Fountain of Filth No. 4

Tom Sachs

by Olive Jones

I love Walgreens. (1) There was a cashier at the Walgreens down the street from my childhood home named Cathy. Cathy saw me for the first time a mere few weeks after I was born, sleeping in my mother’s arms. For the remainder of my youth, any time I came to that Walgreens she would remind me of this fact, and every time she referenced the memory I was delighted to hear it. After coming home from my first semester of college I went to the Walgreens not to purchase something, but simply to see her. There were no Walgreens in my college town. I live near a Walgreens now though, and I love to go there, in spite of the long lines. I am greeted by a sense of calm and familiarity that can only be called homely. This Walgreens in Brooklyn and the Walgreens in my hometown can translate this experience so strongly because of the near identical store layout, color scheme, and selection of products are near identical. Even though I know Cathy is not there with me in my Walgreens, I can so easily picture her rounding the corner at any moment and remarking on how much older I’ve gotten since the last time I stopped by.

There is something about my connection to Walgreens that is unique to the current stage of development that American society and culture is in. Although people have always developed attachments to the shops, bars, restaurants, etc. in their town, these places were for the most part unique. A corner store in one small American town has similarities to another a few towns over, but also contains its own unique identity that isn't replicable. The same rules do not apply to my beloved Walgreens. As small businesses were forced into impossible competition with larger chains, the experience of the corner store became infinitely repeatable, standardized and the regional quirks were ironed out. What that left the Zoomer generation with is an experience of ‘local’ that had no identity. There are no unique traits that can be contrasted with another area’s culture. However, there are cracks in the cultural asphalt. Within the standardized American consumer culture, which is instantly recognizable yet so sterilized that it becomes impossible to identify with, live beating human hearts that power this machine, often against their will. 

In my mind, there is no greater artist that represents this than Tom Sachs. I am a fan of Sachs’ work even though we differ, maybe even are opposed, ideologically. Sachs is a capitalist artist. He embraces capitalism and celebrates consumerism in his work. He is also a victor of capitalism, having carved a successful career in art by partnering with brands such as Nike to create commercial art objects such as his ‘Mars Yard’ sneaker. He paved the way for artists of more dubious quality, such as KAWS, to create objects that are nominally art but in reality just commercial vessels for wealth. This month I want to examine Sachs’ work through the lens of commodity fetishisation. This lens will give us further insight not only into Sach’s personal relation to capital, but can be used as a lens to examine cultural responses to neoliberalism. 

Tom Sachs’s work is defined by two key elements. The first is his handmade style. His sculptures are made of plywood, duct tape, foamcore and hot glue. His paintings are painted on plywood instead of canvas. The human hand and all of its errors are at the forefront of his work. The second key element is his reproduction and mixing of high and low culture. A grenade made of Hermes packaging, a Tiffany Glock, and a fully functioning handmade McDonald’s kiosk are among some of his early works. As it says on Sach’s website “It was through these explorations that Sachs began to develop the ethics of his studio, recreating the things that he most desired with what materials were available, rendered in a way that intentionally highlighted their process, challenges, and flaws.” (2) I am especially drawn to his work “Nutsy’s” which was a sprawling installation he put on in 2001, 2002 and 2003. It contained an RC car raceway, bong hit station, McDonalds kiosk, and a massive scale replica of Le Corbusier’s Unite d’habitation. To me, Nutsy’s reflects an embrace of  the shift to mass consumer culture that began in the 1980s and continues to this day. Sachs plucks the perfect object produced in factories in China and Vietnam and enters them into American mythology by creating handmade replicas of his own. Sachs talked about this in a 2014 keynote address for the New York Times International Luxury Conference. In the talk, he compares his work to cargo cultism, a belief system mostly located in Melanesia based around praying for cargo drops from a God or Gods.(3) In reality, these shipments of supplies came from the Colonial forces taking over this network of islands. Although Sachs’ sentimental comparison to the Cargo Cults of the Pacific does reflect his true belief in capitalism, I would classify his work as a full embrace of commodity fetishism. 

Commodity fetishism, for Marx, is a social characteristic of commodities which disguises the source of value contained within it, that value being labor;invisible. For example, the price of a cup of Starbucks coffee may seem to come from the global prestige and quality of the brand that makes it. However, this is just an illusion. The true price of, say, a frappucino, is derived from the amount of labor needed to produce it. This stretches from the farmers in South America to the septum-pierced barista handing you your morning milkshake. Curiously, as Sachs borrows from Cargo Cultism, Marx borrows the term ‘fetish’ from the world of religion. A fetish, in the spiritual context, is an object thought to have supernatural powers.(4) I bring this up because in some ways I think that Sachs’ work presents a capitalist mirror image to Marx’s commodity fetishisation. Both are concerned with tearing away the veil the fetish casts over these commodities. Sachs discusses this frequently, stressing the importance of the human hand in his work. In his own words “I could never make anything as perfect as an Apple product, but Apple could never make something as fucked up and flawed as one of my sculptures.”(5) In his work, Sachs mounts a two pronged response to the growth of capital in the late 20th century. On one hand he wholeheartedly embraces neoliberalism, finding an identity in consumer culture. On the other, he denies the crawl toward inhuman perfection, subverting the expected use and expected value and exposing the human labor and exploitation contained in each object. 

As the world that Tom Sachs was raised in was slowly replaced by our current world, his relationship with capitalism became further confused and incoherent. As the fine art world became more and more diseased and, in some ways, forced into irrelevancy, he had to stop straddling the fine art and consumer role that he had built his career on and put both feet into the role of content creator. His ‘rocket factory’ paints a vivid picture of his shifting career. In these art pieces, if they can be called that, consumers can buy and launch an NFT rocket that is made from a bank of digital drawings in his style. These bland, uninspired pieces rework the visual styles and parodies of luxury brands, but ditch the underlying commentary. The dissonance in his early work is fully resolved, leaving no critique. It also, however, is not an embrace. Scrolling the rocket factory website, the project seems more than anything like his resignation to the whims of capital.

Footnotes:

1.  For my Manhattan readers: the rest of us call ‘Duane Reade’ Walgreens.

2.  “Tom Sachs: Handmade Paintings.”

3.  New York Times Events, Keynote.

4.  “Commodity Fetishism – Marxology.”

5.  HYPEBEAST, Tom Sachs Admits All Of His Work Is Flawed | A CONVERSATION WITH...