American artist Tom Sachs serves espresso and 86-proof mezcal behind the bar at Thaddaeus Ropac gallery on Dover Street during Frieze Week. He’s launching his new show “A Good Shelf” (running until December 20), which features 30 ceramics inspired by Japanese tea bowls with NASA graphics (Chavans), rituals, patchwork and space travel. After several years of testing, the saxophone deserves a stiff drink. His sneaker release partnership with Nike was suspended in 2023 amid accusations he created a “hostile and overly strict” workplace at his New York studio. Last February, Nike renewed the pressure, and Sacks, who vowed to improve working conditions, returned to the coalface, toiling as hard as ever.
Over the past few months, he has completed several international projects, including another exhibition at Ropac’s Seoul outpost featuring the work of Pablo Picasso.
Only a handful of living artists have reached the heady heights of directing studio teams to realize ambitious, large-scale visions. Sachs, 59, has an auction record of $302,400 Tiffany value meal (1998) Christie’s auction house is one of them. His works include a life-size replica of the Apollo Lunar Module for his “Space Program” series, a Chanel-branded guillotine (Chanel Guillotine [Breakfast Nook]1998), and a 17-foot-long foam core sculpture titled unity (2001). The latter is a commentary on the commercialization of high modernism and has a place in the Guggenheim’s permanent collection. His current performance at Ropac is a continuation of his 2012 “Space Program: Mission to Mars” performance, when he created a collage version of a traditional Japanese tea ceremony performed on the Red Planet.
The handmade ceramics of “Good Shelf” symbolize Sachs’s pursuit of perfection, the juxtaposition of balanced control and intuition, and the abandonment of his artistic identity. “Ceramics are without a doubt the most complex of all crafts,” he told art news. “I am almost sixty years old and have dabbled in every possible craft. Ceramics is the most technologically advanced. It involves the most mistakes, science and chemistry. In my handcrafting, I have been working towards my ideals. He is the founder of Rakuware, the 16th century potter Nagajiro. [a type of Japanese pottery traditionally used in Japanese tea ceremonies]. As I get better, I’m giving up my character because my ceramics are losing some of their personally crafted identity and grungy feel. “
Each unique piece of ceramic in the exhibition bears the fingerprints of “NASA” and its maker. As such, they are highly personal, displayed on shelves made from scraps of rough materials such as cinder blocks, polystyrene and plywood. Sacks describes himself as a “patchwork black belt.”
I asked him if he had found perfection in his sculptural practice. “Yes, I think I’ve achieved a level of mastery in a lot of areas, like when I’m making models or sculptures of pre-existing things using the wrong materials and wrong proportions,” he says. “Whether it’s a Hermès Kelly bag or a lunar module, I’ve found a way to make it truly my own, a way to make it look like it was made in a factory, even though it’s handmade. I think the sculptural language I’ve developed over the past 40 years has matured, whereas with ceramics I’m still learning and struggling, but through repetitive work, innovation happens unexpectedly.”
The overt ritual element of A Good Shelf was important to Sacks, who said “one of my daily rituals is to make a new ceramic every morning before checking my phone.” He added that it distracted him from the daily chores of the digital world and fueled his creativity, an important outlet for a self-confessed utilitarian obsessed with function and purpose.
When I asked him if his obsession with practicality limited his artistic process, he thought for a moment, then responded: “In the studio we say ‘creativity is the enemy,’ and I mean that very seriously. It’s like cayenne pepper, you don’t need too much of it to spice up what you’re doing, too much just ruins the sauce. You want a high percentage of pure hardness that shows up every day. And then, for 99 percent of the time you spend making a piece, While sculpting or digging a trench, the mind wanders, but it is anchored by the act of work. Work becomes like meditation, and that’s when innovation and surprise happen, like genetic mutations in nature. An animal that is bred from generation to generation is essentially the same animal, but occasional genetic changes give it a better chance of survival. This is how slime evolved over billions of years into creatures that talk about slime. Creativity is about sticking to your guns and spending a lot of time at the dinner table. “
