As you can see, I have a new look at Cobb. It is influenced by the new theme I put on Chrome which is the Tom Sachs Theme. There are people who say that Sachs is best known for his "bronzes of Hello Kitty, a foamcore Unité d'Habitation, and a functioning plywood McDonald's", but that's just stupidity fronting as taste. I say the man is brilliant in the way Dean Kamen is. He builds things.
You cannot appreciate Tom Sachs the way I do unless you can look at the following picture and get really excited about the space. This picture gets to me in the same way as walking down the aisle as Sur La Table surrounded by cooking hardware, or walking down the aisle at Fry's surrounded by computing hardware, or walking down the aisle at Ace surrounded by hardware. These are today's modern stockpiles of tools for creative construction and people who think like I do are excited by the possibilities of building.
I'm a gearhead and Sachs is a gearhead as well. It's quite finally a pleasure to find his kind of art to get me beyond the designs of Oakley, which are beginning to get old. But what really got to me was a surprise that I found having used the Chrome theme for a day. It's the quote: "It won't fail because of me."
That says plenty. So when I checked out his website, I wondered if the person matched up to the artwork. Comparing him to Duchamps or Warhol because he does bricolage with what appear to be found objects is just a lazy way of describing him to a rather stale art crowd in NYC. I mean really, why would anybody want to be the next Warhol? So I got 15 minutes into his Goole presentation and determined that I like him. Not too ironic, or rather I should say all of his irony seems to come from his comfort in being misinterpreted and people not getting his jokes. He opens up with a classic geek line, which you would expect to get interest at Google "Who is going to be the last Cylon?" and nobody had an answer. He had to explain that it was Battlestar Galactica and was disappointed that they didn't get it. I don't watch the show but I get it when he said Adama. At any rate, his arts's raison d'etre is simple. I want to build what I can't afford to buy. So he built a spacecraft. A man after my own heart.
I hope to continue to be impressed with Sachs, and I will take to and adapt his visual themes. They are clean and precise without being antiseptic or brittle. They are masculine and clever bringing a sense of awe not by being overbearing, but by being engineered. It is truly wonderful. Maybe there is art in contemporary America after all.
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