Meet an artist, who has created his own elaborate space program, which sends pretend astronauts on a fictional filmed journey to outer space. Tom Sachs here talks about the highly original project and shares his fondness for space exploration, which he feels has similarities to religion: “You don’t build a rocket without wanting to understand if God exists.”
Though Sachs’ approach to space travel is far from e.g. NASA’s – his satellites and rockets being made from plaster and plywood and his crew never leaving the surface of the Earth – he engages other aspects which he deems equally important, such as his bricolage technique, public relations, and storytelling: “By executing details to an extreme degree, the experience becomes authentic, and it’s not playing, it’s much more fun, it’s serious, it’s a real job. That also makes it much more hilarious, because we go so far.” In continuation of this, he feels that it is important to have a dogma or an ideology that you use as a compass, but that you also break once in a while, which is also what they do in his studio. The advantage of an artist, Sachs adds, is that they can get away with making things that aren’t perfect, and that allows them to “show their own fingerprints.”
Tom Sachs (b. 1966) is an American artist, who primarily works with sculptures. Sachs is widely known for his elaborate recreations of various modern icons, such as his recreation of Le Corbusier’s 1952 ‘Unité d’Habitation’ using only foamcore and a glue gun. Throughout his career, Sachs has built numerous space-related sculptures and his interest in space – in particularly the Apollo program of the 1960s and 1970s – resulted in his ‘Space Program’ in 2007, where he built a 1:1 model of the Apollo lunar module: A mission control with 29 closed-circuit video monitors and two female astronauts with handmade space suits. In 2007, Sachs launched his spacecraft at Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles, landed on the moon, and explored its surface – all of which was made into a video by Sachs and the Neistat Brothers. In 2012, he opened the elaborate Space Program 2.0 MARS exhibit at the Park Avenue Armory in New York. His works are held in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Goetz Collection in Munich, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, among others. He lives and works in New York City. For more see: https://www.tomsachs.org/biography
Tom Sachs was interviewed by Mikkel Rosengaard at his studio in New York City in August 2018.
Camera: Pierce Jackson
Produced and edited by: Roxanne Bagheshirin Lærkesen and Christian Lund
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2018
Supported by Nordea-fonden
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