Tom Sachs Postmodern consumerism
We live in a time where consumer culture is at its most potent, everything is about brands and logos, from the clothes people wear to the products they buy. We see a lot of popular musicians dress like Selfridges mannequins - covered head to toe in whichever fashion house is trending at that given time. We also see Instagram ‘influencers’ constantly copying each other in a desperate attempt to satisfy the app’s algorithms and end up on the Explore page, or perhaps trying to determine who has the largest collection of post-2016 Air Jordan 1 releases. Though this is just one specific fashion related example, any outsider would look at this phenomenon and see the humour in it, why is it the way it is?
Tom Sachs’ first sculpture dates back to 1974, when at the age of 8 he made a Nikon FM2 camera out of clay after finding out his father wanted one but couldn’t afford it. Sachs has said himself that he would originally make items that he wanted but couldn’t get for whatever reason, also going to say how ‘consumerism was the sort of ritual of my community and making this clay camera was a way of contributing to that’. He expanded on this point further by stating ‘half of having an expensive camera is the image that it captures, but the other half is holding, desiring and appreciating what went into making it. I think a lot of collectors aren’t even so much interested in the original intention of the thing but what it means to them as a consumer object’.
Before Sachs became ‘high art’s handyman’ and after receiving his BA from Bennington College in Vermont in 1989, he would work a series of odd jobs around New York City including working as a janitor, an elevator repairman, and a job working on lighting displays at Barney’s. It was here at Barney’s Department Store where, in 1994, Sachs entered an auction sponsored by the store for Christmas, which ended up with his sculpture depicting the famous Nativity scene being put on display in the store’s front window. The sculpture known as ‘Hello Kitty Nativity’ was Sachs’ first official work and it allowed him to make a name for himself through controversy as his depiction for this holy scene included replacing the Virgin Mary with Hello Kitty wearing an open Chanel bra, replacing the three kings with three Bart Simpsons and marking the stable with the famous McDonalds arches logo. Of course the display was met with a great deal of attention, leading to the president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, William Donohue, warning the store to remove the sculpture, accusing the work of blasphemy. Donohue contacted the media and soon after, Barney’s received hundreds of phone calls from religious advocates asking for the display to be taken down. This wouldn’t be the only time Sachs would find himself in controversy; he once spent a night in jail for having a bowl of live ammunition at the front desk of his showing at Mary Boone’s 57th Street Gallery, while he’s also managed to have his sculpture ‘Prada Death Camp’ - a model of Auschwitz made out of a Prada hatbox - exhibited at the Jewish Museum in New York.
Was ‘Hello Kitty Nativity’ simply a meaningless joke from Sachs? Was he showing us his particular stance on religion? Or does its purpose have more to do with conveying subtle social commentary on how these recognisable brand logos and companies are essentially being worshipped by us, the consumer. This following excerpt is taken from Sachs’ own website and gives some insight into the artist’s mind and reasoning behind his work:
‘’a contrarian and provocateur, Tom Sachs embraces rather than disparages consumer culture. It is difficult to speak about the perils of society and the degradation of the environment while holding an iPhone. The rise of consumerism has cultivated an aloof criticality reluctant to see its irony revealed. It is impossible to discern whether Sachs is sincere about his sincerity - the critical, academic, leftist response would be to reject consumerism as inauthentic and bourgeois, not to embrace it. Liminality is an overarching theme in his life and work: Sachs occupies the space between artist and manufacturer, proletariat and bourgeoisie, ascetic and materialist, reality and make-believe’’
There seems to be this idea of balance stemming from a place of enlightenment within Sachs’ beliefs. Consumerism is something that is inescapable to the point that there is no point in fighting it, instead, Sachs has found it easier to embrace this phenomenon through satirical humour. This is when his 1997 piece ‘Prada Toilet’ may come to mind. Sachs has gone on to comment that ‘every time you buy a BMW, you have this great advantage of this luxury consumer product, but you’re also subject to the tyranny of its system. To have a luxury car requires great expense all down the line. They’re expensive to buy, they’re expensive to maintain and are incredibly fragile. You’re buying into a system; you become a subscriber. I’m a victim of this system as much as I benefit from the luxury of the experience’.
Karl Marx brought forth this theory of ‘Commodity Fetishism’ in his book Das Kapital (1867). The basis of this theory argues that commodities can become fetishes because by power of our belief in them, we create an obscure hierarchy of value. This can be explained by Adam Smith’s example from The Wealth of Nations (1776) where Smith says we rate a diamond over water in spite of the fact the diamond serves little to no purpose, whilst water is an absolute necessity for us to live. In a modern day sense, we can see the effect commodity fetishism has across society, from large companies replacing local merchants with mass industrialisation, to people organising and identifying themselves with a particular brand.
For example, Travis Scott has become a literal walking merchandise machine since the start of 2020, releasing collaborations with the likes of Nike, McDonalds and Fortnite - acting as a prime example of how commodity fetishism links in with consumerism. Just 2 years ago in 2018, you could go onto eBay and purchase a pair of OG Nike Dunks Highs from the 2000s for as low as £30 (I know this because I did so… twice.) Once Travis Scott was seen constantly wearing the Nike Dunk sneaker last year whilst teasing a collaboration including SB Dunk and Air Jordan 1 silhouettes, demand had shot up. This meant that prices for the very same shoe I bought for £30 went up to around ten times what I was able to pay - whilst Nike were able to cash in and begin to release models they hadn’t done since the early 2000s. I’m not saying Travis Scott is the sole reason as to why this particular shoe made such a comeback but to trivialise the impact he was able to have on a larger, more generalised consumer base would be erroneous.
Once you understand these concepts, I believe that Sachs’ works, such as ‘Hello Kitty Nativity’ and ‘Chanel Guillotine’, begin to make much more sense. However, it is important to remember that he does not collaborate with most of these brands in the same way that someone like Travis Scott does.
That being said, Sachs is a name generally known to the fashion and sneaker scenes, since he has officially collaborated with Nike on a number of occasions. It may be surprising to know that a guy who has lampooned capitalism his whole career has been working with a company with the stature of Nike but of course, Sachs being a huge critic of sneaker and resell culture, the shoe releases have been on his own terms to attempt to make sure only the ‘right people’ got their hands on them. For his first major release of the Nike Mars Yard 2.0 in 2017, people who wanted the shoe (who live in New York) had to sign up for a chance to purchase. If chosen, they would be taken on a boat to Governors Island and subjected to watch a 40 minute film directed by Sachs. This was followed by going through an obstacle course composing of one deadlift, one lunge, one push-up, an ab wheel, a chin-up and rope climbing along with completing activities Sachs is very particular about, such as organising screws and bolts, a process he refers to as ‘knolling’, and learning how to tie a knot. The idea was to deter hypebeasts and sneaker resellers away from the shoe by doing this, but as expected, this only went on to increase the hype for the shoe itself and at this moment, you can pick up a pair upwards from £2,500 on the resell market. As of December 2020, Sachs is asking fans to upload a short video onto their Instagram accounts explaining why they want to be test wearers for his latest Nike shoe, an upgraded version of the original Mars Yard.
If there ever was a cosmic joke about our existence, Tom Sachs would be someone who was in on it, or someone who got the joke whilst it completely flew over the heads of others. It’s easier to say Sachs is critiquing brands through irony in his art but that wouldn’t be a correct assumption, there’s much more awareness in his process towards branding, fashion and celebrity. Sachs has spoken about how consumerism is replacing religion but since spirituality is no longer a part of organised religion, this isn’t something he necessarily minds. It’s the lines between playfulness and critique that Sachs is so good at blurring with his work, which ultimately makes him such a unique and enigmatic artist.
Written by Dillon Gohil