Tom Sachs: “It’s All Sculpture to Me”

TRANSCRIPT

Tom Sachs: I don’t really believe in writer’s block. There’s times when information flows and when it gets stuck. But when it gets stuck, there’s so many strategies that are worth doing. But what you do with that time, if you spend that time cleaning and setting your tools or sharpening your chisels, stuff that’s important to do because it bonds you with the process. You can’t just show up at the pitcher’s mound and throw a perfect fastball. You’ve got to warm up.

Dan Rubinstein: Hi, I’m Dan Rubinstein, and this is The Grand Tourist. I’ve been a design journalist for more than 20 years, and this is my personalized guided tour through the worlds of fashion, art, architecture, food, and travel, all the elements of a well-lived life. And welcome to the 14th season finale of The Grand Tourist.

We’ll be back with new episodes after the holidays, but until then, we’re hard at work on the next two print issues of The Grand Tourist in 2026. So make sure you’re up to date and sign up for our newsletter at thegrandtourist.net. My guest today is an American artist who traverses different fields of creativity with ease. Craft, consumerism, industrial design, technology, social criticism, filmmaking, painting, sculpture, and even performance.

He’s recreated Picasso works with found objects, faithfully created NASA space missions with painstaking accuracy, complete with extraterrestrial encounters, crafted pieces of collectible furniture where the so-called marks of making are on full display, created very unofficial objets like a Chanel branded chainsaw and Prada cardboard toilet. In other words, there’s no one who creatively explores the various cultures of making, quite like Tom Sachs. For a current exhibition at Thaddeus Ropac in London called “A Good Shelf,” hand-shaped ceramics, branded with the NASA logo of course, are placed on an inventive array of homespun looking shelves made from things like hardware, plastic, and cinder blocks.

In his recreations, inventions, and happenings, Sachs makes us take a second look at all of the ordinary things around us and ponder our fundamental desires. And if you’re looking to grasp his prolific catalog of works, you can pick up his latest book, he’s done many, called The Tom Sachs Guide from Phaidon, due out next month. It walks readers through his incredible career and his hundreds of creations that often start in his workshop.

As you’ll hear on the program, Tom grew up in Connecticut, studied architecture in London, and it was during his early years in New York when, as a maker, he contributed a work of art to the legendary windows of Barneys that caused quite the stir and put Tom on the map. His works, both serious and humorous, often at the same time, has led his works to be collected in museums including the Pompidou in Paris, the Prada Foundation in Milan, the Guggenheim, MoMA, and Whitney in New York, and many others. I caught up with Tom from his studio in New York to talk about his Bar Mitzvah reception, catered by the one and only Martha Stewart, how he explains his concept called sympathetic magic, what knolling is, his wishes for a Viking funeral at sea, and much more.

So I read that you were born in New York, but that you grew up in Connecticut, and your own family history goes quite a ways into Manhattan and the five boroughs. How do you describe the Sachs family tree?

So my ancestors came to New York via New London. I’m just kind of going to smash all the ancestors together in one pile.

Sure.

Via New London and North Adams Mass, part of the big Jewish immigration into the East Coast in the end of the 19th Century. Everyone kind of wound up in lower Manhattan. My great-grandfather was a rag and bone man, a guy who would push the cart and sell stuff on the street on the Lower East Side. And he had two sons. One became an accountant that helped build the IRS, and then spent the second half of his life as a devout communist trying to dismantle it, Oscar Hemingsburg. And he’s the voice of the Nutsy’s movies that we did around 2001.

And then his brother, my grandfather, is a doctor. My other grandfather is a doctor. And they all eventually, once they got some degree of affluence, moved out of Manhattan into Queens, and my parents are from Queens. And then they moved to Manhattan and the suburbs where I grew up. My sister was born in the city, but we grew up in Westport, Connecticut, which was a town also in transition that was kind of like a Jewish hippie alternative to Greenwich. And with head shops and a Goodwill and hardware stores and a playhouse where the Talking Heads played and kind of like the alternative people like the Rolling Stones and Ashford & Simpson lived there. It was like a hip place because it was pretty rural. 

Now, all those great businesses have given way to The Gap and Banana Republic and Home Depot and international brands and McMansions. The house that I grew up in—parents still live in it—is like the last small house on a big piece of land because every other house around them is built to the maximum allowable footprint per square foot. So, they’ve got kind of a small place surrounded by trees. Everyone else is kind of like…

They’re the holdouts.

Yeah. And I think because of the land, that when they die, they’ll bulldoze this beautiful little jewel box and do the maximum footprint. I got to witness the horror of a classmate of mine who became a developer who bulldozed all the Marcel Breuer buildings in town. All the Marcel Breuer houses and Bauhaus houses because they were not efficient and didn’t maximize the space and they certainly weren’t landmarked. So, all that stuff got smushed. Westport’s a lot like a Jewish New Canaan in a lot of ways. And the kind of relationship with affluence and decadence is very much alive.

Although my experience was more aspirational. Like when I was a kid, we only had one car in the family. So, my mom had to drive my dad to the train station for his job into the city every day so she could have the car all day. And at the train station, she’d meet her friend, Janet Horowitz, who wrote children’s books that were published by Workman Publishing, which is another… Katie Workman’s parents did that book. She did books of… It was like a map. You’d open it, it was a map, so matchbox cars could drive around the page. And then you’d turn the page and it was another map. And then their friend, Martha Stewart, would bring eggs that she grew, that she had in her garden because she raised chickens so she could have the family car. And that’s kind of how… That was before Martha made the jump to hyperspace. These were all… I grew up in a community of women that made stuff because the husbands were at work.

Oh, gosh. Okay.

And my mom would take me to Goodwill where we’d get furniture that was… It was the ’70s. So, the furniture was made in the ’60s or ’50s or ’30s. And so, it was good stuff that was worth stripping down off the paint and putting it in your home because it was nice. It wasn’t like the garbage that you find today that was made in the 2000s or 1990s. But my mom taught me how to wire a lamp and how to be handy. So, I was kind of raised by these women that were in this really beautiful place where they had this opportunity to make stuff, to make their lives better.

This was not poverty. This was affluence, but it was kind of a more craft-based affluence. I remember before Martha Stewart, you couldn’t buy balsamic vinegar in the supermarket. It just wasn’t like an extra virgin olive oil. It wasn’t a thing. You had white wine and red wine vinegar. And you certainly didn’t have something called DOP. That wasn’t even an option. And now, it’s everywhere.

What did your parents do?

So, my mom is a registered nurse. She worked in the emergency room at Norwalk Hospital. I think she did that after me and my sister were old enough to feed ourselves.

So, in high school, she went back to nursing school. But she was a mom before that and still is a mom. And my dad had an independent insurance agency and sold insurance to the community.

And I also read that you grew up in the reform movement. Was it a religious household?

We did the Jewish thing out of guilt for my grandfather. And it was always something that I resented because Hebrew school was at the same time of day as soccer practice. So, I was cut from the soccer team for missing so many games. And I really resented it. Soccer was an important part of my life before and during and after Hebrew school. And I was a captain. And I was really into it. I was in New York City. I had a team called Kill All Artists years later. And I still really believe in the sport. But it was something that we did for my grandfather. It was something that was forced upon my dad, so it was forced upon me.

But the religion of our household was consumerism. I mean, that’s what we talked about around the kitchen table. It wasn’t about Judaism and all those stories. It was more about dad’s new used BMW or mom’s dress or when American Gigolo happened. It was people like my dad that made Giorgio Armani happen because everyone wanted to be like Richard Gere. So, Giorgio Armani was not huge. He was kind of unknown until he did the outfits for American Gigolo. And those scenes where he’s going through his closet and all the neckties was something that my dad and his friends emulated. And they’d go into New York City to Barney’s New York or to Armani Boutique later, and they would get those clothes.

And so, that was what my parents were really excited about. And as a result, I became interested in the aspirational power of brands. So, for example, there was this mountain called Powder Ridge that was an hour from where we grew up. Now, it’s closed because of global warming, but it was a ski mountain. There is not enough snow there, they closed it a dozen years ago. And we’d go there after school, and I had this really cheap ski equipment that was kind of generic. And I remember painting on the skis the logos of Rossignol ST Comp. I would paint them on my skis so I had better brands because, I mean, it didn’t really matter how, but it was like an aspect because there were kids in my community who had Rossignol ST Comps or Olin Mark IVs, and I always thought they were beautiful in one of them. Something that I discovered later, when visiting as an adult, Jamaica, and I’d see things like Lexus Barbershop, where people would name their barbershop after Lexus cars because it was an aspiration towards luxury and glamour, and building your—the transformative power of art to make the world not the way it is, but the way you want it to be.

If you’re an astronaut, if you say you are.

And if we could go back in time—first of all, were you a bar mitzvahed?

I was. In 1981. And Martha Stewart catered my bar mitzvah.

Oh, wow. Okay. Those are some really good bragging rights, by the way.

She was a local caterer. She wasn’t Martha Stewart Living, and she hadn’t written a book or anything.

Do you remember what she served?

Yeah. I can tell you, not everything, but I can tell you that I remember it was the first time I had quiche. And the first time I had those really tart lemon squares with a graham cracker crust on the bottom. Do you know?

I think so, yes.

It’s like very tart, almost gelatinous lemon pudding, but very, very tart under a sweet, but bland graham cracker style crust. And it was a little square, like a two inch square. That’s all. 

Wow. That’s amazing. And so let’s say, after the lavishly catered bar mitzvah…

It wasn’t extremely lavish. It was just like she was the caterer. But it was as lavish as my parents could supply for sure. There’s no doubt about that.

And to this day, talk about a brand name. But after that, before you went off to school, like what was that? If we’d go back in time and visit you as a young 16 year old, like what kind of young man were you?

Well, so that was when I was 13 and with a bar mitzvah. I just also want to outline that I recently found the invitation to my bar mitzvah. And I remember it was the first time my mom ever took me to a graphic designer and we had a letter press made and it was all in lowercase.

And I was really impressed by the graphic design. I showed it to Yeju Choi, the designer of the book. And she was so impressed. Now, I’m not saying I take credit for it, it could have been the graphic designer. But I remember going into that room, looking through things called fonts or type styles and paper and samples. And it was probably the first time in my life that I can remember being sort of a creative director because a graphic designer said to me, “Hey, what do you like, this or this?” And I had to choose and I had never had a choice like that in my whole life. 

And that was because that’s very much what my life’s like now, with a big studio team. Is that the great people on the team bring me options that I can, you know, where I can drive the look of the studio. And so that was the first time.

But as a 16 year old, I would just say that I spent my childhood, it was really unsuccessful. I mean, I had to repeat ninth grade. I had to do summer school two or three times. I didn’t really understand school in first grade. I was always behind pretty much until I got into college and I found my own internal standards of excellence when I started making sculpture. But I really was very unsuccessful all through elementary, middle school and high school.

But when I was about 17, I got a driver’s license. You could get it at 16, but I was too much of a fuck-up. And I remember having a conversation with my parents, and we all agreed, because it was not just entirely them, that I wasn’t quite ready to—I needed a little more time to like get my shit together.

And I got my parents’ old Plymouth Volaré station wagon, was my car. And I was lucky enough to be exposed to the American hardcore punk movement. Because in Stanford, Connecticut, which is 30 minutes from my house was a club called the Anthrax that was in downtown Stanford. And it was an art gallery on the ground floor and the basement was a punk rock venue.

And the Anthrax was on the way from Manhattan to Boston. So, if you were on the national tour circuit and you were Minor Threat or Black Flag or the Dead Kennedys or the Minutemen or the Circle Jerks or whoever, you were probably going to play Anthrax because you could get out of the city, play one more gig, sleep on someone’s sofa, and you’re in Boston the next day. And I got to see many of those greats perform.

And the Bad Brains were, because they were more local, they were DC, they played a lot. And they were around. And Sonic Youth even.

And these were rooms of 50 people in them. So I was exposed for the first time to an art movement. And there was an art gallery upstairs, but I never really went there. So I don’t really know what was up there. In my fantasy, it was people like Todt, T-O-D-T, this German art group, or Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer. I don’t know, I have no idea if it was really those people or not. But I imagine it being kind of like the East Village art scene and being really political. But I really have no idea. To me, Crass was the best because they were English. And I might have seen them when I lived in England later, definitely they wouldn’t have come to Anthrax, it was too far. But the graphic design and the politics of that really helped. And of course, the things I learned about consumerism, if I was painting fake brands on my skis when I was 13 and 14, by the time I was 17, I was debadging my car and taking Plymouth off of the station wagon because I wasn’t getting paid by Plymouth.

I began to understand about the power of consumerism and brand loyalty and all the negativity around that. So I was even cutting the Levi’s label off the back of my Levi’s jeans, and really going the other direction. And that was then later, of course, reinforced in college when I was exposed to even crazier, more educated Marxists who had theory and literature behind this that I was not exposed to in high school.

And by then I was able to sort of excel through sculpture. I learned to read and write and was able to perform academically in a way that I wasn’t throughout high school, mainly because I had found one part of my life was working and that enabled me to make all the other parts work simultaneously. So I was not a good reader or writer, but I was motivated. So I was able to get stuff done.

(SPONSOR BREAK)

And you eventually made your way to the AA, the Architectural Association in London. Which, I think you also had a little bit of a tricky time. But why London and how did that happen?

So my advisor was a Dean of Students at Bennington. He was also the architecture professor. There were like one or two architecture professors. And we spent a lot of time together, Dean Beale, Patrick Beale. And he said, I should check out the AA, which is kind of like, I don’t know, like Cooper Union or something. It’s like a pretty far out experimental architecture school. It’s the most progressive architecture school, probably in the world. And the closest thing to it is Cooper Union or what was the one in Cali? Is it called SCI-Arc in Los Angeles?

Like it’s that the same brain trust, you know, storefront gallery, architecture gallery around the corner from my studio, is kind of like the same, you know—what architecture can be. I really feel like it’s an expansion for me of like the values of ArchiGram. I mean, it’s so many things, so many more things. You could really get a technical education there too. I’m not saying it’s not that. But I remember Peter Cook and someone else from ArchiGram, they like worked there in the AV department, managing the slide projectors. Like those guys were just at large because they were, you know, it was 40 years ago and they were young enough to be able to have a job doing an AV projector and not, you know—Sir Cook now is, you know, acknowledged for his contributions. But I think back then they’re teachers, professors, and we all did, everyone plugged in the slide projector and did what they had to do to make the classes work. 

But there was like a, you know, humility to the, just the blue collar aspect of being a professor. And it was a very special place. I dropped out after one trimester after I took a class with Tom Dixon where we all had to make a piece of furniture using no money, using things down on the street. And there was a little contest and I won the contest, but I decided that what I really wanted was a job. And I wound up working for Tom in London and we have become lifelong friends.

Oh, amazing. So he encouraged you to drop out essentially and just come work for him?

No, I dropped out. I remember it was two things, two people. It was Tom Dixon’s class where I really excelled because I was able to use my hands and the physicality of my work is still so important. I’m not happy if I don’t have a little blister or a scab or callus on my hands at any time, any given time. But it was building a thing. And also the AA was fantastic, because probably still, all kinds of artists and architects do lectures all the time. And I remember I attended a lecture by Michael Craig-Martin, which was really influential about his work, but it was one of the first artists who I really, I could see the art could mean so many different things. They really opened my mind.

But then I started a lifelong friendship with Richard Wentworth, who really blew my mind and said that I was—an artist at the AA was like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. And I think being an artist at the AA was like being a wolf in sheep’s clothing. And I think talking with him really encouraged me to let go of my bourgeois aspirations of having a successful upper middle class life where I could provide for my family and say, “Fuck it.” The world’s going to hell in a handbasket. I’m just going to have a good time and make sculpture. And I think Richard really helped me, not personally, not like he didn’t tell me to drop out, but seeing his work and the way he talked about his work and seeing how exciting the ideas behind his work were really gave me confidence to spend time making stuff. And then after I dropped out, I asked Tom for a job or probably just showed up and said, I’m here to help.

How long after that were you in London before you went to LA?

So, I don’t know, my whole time in London was about a year, including a few months at AA and many months working with Tom. And London was great because it was very expensive. And it was the first time I was not supported by my parents financially. I was totally independent and broke. And Tom gave us 20 pounds a day and lunch. And he was such a good cook that it was like, even though it was never quite enough food to go around, the quality was so good that it would sustain you spiritually. He’s so good, like genius. That guy, like so many things, music and his art. 

Yeah, he plays the guitar, doesn’t he?

I mean, I don’t know what he plays now. He always has a restaurant going.

That is true.

So that’s like, he knows how to do it. And Tom’s also, he’s English, but his parents, I think, are French or Tunisian. And so he’s got like a really rich background. And so then I went back to Bennington for a year or so, and then graduated. And then I had a short list of like, what I was going to do next. And Frank Gehry, an opportunity came up there.

So I worked in Santa Monica for about a year, building the bent plywood furniture for Knoll. And I was a Knoll employee, but I worked with Frank and actually for someone who right out of school, had a lot of time with Frank and we became friends and we’re still friends.

And at this point, there’s something called knolling, which of course has become integral to your process and how you like to describe your work. Can you explain, A. were you having a good time in LA? And B. How did this idea of knolling strike you personally so deeply? If you could also explain what it is.

So when you’re cleaning up a wood shop, you take all the tools and you lay them out on the table and you blow it all off with a compressor and you lay them all out at 90 degrees or parallel angles so that there’s lots of space and you can see what you have. And sort of like cleaning up without really cleaning up, you just kind of visually organize it so it takes up less chaotic space. It’s just a way of organizing your stuff neatly so that your mind can see it quickly without getting caught up in it.

And Andrew Kromelow, who’s an artist that I went to Bennington with, who also studied architecture and sculpture, was the janitor at Frank Gehry’s. And I said, Andrew, what does it call when you line everything up like that? And he looked up on the wall and there was a Knoll sign and he said, knolling?

And that’s how the word stuck, but it’s something that’s gained traction. I think probably because Knoll was such an iconic brand and in particular, the furniture of Florence Knoll was the most knolled furniture. I always thought that the Knoll sofa and the credenza and all that stuff was like really the apotheosis of the Bauhaus movement. I mean, she was like the sexy niece of Mies van der Rohe, but really the values of the Bauhaus were in her work best. And I still think if you were to look up sofa in the dictionary, there should be a picture of Florence Knoll sofa. That’s to me the most iconic piece of furniture that exists.

And so it’s kind of like the design or woodshop equivalent of like a mise en place for a chef where everything is sort of laid out and organized in front of you.

Exactly. I think it’s the same. 

And so like, why over the years has it struck you? Is it because it’s bringing order from chaos in a sense?

Well, yeah, because sometimes it doesn’t make sense to put everything in your shop away. You want it out so you can use it, but it takes up a lot of space and you’ve got to clean. And sometimes having a little bit of something to do that’s meditative, that still connects you with your tools and your stuff is part of work. I don’t really believe in writer’s block. There’s times when information flows and when it gets stuck. But when it gets stuck, there’s so many strategies that are worth doing. For example, clean and knoll your space because you have to clean and knoll your space. The worst time to clean and knoll your space is when you’re in the middle of an inspiration streak. But streaks come and go. And the key to getting over them is recognizing that you’re in one and stopping immediately. I really believe if at first you don’t succeed, give up immediately.

It’s crazy to resist. It’s going to happen. But what you do with that time, if you spend that time cleaning and setting your tools or sharpening your chisels if you’re a carpenter or whatever, stretching a canvas, doing all that blue collar stuff that’s important to do because it bonds you with the process. You can’t just show up at the pitcher’s mound and throw a perfect fastball. You got to warm up. Whoever you are, no one is immune. Even Louis Armstrong has to warm up his voice and his hands and play. We’re organic structures. We have to warm up. There’s no way around it. 

Things like writer’s block are just when you get so rigid and stuck that you decide to stress about it. Of course, this is an incredibly privileged position. My privilege in this case is time. Some of us don’t have time. We got to get through it. But even then, just a few minutes of knolling. That’s why I trust cigarette smokers. I think cigarettes, not vaping, but cigarette smokers are great because it’s the exact amount of time, 10 minutes to take a break and think about something. Instead of wasting five hours, take 10 minutes and meditate. Sorry, I hate to use the word meditation. It’s so contaminated. But just to get a different perspective on something. That’s all art ever is, is a different perspective. From a certain point of view, the opposite’s equally valid.

After LA, you eventually moved back to New York and opened your own studio in the 1990s. In those early days, there was this now legendary piece in the Barneys window. What were those early years like for you? It was maybe 1994, because I think that’s when Barneys happened.

I moved to New York. I had a job at Barneys, New York, installing a Frank Gehry bent plywood furniture window. It was weird because I had done pretty much a year as an apprentice. I had a pretty elite level of high-end carpentry. After a year of doing something every day, working under a true master, I had the ability to do bent plywood furniture better than anyone on earth because we had invented a bunch of technologies in this team. It was only three of us, under Frank. So for someone so young, I was very lucky. I fell into a group of very high-level makers. I was the assistant so I learned a lot. Then I wound up as a janitor at Barneys, New York, helping out, painting windows out, and just schlepping.

I very quickly found myself in a position of being indispensable because I was a welder and a carpenter so I could fix stuff. I helped for four or five years doing all kinds of things at Barneys. I built whole boutiques for Azzedine Alaïa. I did window displays and lighting. I would travel around the tri-state area painting and setting up windows under someone else’s design, sometimes designing them myself or contributing to a design team. This is all under Simon Doonan’s leadership.

The Christmas windows were the main thing of the year. We’d start in July, for Christmas. One year, all the famous artists were asked to contribute a piece that was to be auctioned off for the Little Red Schoolhouse. Because I had worked there for a while, I asked if I could add a piece, too. There were famous artists like Ross Bleckner and Brice Marden, who had big careers and showed up at places like Mary Boone Gallery. They had their pieces. I made a Hello Kitty Nativity, which was like a creche about two feet wide with a Hello Kitty as baby Jesus and Hello Kitty Madonna as Mother Mary and Bart Simpsons as the Three Kings. It was all inside of a McDonald’s restaurant. It was in the display and the Catholic League protested and sent death threats. Barneys pulled it out of the window and issued a full-page apology in The New York Times. There was a cover in the New York Post, “Away With a Manger.”

Yeah, I’ve seen the cover. It’s in the book. Maybe I just saw it online.

Is it in the book, the cover? Is there a picture of the cover in the book? There should have been a picture of it. We’ll have to find a way of doing some content around that because that’s a great… I mean, if you go to the New York Post website, there were thousands and thousands of fantastic covers about great moments in history and this super lowball approach. I don’t know. I guess it must have been a slow news day that day. Well, it’s local news. Local news.

Hey, listen, that’s their bread and butter at the New York Post, is outrage over artists and anything lefty, I guess. 

And so, obviously, that was a big turning point for you. Did that invigorate you to be kind of the most controversial artist in New York at the time, even if it was only for a week or something?

It was scary because there were death threats. There was antisemitism. People in my family were mad at me. “How dare you insult someone else’s religion after our people have been persecuted for so long? You’re not showing tolerance.” I was like, come on, it’s Christmas. It’s bullshit and you fucking know it. This is like the commercialization of Christmas. This isn’t about baby Jesus. This is about Chanel.

If I remember correctly, the Hello Kitty is wearing a dominatrix outfit.

Hello Kitty is just Hello Kitty. I think he’s naked. I think he doesn’t have any genitals. I don’t remember. But the mother, Mary, Madonna is in Madonna Sex. I don’t know if you remember Madonna Sex.

Yes, of course, a legendary book.

And actually, one of the jobs I had at Barney’s was I set up the Madonna Sex window, the metal book with a spiral. And I had to make aluminum Christmas trees that were spiral bound, like a forest of them behind the book that was on a pedestal. That was one of the jobs. So, I was very familiar with the book and it was a great book too. I don’t own a copy of it, but I remember we had one precious copy of it and I had to take care of it. But I looked at every picture because it was so like sexy.

It’s really one of the great Madonna moments. So, I made it like a bustier and she even had a headset just like the one I’m wearing. Because when she was in the sex dominatrix thing on stage, she performed with this kind of like—that was that time where you performed with a headset. Unlike now, it’s just invisible. That was part of it. And I think the three kings, there were three Bart Simpsons, they wore Hermes belts. And the manger had a McDonald’s logo on top and it was all inside of a shell of a TV that was like the box. It was like a Sony. It’s on the back. It said Sony even. Sony’s a brand that was always been important to me. 

Looking back on it today, it would be kind of tame. I don’t think it would be that controversial today probably.

Well, the thing about innovation, and I think this is why comedians kill themselves all the time, is because it’s only funny if you think outside the box, right? It’s only because no one had thought of it before. So, it’s new information.

And then once you think outside the box and make that joke or make that innovative artwork or whatever, that box gets bigger. And everyone’s sort of collective thought has to be even bigger than that box. It requires more. So, it’s this constant seeking of innovation that I think pushes those guys beyond where they can take it because we all have our limits.

And despite it being sort of scary and controversial and everything, did it actually spur the career in a way? Was it kind of a big bang? Or was it just kind of at the same time-ish?

It was scary and exciting. And I was on TV and the news and there’s a lot of press and stuff. And there was a news truck that pulled up in front of the studio and ran electricity into my studio. It was very scary. And I still had a job at Barney’s. So, I was very concerned with my relationship with the brand because I had a good relationship with everyone.

I mean, Simon Doonan, I think if you ask him, probably if my name comes up, he’ll have some kind of trauma response because it was really hard on him. I mean, he got death threats and it really put him under a lot of pressure that he’d probably never experienced. And he and I are still friendly and became very close through this.

And that’s where I met Glenn O’Brien, who crafted the New York Times apology. He wrote the text for it, which I didn’t really like because I thought it was placating. And I thought that it was bullshit that Barneys wanted the glamour of art without taking any of the responsibility for it. And they kowtowed to the Catholic League, which was a group that besides this, they also had a hell of an anti-condoms campaign. And by the way, this was at the height of the AIDS pandemic where condoms and communications around safe sex were so elemental to the war against AIDS. And I mean, now there’s PrEP and it’s different.

But at the time, it was like a revolution to defang condoms as being shameful. You’d have them in stores on the counter, like free, take as many as you want. That was that time, and they were against that. So, these guys were outright assholes, especially in a gay community like Barneys windows, that they would not fight, I thought was really cowardly.

But it was scary. These are just guys trying to do their job as window display artists. Not everyone has to be David Wojnarowicz or Keith Haring. People got to do what they got to do. I can’t judge them. I did then. I was pissed off because my piece got pulled out. And I wasn’t thrilled that I was not a nobody anymore. I was pissed off that my piece got banned and I had it in my studio and I still own the piece. And that’s fine. And I had some opportunities through that to be in a group, a couple of group shows, most notably at Morris Healy Gallery that then became Thomas Healy Gallery.

And that’s where I did my first two commercial art shows. And I was able , over the course of the next five years, to really spend less time as a handyman window display guy and become more of a full-time artist like I am now. Although there is one day of the year. And if you ask me on that day, and I won’t tell you what it is, I will still take a welding job.

Okay. So it’s just one day of the year on the calendar. Is it the same calendar day every year?

It’s different for everyone every year. And if you ask me on the wrong day, you’re banned for life. Set those terms for your listeners.

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In the book, you say, “When at a bricolage station, and maybe only then, am I at peace.” Can you describe what bricolage is in the context of your art and how you and your team and your studio created it and why it brings you that much peace and joy?

In sports, people talk about the zone or the flow state. My zone or flow state is when I’m making stuff. And there are a lot of different processes that I engage in. And I’m the world’s best artist at making Tom Sachs art. I see a lot of good artists out there. Sometimes I look at their art and I was like, “Oh, I could do their art better.”

Sometimes I’m like, “God, I wish I could—” I would never say anything, but sometimes I see something. I’m like, “If they would just do it a little bit more like this.” And I think that’s why people teach, is because they want to indulge those things. I would never tell someone what to do. And of course, I hate it when people tell me what to do because they’re usually wrong. And when they’re right, it’s like a gift. But that’s again, one in 365. It’s pretty rare.

So for me, bricolage is making with available limited resources. It’s kind of like, we use this word in the studio, ISRU, in situ resource utilization. And it just means like, use what you’ve got to get what you want.

And in sculpture, there’s a great heritage. Probably the most famous movement is Arte Povera in Italy in the ’60s, or even the American or international conceptual art period of ’68 to ’74. Art with a bunch of rules.

These were artists with not a lot of resources who made the best work. You know, for me, it’s just building mixed media constructions. And sometimes with more resources, and I’ve got like a professional TIG welder, like the same kind of welding machine they use for welding airplane parts. I have one here. So I use that and a hot glue gun side by side. And I think that kind of diversity of technique and materials, titanium and cardboard, is what gives the work its resonance for me. And that’s the part when I’m at peace, because it’s so fun and rewarding. And it’s been like that for many years. Not just now that I have a fancy TIG welder.

It was like that when my whole studio fit inside of a little toolbox. When I was in England, I had a metal toolbox that could hold everything I owned in one hand. And you could do the same philosophical approaches. It’s easier when you have less stuff, because you’ve less options to choose from.

And there’s a chapter on cameras, where you mentioned a camera model that you made for—same model that you made that your dad wanted to buy. And you made it out of clay as a child. And in the chapter, you write that sympathetic magic is a cornerstone of my work. And so what is sympathetic magic? And can anyone practice it?

Yes, anyone can. And some of us even do it without knowing we’re doing it. But sympathetic magic is, in a lot of ways, a lot of ways of describing it. Build it and they will come. Make a voodoo doll of your enemy and push pins into them to imagine it. Or build a model of their house, of their fort, and burn it down. Visualize the destruction. That’s sympathetic magic of the first order. Sympathetic magic of the second order is associative magic, where you get a lock of someone’s hair Or you get a guitar that Jimi Hendrix played. Or you buy a pair of Air Jordans because you want to be a better basketball player. So, at least your feet look like Michael Jordan’s. And then through that, you can assume his power on some emotional level and channel it and be actually better. And it works. Both of those ways work.

The most beautiful form of sympathetic magic I can think of is an ex voodoo where you build a model of your ailing limb, like a broken arm, and you bring it to your religious practitioner who prays to it and helps you pray to it so that you believe that you will heal. And if you are sick or injured and you believe that you will never get better, you will never get better. But if you are sick and injured and you believe that you will get better, you might get better. And might is a whole lot better than won’t. It’s not a guarantee, but it sets you in a positive direction towards making your life the way you want it to be.

And like I said before, if you say you’re an astronaut, you are one. I learned that at Bennington. Sidney Tillim corrected me and everyone who had come across him saying, you know, “I’m an art student.” And he said, “No, you’re an artist. You might be 18 years old, but you’re an artist now. And we’re going to hold you to those standards.” And if you don’t know who Brancusi is, go to the library and look him up or go on the internet and look it up. And it’s because, like, start now. Start now with what you believe in.

And you’ve created furniture that’s very real and showing at Salon 94. And you’ve done shoes with Nike that you can actually purchase. And I believe you just reintroduced a few that will be coming out in September.

They will be out by the time this comes out. 

They will be.

Yes, they’ll be out. Mars Yard 3.0 is out. And also a new shoe that we can’t name because we’re naming it now. It will have been named by the time this comes out. More stuff’s coming.

So, I mean, how do you feel about the dividing line between design and art? I mean, do you consider the sneakers you’re creating for Nike to be a work of art of yours or a work of design? Or do you not care?

Well, first, I would just say that it’s not what you can do for Nike. It’s what Nike can do for you. The shoes, the Mars Yard shoes, the General Purpose shoes. are the official shoes of the studio. So if you share our values, these are the shoes of the studio. We’re a professional sculpture-making team. And Nike makes shoes for us to make stuff.

And you, Dan, and you, dear listeners, are part of our community enough that you’ve listened this long in this interview that you care enough and you could easily click away. So, you know, if you have a body, you’re an athlete. And in a shop, we need shoes. So, Nike makes our shoes. I don’t draw a distinction between a poem, a video, a sculpture, a painting, or a sneaker. It’s all sculpture to me.

I felt this way for many, many years, I think, probably when I saw the first Air Jordans and I saw people fighting over them. And I also saw the power of sympathetic magic of, like, wearing—I remember wearing the soccer cleats of my favorite soccer player in high school and seeing—not seeing and understanding, but understanding without thinking of the power of this. So with the Nike Craft brand, which is General Purpose shoes and Mars Yard shoes, the idea is of doing—owning less and doing more, of taking care of your stuff.

Instead of buying 50 sneakers, like throwing your old ones in a washing machine, maybe get a new pair of laces and a sock liner for it, and showing that they’re clean, but they’re worn. Or showing that they’re worn, but they’re clean, and that they have a And that their stains and tears and things are all scars of labor, and that beauty isn’t limited to youth and to new, but beauty is also linked and represented by experience. And we know this through our love of jeans that have holes in them. And we criminalize this activity by buying acid-washed genes or genes that have holes pre-made into them, because we’re culturally appropriating the value of labor. We’re saying, I worked hard, look at the holes in my jeans, versus buying a new pair of jeans and wearing them for a decade and earning those holes and having a greater connection with your jeans and showing the truth of that. I’m not saying it’s deserving of prison time, but it is a sort of morally criminal act to represent that you did something when you didn’t do it. There’s a rule in skateboarding photography, you can’t publish a picture of a trick unless the person lands it.

And a lot of your work, especially the earlier work, skewered luxury labels and brought to light the artificiality of luxury and what it all means. But that world has changed so much. Do you think a lot of that you could do today?

Because what you did before was almost like satire, but now that so many luxury brands are such lifestyle creations, it wouldn’t be weird to do a Chanel chainsaw, in a weird way. It used to be transgressive, or if Chanel did skis, it would be like, “Ooh, it’s so weird and new.” But now, obviously you took it to an extreme, but it has changed. That world has changed a lot in the past 30 years. Is that accurate, do you think?

I think that’s a good… Yeah, I would say that sure, I skewered Chanel with a Chanel guillotine or Prada toilet or whatever. But at the same time that I was skewering them, I was also amplifying them and admiring them. I was working at Barneys. I wanted Hermes. I remember I went down to Canal Street and I bought a fake Hermes belt and I wore it to a party. And then I saw someone at the party with a real Hermes belt and I saw how fake mine looked and I pulled out my sweater and put it over. I didn’t want anyone to see it because I was so embarrassed. Because I aspired, like everyone else who shops on Canal, to have this expensive thing that I didn’t have the resources to buy. So at the same time as I was attacking it, I was also admiring it.

And in college, in my punk rock days, I was really against something like Chanel. But when I moved to New York and I was working at Barneys, I started meeting people who were gorgeous wearing Chanel and Alaïa. And when I discovered how epic Alaïa could be, I kind of fell in love with how fashion could really… I fell in love with women who were beautifully dressed. Whereas before that, I only wanted filthy punk girls. I was turned off by that. And what happened was that my horizons were expanded. My friends were incredibly well-dressed, men and women. And I went to check out Patricia Fields and there was a sales associate there named Lonnie Barnes. And I tried on a pair of reflective Scotchlite jeans. And they were really expensive, like $300 or something. But they were so cool. I tried them on and he was like, “Just keep them.” I was like, “What do you mean?” He was like, “They look good on you.”

And Lonnie, God bless him, kind of set me on a road for hybridization of simultaneously loving fashion and hating it. Or hating it first, maybe, and then loving it equally. And that duality is what makes it art and not propaganda.

And do you think that there was a disconnect between how you felt about the art that you were creating, and what the greater culture or the fashion world proper thought about it? Because when I think about it, there’s a famous book by Dana Thomas, the fashion critic, called How Luxury Lost Its Luster. And your work is on the cover. And it’s a McDonald’s meal, but it’s all with Prada logos. And today you might be like, “Oh, wow, what a cool collab.” But maybe back then someone might be like, “Oh, fashion has changed so much.”

Do you think there’s a disconnect between what you meant to say and what people thought it was?

Well, I think Dana’s book, and I’ve read it, is half the story. But I think the opposite is equally valid. I think it’s both. And I can’t speak to people’s interpretations because everyone’s opinions are like assholes. Everyone’s got one. But I kind of don’t care. I hope that you—in my dream, everyone sees both sides. That’s my job as an artist, is to provide that opportunity. But people are going to pick one side.

And there are very few people, and those are the people who tend to be my friends, see both because we’re aligned politically. And I think that’s the sophistication of it. Those who see how beautiful it looks, and those who also see how corrupt and usury it is for advertising to say, “Hey, get this car and you’ll get the girl.” Or “Get this dress and you’ll get the guy.” Or “If you drink this, you’ll be skinny and then you’ll be loved.” Or whatever. Like those values that don’t really serve our own sense of self-worth, but that amplify external standards of excellence and acceptance is what advertising preys on our weakness. And of course, nothing does that more than Instagram, because it’s not just there to sell you a car or a dress. It’s there to consume your attention and time. It’s your views that have value in that economic structure. And so it’s specifically appealed to giving a promise that can never be delivered. And whatever part of the limbic part of the brain, like sex or survival or caring for the young, that is.

And speaking of astronauts and believing you’re an astronaut, you’ve done a lot of work with all things NASA related, like rockets and spacesuits and lunar modules and things like that. I think today as space exploration has become more privatized and maybe the golden era of NASA is over, has it lost some of its appeal to you in 2025, this idea? Or is it really that you just love that period of optimism and big, giant design projects the whole world was pinning their hopes on?

So in September, we just closed our fifth Space Program, which is Space Program Five in the Infinite and Beyond. And it was in Seoul at the Dongdaemun Design Plaza, where artists went to, in this case. But we’re going back to Mars, we got sidetracked and ran into a UAP, an Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena. It’s kind of like the PC version of UFO. It’s a little more general.

New names. We need new names.

Yeah, well, I mean, there’s advantages to being more general and to being more specific. You know, these are Gesamtkunstwerks. These are total works of art. These are large scale, sort of like performance pieces, although we have a swear jar. If you say performance, you have to put a Euro in a jar. We say “live demonstrations of our systems” and our space programs.

And we’ve been to the moon and to Mars and Europa and Vesta. We just had this UAP incident on our fifth mission. And we have full size LEM and mission control and spacesuits and everything works. And it’s all made of cardboard and duct tape and plywood. But our spacesuits are sealed, so we really have to pump breathable air into them and they get hot. So we have to have cooling layers. And we made the only lunar module that stands on its own four legs. In other words, a lot of assholes have made their own lunar module for their high school stage production or triage. But there’s always a central column. So ours stands on its own four legs. So it’s built the way the ones that are on the moon are built. There’s a lot of high level of detail. This isn’t method acting. This is a way of creating authentic stakes. It’s not unrelated to sympathetic magic. If you build all those details, then the experience becomes more real for you. And guess what? I’ve had multiple invitations to go to space as an astronaut because of my work in the space program.

I’ve been invited to be the artist-in-residence at Jet Propulsion Laboratories, Entry, Descent, Landing Team. I designed the mission patch. Still really close to the EDL team and spend time at Caltech with those guys when I can and continue to work on future missions together.

I think we’re all a little frustrated that things didn’t go in the direction that they could have, that we haven’t gone to Europa yet, which would be really great because then we could really prove that life is on other worlds and finally really kill God and show that science is the religion of our time. I mean, it kind of is, but it just would be a really nice nail in the coffin of the whole God myth. We don’t know if there’s life on Europa, but it’s the best chance we have.

The good money is on going there and checking it out and getting an answer. If we find that there isn’t life there, that’s pretty impressive, but there’s a good chance. We’ve proven that it’s got all the stuff to support life.

But the Europa Clipper that’s going there now is just going to fly through a plume of the gas that’s exposed to space. I think we might get a little more evidence on that, but it’s a slower burn. It’s not going to happen in our lifetime because it takes whatever, seven years to get there.

So we got to go there, get that, and then build something that can actually land on the surface. We’ve got designs for the design reference architecture for how to do its setup. That’s been for many years, but just organizing the public relations that supports the sense of collective importance that we go there is not lined up. You just have extremists like me and scientists who think it’s important, but people just want their Starlink. That’s more important because it’s more immediate. It’s hard to justify.

And speaking of the grave, as my last question, I’m sorry, this is also the peak existentialist question. As someone who enjoys playing with these realms of consumerism, culture, and craft, have you thought about what you want to do with your body after death? Will it be a Tom Sachs-like mausoleum?

My body, like my carcass?

Yeah, or your funeral or anything. You yourself and your final resting place.

So, Nathan Austin and Mary Frye, who I will do my best to outlive, are authorized to execute my final wishes. My Laura knows what they are. And it’s a Viking funeral. Of course, it’s a Viking funeral. 50 miles offshore, international waters, Tyler Hayes and I designed the boat. It’s a steel boat filled with kerosene. That’s offshore. 12 of my best friends are on another boat, a fast boat, because 50 miles is far. So they’re on like a cigarette boat. They launch flaming arrows at the funeral barge until it catches fire. The body, because it’s on a steel boat with kerosene, is completely incinerated before it sinks, before it heats up enough that the hull is breached and it sinks. But we need total incineration. And that’s why there’s kerosene, because it’s oily and it burns for a long time before the steel breaches, which also needs to happen so the whole thing sinks. It’s time. It’s like an engineering thing.

And it’s hard because I have a Jewish family and they’re going to want it to happen fast. And I don’t know how long it’s going to take to build this thing. So maybe I’ll start building it now. And then the crew of 12 people go back to whatever, Pier 29 or wherever they came from. And they have to listen to The Pogues and they can only drink Jameson so they get all seasick and drunk and hate me.

Thank you to my guest, Tom Sachs, as well as to everyone at Phaidon for making this episode happen. The editor of The Grand Tourist is Stan Hall. To keep this going, don’t forget to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter, The Grand Tourist Curator at thegrandtourist.net. And follow me on Instagram at @danrubinstein. And follow The Grand Tourist on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. And leave us a rating or comment. Every little bit helps. Til next season!

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