I had the opportunity to go to a screening of a film version that chronicles the Mars space program project that you did, where You took over the New York Armory, and it was an entire operation where you launched these women into space, land them on Mars to be the first women ever to land on Mars.
And they go out and they take samples and they return.
It's like it's an unbelievable thing.
That was directed by Van Nystad, who's here, friend of the podcast.
It's quite a remarkable film, but also just a remarkable piece of performance art.
There's a performance aspect to this aspect of your art that is so incredibly elaborate.
It must have taken years and years, and years to get that to where it was, for that to be filmed in that way.
Yeah, I mean, that was 2012.
And we had started working on it in 2005.
But also drawings of it exist in 99.
And we're still working on it.
We've done five missions, five major missions to the moon, Mars, Europa, Vesta.
And we even went to an alien spaceship called Infinity.
And this is where the cheekiness comes in.
Why is it cheeky?
It's real.
I mean, we...
We don't use the word performance.
We say live demonstration of our systems.
It might seem cheeky because we use cardboard and duct tape instead of kerosene and titanium or whatever.
But we have all the same problems and we have all the same stakes.
There's even a moment in the other NASA where the astronauts landed on the moon and there was a contingency if the Ascent engine did not ignite because there was some question about that that the astronauts would be marooned on the moon.
So Nixon hired William Sapphire to write a speech in the event that they were stuck on the moon.
And you can Google it.
It's out there.
And so I hired a Nixon impersonator to read that speech on video.
And in the desk at Mission Control, we have a DVD of that video.
That was kind of the threat to my landing crew, to my astronauts, saying if you screw up the landing with the Atari emulator, we're going to play this video.
And the Nixon impersonator that I hired did such a terrible job of impersonating Nixon, and it's so awful and awkward, but it is the correct words that I didn't want anyone to see the video.
I didn't want to show a Nixon impersonator. william sapphire arch right um video in my art piece so that was always kind of the threat and in doing this um for 20 years now no one has crashed in a live demo tons in practice but no one's crashed yet so the landing for people that don't i mean you literally have that that atari joystick That we had when we were kids.
And yeah, like you see the screen and it's the video game of the landing coming down and you have to do it just right or it'll crash.
And it's hard.
It's not that easy.
And it's one of the things that the astronauts practice.
But the value of this is that we work really hard to realize these details to such an extreme degree that the experience for us becomes real.
And when you're in the live demonstration, by the way, sometimes they're like eight hours long.
They're exhausting, but you suspend your disbelief and there are stakes.
And we've had some Apollo 13 moments where we're drilling into an ice pond and the drill got stuck and we had
Tommaso Rivallini and Adam Stelzner on stage screaming like Apollo 13 style.
Like use WD-40 on the ice.
Well, you actually had the real JPL people.
Because they're friends.
They happen to be in the front row.
And Guy Vertoli from Brightworks in San Francisco.
They were all like screaming and we were arguing about how to do this.
And the drill was stuck in the ice for like two hours and we –
The live demonstration was two hours extra long because we were trying to get it stuck out of the ice.
And it's no different than guys trying to change a carburetor underneath a shade tree, not knowing what they're doing, arguing about how to get the car started.
It was just a bunch of friends arguing about how to solve this problem.
The authenticity of that and the boringness of it, because if it was theater, we'd find a way to make it entertaining, made it real for us.
And the astronauts had cooling suits and they were getting hot and they had to have ice changed in their cooling suits and batteries so that they wouldn't suffocate in these airtight suits.
All create opportunities for us to make the stuff real real.
I think we all grew up watching mythbusters a lot and adam savage is a really good friend and the the not.
The idea that it is possible, that it's plausible, is enough in art to get the idea across.
I mean the.
I think of the martial artist who spent his whole life training and never got into a fight and then one day was a surrounded by assailants in a dark alley And instead of using his martial arts, he just fake, dodged and ran away.
And then, years later, he was on his deathbed contemplating the moment like, oh man, I could have used my martial arts and kicked those five guys ass or whatever.
But really what he was his whole life was a student or teacher of this discipline.
So it doesn't really matter, if you think about it, if you fly To Mars on a SpaceX mission or whatever, or you do all the training.
That's just a few moments in the journey.
The journey is all the research, the physical fitness, the science, the sacrifices that you make to your family for not being there, and all that training.
That's the reward.
Yeah, and the collaborative aspect of it.
I mean, as an artist in this studio, like you are creating art, but you're also you also serve as this teacher and this mentor for young people and and you're in this collaborative relationship with a lot of people, so it's it's kind of multi-dimensional in that regard.
It isn't just like everybody's showing up and does what tom wants, like there's almost this community aspect to that ecosystem.
Well, when the studio's great, it's better than what I could do by myself.
I mean Van, and I argue endlessly about details and we have these wonderful arguments and I'm not always right.
I want to win the argument like everyone does, but I only care about the best solution.
The greatest privilege of the studio is working with people who are smarter than I am and where we can use our combined intelligence to find something that's maybe even more authentic than just doing it myself, which sounds crazy, right.
But, um, we are a community.
So if it's an expression of the community, that is more authentic than me just working alone like Vincent Van Gogh.
You've said that the studio is your greatest, greatest work of art.
I think in many ways that's true.
I mean uh, The relationships, the people, these shelving systems, the libraries of books and tape and other materials.
It's an ongoing struggle to keep it all organized, keeping the flow and eliminating.
There's some materials I really don't like sheetrock.
So if you don't have sheetrock in your life, you have to, it's really, it's tough.
Things get expensive and weird.
I also don't like molding.
I also don't like the color purple.
So if you eliminate these kind of basic things that everyone has in their life, your life gets much more interesting and complicated.
Yeah, I mean part of the book which you know we haven't even really gotten into the book specifically, but like Tom Sack's Guide, like it is part, like what you would expect in an art book with beautiful photographs of your work.
But it's really very practical in the sense that you are sharing your wisdom and the principles that gird your perspective on life and your work.
There is a functionality and a utility to this book that you don't normally – you wouldn't find in a typical art book.
But that speaks to your art, because your art is about utility and function as much as it is about anything else.
And in the back you have kind of this glossary of – you know resources, but you you even have like your, your color palette and like these are the colors I like and these are the colors that are off limit.
And like, you know, that gets to that kind of obsessive objective.
Like there is a right way to do things in a wrong way to do things.
And there's my way of doing things.
This book is a lot of things.
And one of the things that I intended to be is a guide to, a guide to the work, not just to me personally, but the work that me and the studio have been able to achieve collectively.
To answer the question of what is this?
What do we do?
A lot of this work came out of a book that van nystad and i started called the tom sock studio manual, which is kind of like a part emily post, part dictionary um, But I think that got really too complicated.
I think a lot of those ideas that we worked on got into Spirited Man and Van's movie series.
But this is really a guide to all the work.
And there are 25 essays in here that I worked on with Howie Kahn.
And the design was by Yeju Choi.
There are stories of my process.
So in a way, some of the ideas behind the Tom Sack Studio Manual are in here, but it's really more about my motivations and methods to achieve and some of the tricks that I've used to get through the day.
Like when I'm really stuck, I sometimes just take a break and make a lamp.
Because a lamp is like a lower order of thing as opposed to a sculpture.
A sculpture or painting is really high.
Like a lamp, what is it you do?
You pull a string and light comes out.
Chair, you put your ass on it.
A painting or sculpture.
What do you do?
You contemplate it.
That's like a pretty hard thing, like what does contemplate mean?
But a lamp creates illumination for eating or working or making other art objects, and its utility makes it easier to comprehend.
But there are still sculptural aspects and um uh, sculptural problems to solve.
So it's just a way of like uh, It's like doing free throws or warming up.
Yeah, if you're stuck on a problem, build a lamp.
That's one of your rules.
And there's a whole chapter on how that works in here.
And it's akin to, if at first you don't succeed, give up immediately, build a lamp.
And there's a chapter on how I do that.
And if part of this is a self-help book, I would say a couple of things might be useful to you finding something in your life.
I highly recommend against doing it my way, but if you want to, here's how.
You're one of those people for whom it almost doesn't matter what the piece is.
It's so immediately identifiable as yours.
There's just something indelible about your fingerprint on your work where you can see it immediately and identify it, which gets into this idea of authenticity.
The word has kind of come up a couple of times.
It's one of your three rules for life.
So I wanted to spend a few minutes talking a little bit more in depth about that, particularly as we're kind of careening off the cliff of artificial intelligence and what that means, not just for artists or creative people but for all of us.
How do you think about authenticity and the importance of authenticity, particularly in our digital age, and kind of what artificial intelligence is auguring?
Authenticity is everything.
I remember when Mickey Drexler and I first became friends, it was because of a letter that I wrote to him about authenticity in making military clothes fashionable and the problem with that, whether it's khakis or cargo pants.
And it started a dialogue that continues to this day about finding your identity through the stuff around you, right?
And I make stuff.
There are three reasons people make things for spirituality, sensuality, and stuff.
So spirituality is The big questions, are we alone?
Where do we come from?
What happens when we die?
That's what religion and science do.
Sensuality is climbing the highest mountain, flying to another world.
The smell of the incense, the awe that you feel in a cathedral and the sound of the reverb that makes you feel small.
The touch and the smell of tatami or of matcha.
And stuff is all the stuff.
The cathedral itself, the rocket ship, the Chawan tea bowl that you drink, the matcha from, the crucifix, all those things.
And as a maker, I make stuff, right?
I'm not James Bond, I'm Q, the guy that makes all the cool gadgets and stuff.
But it doesn't mean shit without the... philosophical underpinnings, without the spirituality.
You don't make a cathedral without believing in God.
You don't build a spaceship to go to other worlds without trying to understand the importance of reflecting on what we're doing here on Earth.
These are big questions.
But nevertheless, as individuals, we specialize in one of these three categories.
And for me, it's stuff making.
And By coming to terms and accepting that I am not an astronaut, I am more the guy that figures out the logistics of all that then I can let go of the ego trip of flying to space and concentrate on supporting those who do and building good storytelling for them and telling a story and help people to see the importance of it.
We don't go to Mars because we've fucked up planet Earth and are looking for a new home by colonizing Mars.
We go to better understand our resources here on Earth.
And Mars is our sister planet.
And we can see in Mars a distant future of what could be on Earth.
And that's what science does.
It's comparative.
All that to say is I find my authenticity by really studying and understanding who I am.
And then the objects that come are an expression of who I am.
And I think this goes back to early childhood stuff where I was always trying to fit in and in high school wearing those stupid three-quarter length baseball t-shirts with a ringer neck and a different color on the sleeve because all the kids wore those in painter's pants and always feeling like such a douche.
But I wanted to fit in because I didn't want to be alienated.
I wanted to be part of the community.
And it took years to find my own sense of identity through study, to find ways of both dressing myself with clothes that I wear, but also finding an expression through my art of what are the kind of things that I want to make.
What are the stories that I want to tell?
What's authentic?
And, along the way, finding all kinds of failure rejection, but learning to tolerate those bad feelings, to support what i know is true to me.
There's the maker, who is the you know kind of primary leading.
Uh, you know character in the, in the multiplicity of tom sack's, you know personalities.
But there's also, I think what I see in your work is a deep reverence and spirituality, because the things that you make are almost invariably like some form of altar.
There is a sacred quality to these objects that speaks to the ritual, like these workstations or the idea of organizing your space.
This is all about creating an environment for a transcendent experience.
And whether that's like the discipline of your work or the higher ambition of we're going to Mars, it's all of a piece with this idea that we should have a more reverent relationship with the extensions.
You know that we use every single day as an expression of our imagination and our discipline and our daily work.
You have these boom boxes and you have these you know kind of cabinets and the display of televisions for the Mars program.
Like all of these things are, they're sort of cathedrals in their own right.
I think it's taken a while to find something that's totally unpretentious, like all the things that i make.
You can go buy or visit in a museum or see in a book, but finding a way to make my own authentic one is like kind of preposterous.
Like everything in this book, if you're to describe it in words, sounds kind of dumb or remedial, but through the execution, the work, it resonates from me and maybe others with the sublime.
That might sound like a brag or a flex, but when it's successful, it works.
But it only comes through being really honest with what your motivations are.
For me.
When you ask that my studio is the best artwork, it's because I spend so much time organizing my tools so that when inspiration strikes.
I can just go for it and catching the big fish.
David Lynch talks about when you don't know what to do.
Organize your paint so that when inspiration strikes, you don't have to take time, go to the store and buy red paint.
It's just there with your left hand.
You put it in your right hand, you apply it in the canvas because the muse, the inspiration is so fleeting.
So when you don't know what to do, when you've got a writer's block, spend time organizing your stuff.
It's kind of like always be knowling. is your version of that.
Explain what that means.
So, knolling is just organizing your tools.
So lining everything up in 90 degrees or parallel lines, so that it looks clean and organized, so that your mind isn't caught up with the mess in front of you.
Sometimes knolling isn't really cleaning up at all, but it is a form of meditation and becoming at one with your environment.
And I think it's always worth doing.
So, I mean, you could call it OCD or you can call it procrastination or you can call it warming up.
Like I do this, like I am meticulous about this and there's a reason for it.
So I made a bet with my son because we're building a Lego set.
And I don't know if you've built a Lego set recently.
Not enough.
My kids are older.
There's always this moment where you're like fuck, those motherfuckers didn't include a black one-by-one tile and I need it for this move.
I know they didn't include it, and I can't find it anywhere.
And they never miss it.
You just misplaced it.
So I made a deal with him.
I said, he's like, dad, I can't, dada, dada, I can't find this one-by-one tile.
And I said, have you looked everywhere?
And he said, yeah.
And I looked at the tables, just a big mess.
And I said, it's there on the table, null everything.
And you'll find it.
And he's like, no.
And I said, okay, if you know everything and it's not there, I'll give you $1,000.
And I was kind of like shitting myself a little bit because I didn't see it either.
That's a pretty big incentive for a young person.
And he knolled the entire table and he found it.
And it was there.
And the message is?
Always be knolling.
Always get your environment perfectly organized and then things will appear.
And if you ever do a Lego set, it's worth it to null the entire kit and it goes together faster.
Set the environment up that's conducive for the inspiration and the workmanship in advance.
Perfectly said.
Because it's hard making art.
There are problems along the way.
There are tons of pitfalls.
And you will get stuck.
The wall will be there.
Because it's fleeting.
You get tired.
You get hungry, thirsty.
And the wall is inevitable because you're doing something new.
If you had already done it before... it would be easy.
Or if someone had already done it before, it would be easy.
You'd just be copying it.
But because it's something new, there are inevitable problems and pitfalls that you have to work through.
And it's very, very, very difficult.
And we don't give ourselves enough credit for how difficult it is.
And so things like nulling your tools is a way of making it easier for you to get through something, or for when you have just a glimmer of an idea to expand on it.
I remember once I was breaking a hole in concrete Um, and I was hammering and chiseling and I and I was like shit, I got to go to home Depot and rent one of those giant hammers that are really expensive.
And it was like going to take two hours.
And, um, my friend Vincent said, go get a drill.
I'm like, I got a drill.
My drill's not powerful enough.
He's like, no, a drill is he's from Montego Bay.
A drill is another word for a chisel.
The, And I was like, no, the drill's the machine.
He's like, no, it's the drill bit.
And what you're doing is you're drilling.
I'm like, but it's not turning.
He's like, it's still called a drill.
And I was like, okay, why?
And he took it and he put it onto the ground and he made a tiny little chip this big like a quarter of an inch, with his cold chisel.
And then he did one next to it.
He did six or seven hits, and then finally he got a hole that was the size of a quarter.
And then he built it into a hole this big.
And he, with a tiny chisel, built a hole out just from tenacity on one little point.
He loaded all of his strength onto one point and finally built a hole big enough.
And once the hole got big, I could hit it with a big hammer and it broke apart.
But my point is, the trip to Home Depot and back and returning it would have taken three hours or something.
And he just focused onto something that was really hard.
And he hit that little corner like 20 times before that hole.
A little chip came out, but it worked.
And I think that's a great analogy for breaking through the wall.
It's a tiny little crack that you have to expand, but you have to have the tenacity, strength and experience to know how to do it.
And I didn't know how to do it staying in it and not taking yourself out of it until you see yourself all the way through it with the tools that you have available to you.
Yes, but also not being ashamed.
I was ashamed because I'd given up and I was going to go this wimpy way out and go all the way to Home Depot to rent a drill, a jackhammer.
It seems so dumb.
And it was.
But this speaks to this acronym that you have, this ISRU idea, which stands for in situ resources.
What's the utilization utilization, which is basically like use what you have.
Like you, you should know your, your you always be knowing, but it's not about going out and getting the tool that you don't have.
It's about using what you have in creative ways.
It's the idea of like the movie on a low budget.
That's better because it was crafted under constraints right.
Like the, creativity comes out of the constraints, not out of having all of the resources available to you.
Yes.
It's another word for bricolage, which means to build or repair with available limited resources.
ISRU is in-situ resource utilization and it's a protocol that NASA has been working on since the late 1950s, during the invention of the Cold War, which is, instead of bringing the resources of Earth to Mars, make a machine, send it a generation before the astronauts are born, to generate breathable air, drinkable water and rocket fuel for a return trip home.
Run this thing for 50 years. and then use it.
Slowly collect the natural resources.
Kind of like on a camping trip.
You don't bring a bottle of water, you bring a water filter and you can drink out of a stream, because water is the heaviest thing and you need a lot of it when you're camping.
I'd say that's the most common ISRU tool.
But the entire studio is ISRU and everything we do comes from not having resources and scavenging them.
But then how do you be authentic when you've been doing something for 40 years and all of a sudden you have resources?
Well, I would say even the great NASA is underfunded.
If we had unlimited resources, we'd be on Europa now checking out the octopuses that are swimming beneath the frozen two-meter-thick crust of the smoothest object known in the universe, the planet known as Europa, the icy moon of Jupiter.
But what you get is what you just described is, when you have your limited resources or you push your resources to the max, you start to get artifact evidence fingerprints scuffs, truths of how the process is made that shows a human being was there.
So ISRU is a protocol that NASA's use, but we also use it in the studio as a way of teaching ritual.
It's a project that we do and you can.
It's a.
It's an app and you can get it on the uh app store under Tom Sachs or Google play or under ISAU.
And it's a game and we do rituals.
So the idea is to, um, uh, break your habits by building rituals.
And what it does is help you get in touch with your creativity in a positive way.
So like my number one, most famous favorite one is, um, output before input.
We've spoken about it before.
So every day before you look at your phone, do a drawing, build something in clay, even just make a mark, and take a picture of it and upload it.
And you get a point for doing that.
Or another one that I like to do is out and back.
Set your watch, run for 10 minutes.
When your watch goes off in 10 minutes, mark the ground with chalk, or take a photo if you Mark it with a stone, or just maybe even just look and remember.
And that's called your bingo point.
Bingo point is when the rescue helicopter goes out to sea and it uses exactly half its amount of fuel and it has to return back.
Even if they can see the victims of the disaster, they have to turn back or else everyone dies.
So that bingo point's really critical.
And also if you run the same route every day out and back, you can measure your speed by how far you've traveled, which is an interesting vector.
And then so, when you get back, I always write in my journal, in my runner's log, what I saw, the route I take, what sneakers I ran with, the weather, who I was with, if I was hungry any data?
So I have this beautiful notebook of all that.
And those are also available on the web store, which is...
Shameless self-promotion.
You are the self-help artist.
Yeah.
Creating accountability, habit-building apps when you're not building space programs.
But the irony isn't lost on me that we are using an app to help you beat your cell phone addiction right.
But we do this and we have a leaderboard and there's a contest and people at the top of the leaderboard have access to buy sneakers and other studio stuff.
It speaks to the core contradiction at the heart of the work.
Like as much as you have something to say about consumerism.
Uh, you're doing collaborations with brands like Nike.
Like you know, you have these this legendary.
You know kind of like history with them of creating these.
You know sneaker lines and apparel lines with them.
So you know, while you're also, you know, kind of speaking about our relationship to uh, you know our spending habits and what that says about us as human beings.
Yeah, there's some paradox there.
But I also think that you know, if consumerism is our religion, it's certainly my religion.
Speak for myself then, if I'm going to be a critique of consumerism first, in order for that to be an authentic gesture, I must be a participant.
And I am an active participant.
And I do have a car and I do have sneakers and stuff and I'm very critical of it and I find that as a way to express my apprehension.
Ambivalence contradiction,
But with ISRU, it's an opportunity to utilize this incredibly powerful storytelling apparatus known as Nike to share conceptual art.
So, for example, this semester we're teaching you how to tie knots and take photographs, and how to use a furshiki, which is a Japanese traditional cloth that's used to wrap a gift or to carry something that's too big or dirty to go in your backpack.
So finding a way with just a regular piece of fabric to tell a story of carrying something.
You have furniture designs.
You're working with all different kinds of materials.
You're working with brands and creating consumer products.
Is there a line between what one would consider industrial design or fine art, or do you not even think about those distinctions?
Art's a verb and not a noun.
I don't care if it's a sculpture or a painting or a poem or a podcast or a book or a sneaker or a chair.
It's all sculpture to me.
And I think all of those things are very different and they have different qualities and benefits and attributes and advantages and disadvantages.
And making something in industry is a lot harder than making something in the studio.
But you get to make a lot more of them and reach more people than the one-off that's in the studio.
So all these things have different pros and cons, but the approach is exactly the same.
And one of the great things about getting to work with Nike is that it's an amplifier for the values of the studio, but on a larger scale.
And one of the problems is making sure that we always do that with a degree of authenticity, because the studio's strength is in the handmade and in the one-off.
So finding ways of telling that story that's consistent is just takes a little bit extra time.
That's why we, we sort of we make this um isru instruction manual to help give you a window into that, like not to explain it away, but to help give you some inspiration, like all the things you can do with, like with a piece of fabric, like a hundred different things from one piece of fabric.
And that's.
Those are just suggestions.
They're probably more Well.
What's great is that before the book even begins, in Guide to the Guide, you say this is a book about art, which is not the same thing as it being an art book.
It's a guide.
It is not for display.
It takes you places.
Still that it contains some of the art world's patois of pseudo-intellectual bullshit could be seen as being inevitable.
You'll see words like bricolage and recontextualizing.
These terms seem pretentious because you rarely need them in everyday life.
But they do clarify with precision the ideas, techniques, and methods we use all the time.
We're stuck with them.
So there's a resistance to kind of the tropes of the art world and the pretension that is kind of this environment in which you operate, that's so off-putting to – the average person and makes it difficult for them to connect their own human experience to the expression of, you know, someone like yourself who's trying to say something relatable and evocative that could be, you know, revelatory for the observer.
I despise the elitism of the art world.
Of course, a benefit from it because I get to do all this great stuff.
But it's not where I come from.
I didn't come from an art family.
I went to the Museum of Modern Art for the first time when I was in college.
And it's not where I come from.
And art still is super alienating.
And most art writing is.
This is going to sound really cynical, but it seems to conceal the lack of intelligence of the art writer by using unnecessarily complex words.
Yet I've been really inspired by art.
There are some artists who have really brought me to great places.
And I don't mean artists like Bela Kuti and James Brown and Ella Fitzgerald.
I mean weird artists like Chris Burden and Yoko Ono and Sol LeWitt, conceptual artists.
But the ideas are for everyone.
And there's almost – it sounds like almost like an art world conspiracy to protect these ideas and keep them from reaching mass audience.
And there's a – some museums have a pedagogical department to eliminate that, but it seems they're more to reinforce it.
So –
I'm always working very hard in my work to make sure that everyone can understand it.
There's an incredible essay in here about my cousin Marty, who is a used car salesman from Long Island, who said to one of my he said he was looking at a painting of mine that was like a duct tape painting.
It was made out of, it was a monochrome, just a square out of cross-hatched duct tape.
And he said Tommy, and he was like a kind of like a wise guy, like he talked and acted like someone from Goodfellas.
And he said, Tommy, I got a personal question for you.
What does it mean?
And I found myself fumbling to explain Barnett Newman and the history of abstract expressionism and how the CIA weaponized abstract expressionism in the Cold War to prove to say things like even this ridiculous art is what you can do in America.
That's how great we are.
And the whole history of abstract art.
And I realized I completely lost the guy.
And what I should have said was something like, I just like duct tape.
I just think it looks cool.
And I like things that are simple.
I'm not sure that I would have completely won him over either.
But it's hard.
And I think that was a moment when I really struggled with what art meant to me.
But I also remember when Jean-Michel Basquiat was alive.
I loved his art, but people just thought it was garbage.
Now there's almost nothing more expensive than that.
But it took time for what he was doing to be assimilated by the mainstream, for graffiti to be a sanctioned activity, for skateboarding to be not a crime.
It takes time.
But I'm impatient, so I want that to happen now.
And that's why I work really hard to make these ideas accessible and to not use fancy art words.
I love art theory.
I grew up with it.
It's how I found my calling.
By reading, I don't know, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing that One Sees by Lawrence Weschler, or reading Clement Greenberg or Rosalind Krauss.
These are really difficult things to work your way through.
They're books, but unlike this with pictures, they've got words in them.
I don't know if we even read anymore, but those are the kind of books that really help me to get excited about making things.
And for the person who has, the average person, who has the you know kind of arm's length relationship with art, maybe a couple times a year they go to a museum, or when they're, you know, on vacation, they go to the museum in whatever city they're in.
And that's kind of it.
What is the message that you want to convey?
Or the call to action around the urgency or the importance of having a relationship with art?
I think the first thing is There should be a sign on every work of art on the wall that says you don't need to read this sign to understand this art.
And when we go in, we see people looking at the explanation because art is so bewildering.
Well, the vernacular around it, the languaging too, it's like it's more – it makes it even more difficult to penetrate.
Yeah, because you have to read an interpretation of the thing.
Look at the thing, see if it even lines up with your perception of it.
You're immediately confused.
Edward Tufte said if you want to confuse someone, project the words onto the wall and read them out loud at the same time.
They will not be able to read it or hear your voice.
You can say the words and have a picture of something else to evoke a feeling, but if you do both, you will lose them.
And it's something that happens in every PowerPoint presentation everywhere throughout the world.
It's the most moronic thing ever.
And we've all experienced this.
People, please stop doing this.
I would say that's the most important thing.
I don't use wall text.
And sometimes in museums.
It's always a battle because the pedagogical department wants that, because art is extremely threatening, because it's a noncompliant experience.
It doesn't fit in.
You go to this museum where art goes to die, but there's no other place to see these non-compliant objects, which are very important because they expand our understanding of what something can be.
And I think one of the reasons why I love the art of Yoko Ono is because you can't buy it.
There's nothing ever for sale.
You might be able to buy a book about her, but it's all experiential.
It's all performance-oriented.
There's no thing there.
It's just ideas.
And it exists without the economic constraint.
And even if you look at the great Pablo Picasso, he was perhaps the ultimate art world artist, because his things existed in his time as money.
They were bought and sold.
But not to diminish the quality of what he achieved on the canvas.
But they were consumerist objects from the very beginning.
Yeah.
Where is all your stuff?
Where is the lunar land?
Where do all these things live?
Where do you keep all this shit?
Well, a lot of it isn't my responsibility anymore.
It's out there in public and private collections globally.
But a lot of it is in – you ever see Indiana Jones, the first one?
At the end.
They put the Ark of the Covenant in this giant warehouse at the end, and it goes on forever.
I've got i've got six.
Oh, you do okay, because i'm really focused on building things that i want to build and the space program is in dry dock in philadelphia right now and it's it's and we go back into it and work on it and prepare for the next mission.
Is there going to be another space mission?
I hope not, But you know we – you know they say about leadership in the other NASA, those who command missions are usually not the ones who desire to command them.
They're just the ones who are best suited to do it.
So it's like you can't – it's just – sometimes it's just inevitable.
I don't know.
I want to end with one of your –
10 bullets for life.
Now, this is a laptop bag made out of... This is Tyvek, right?
It's a cousin of Tyvek called Dyneema.
Dyneema.
It's another flash-spun non-fabric fabric.
Super strong, waterproof.
That is the best laptop bag ever because...
And I think there are probably like six of them left on the website.
I got one off your website, but I knew they were.
I got this a while ago, but I don't know if they're still available.
I don't know what's... There are a couple left.
There are probably six left, but they're so special because it's the only laptop.
It's the lightest laptop bag ever.
And someone might say, but there's no padding.
And my answer is...
Of course it's not padding.
It's a $6,000 supercomputer.
Like don't drop it, protect it with your life.
Put it inside of another bag.
I just like how excited you got.
Like when I pulled this out and you looked at it and you're like, you were like you know, and it's the white.
It's the white one which is basically it's translucent material.
So you can see your computer through it.
I brought it out though, because it has a patch on it.
And on this patch are these 10 bullets.
And each one of these bullets represents one of your, you know kind of principles for life or rules for life.
And we've kind of danced around a bunch of them and we're not gonna go all the way through them.
But I wanted to end this with one of them, which is persistence.
And I think that's a good way to kind of take us out.
If I wanted people watching this to take anything away from this, I would say buy this book.
Because it's- Look at you, you capitalist.
Yeah, of course.
Get your plug in.
Yeah, I would say buy this book because it's the story of how I did it.
But use it to find how you did it.
And don't keep buying self-help books.
Just buy one and write your own.
This is my version of that.
I'm going to end with a quote.
Nothing can take the place of persistence.
Talent will not.
Nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.
Genius will not.
Unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.
Education will not.
The world is filled with educated derelicts.
Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
I love it, man.
I think that's a fantastic way to put a pin on it for today, man.
I appreciate you.
You're a legend.
You're an icon.
A real privilege and an honor to spend time with you, my friend.
Thanks, Rich.
I appreciate the time.
The Tom Sachs Guide, available everywhere.
Follow Tom on Instagram.
Are you still out on book tour for a while, or what's your next project?
I'm not sure when this airs, but we're on book tour now.
We're in Los Angeles, and I feel like book tour is forever.
Forever.
So find them on Instagram if you want to.
Maybe, if there's a few laptop bags left or JPL pads, you can go to Tom's website at TomSackscom and the ISRU app.
Yeah, I would encourage you to sign up for the ISRU app, because it's a way of using the phone to work on your cell phone addiction, which is the pandemic really is how much time and energy we're spending on the device.
And it's know.
The irony of using a phone to deal with your phone addiction isn't lost on me, but it is an a window to what you can achieve through work.
All right thanks, man.
Thanks, so good to have you.
Thanks again thanks cheers, peace.
All right, everybody.
That's it for today.
Thank you so much for listening.
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