Tom Sachs

Posted by Fabio 25 November 2009

Tom Sachs is a sculptor, probably best known for his elaborate recreations of various Modern icons, all of them masterpieces of engineering and design of one kind or another.

In an early show he made Knoll office furniture out of phone books and duct tape; later, he recreated Le Corbusier’s 1952 Unité d’Habitation using only foamcore and a glue gun. Other projects have included his versions of various Cold War masterpieces, like the Apollo 11 Lunar Excursion Module, and the bridge of the battleship USS Enterprise.

For many years, a small but significant part of Sachs’s production has dealt with cameras. From 1972 to the present, Tom Sachs not only explore the camera as both sculptural and functional object, but, perhaps more importantly, chart the course that photography and the globalization of precision manufacturing has taken over the past century.

A clay replica of a Nikon SLR camera that Sachs made when he was eight years old as a gift to his father. This contrasts with his recent elegy to the now-defunct Polaroid Corporation: a fully functional “instant” camera that has been cobbled together out of (among other things) a Canon digital camera, a tiny HP inkjet printer, and a battery from a Makita cordless drill.

Sachs’s cameras turn the tables on the usual artistic photographic process, where the image made with the camera is the “art” and the camera itself is merely a tool. Playing off the consumer fetishization of photographic equipment, Sachs’s cameras simultaneously deconstruct the technology of photography while at the same time revealing that these ubiquitous machines are compelling subjects in and of themselves.

www.tomsachs.com