The Magnificient Seven
Hitsville U.K.
Junco Partner
Ivan Meets G.I. Joe
The Leader
Something About England
Rebel Waltz
Look Here
The Crooked Beat
Somebody Got Murdered
One More Dub
Up In Heaven (Not Only Here)
Corner Soul
Let's Go Crazy
If Music Could Talk
The Sound Of The Sinners
Police On My Back
Midnight Log
The Equaliser
The Call Up
Washington Bullets
Broadway
Lose This Skin
Charlie Don't Surf
Mensforth Hill
Junkie Slip
The Street Parade
Version City
Living In Fame
Synthetic Mars Rocks (Sandinista),
2016
Plywood, epoxy resin, lead, latex paint, steel
Vader Fridge, 2009
Budweiser, steel, mixed media
Glove (Right), 2011
Tyvek, Velcro, G-Shock Watch, mixed-media
Kama, 2013
Bronze
Lobster, 2016
Steel, spray paint
Tape Dispenser, 2012
Plywood, steel, epoxy resin, Kapton tape
Ladle, 2016
ConEd barrier, epoxy resin, cardboard
Cinderblock (Windowed), 2009-11
Plywood, epoxy resin, steel, latex paint
In this third mission of his Space Program, Tom Sachs takes us to Europa, the icy moon of Jupiter, whose ocean is twice the size of those on Earth, and the most likely place in the outer solar system to host life. The Sachs Studio brings the best and the worst of us: the Japanese tea ceremony and colonialist hubris, the Landing Excursion Module (LEM) and trash, Isamu Noguchi and resource depletion. The journey is powered equally by scientific exploration and imperialist desire.
In our age of disaffection, the sculptures in this exhibition are also objects of love that support the rituals of studio practice, all things analog, and the handmade. Their meaning is born out of action in time–the original act of their making, and later their use, charges them with a purpose beyond art for its own sake. A postindustrial mash-up of low and high culture is expressed in the recycling of common things and pop-culture icons that–recombined–generate a self-contained DIY universe. This is not stagecraft. In the course of the exhibition, during the demonstrations that are part of the artworks' public life, the Studio activates the sculptures, imbuing them with sympathetic magic. No longer representation, the copy is the original.
Space Program: Europa traces the evolution of these ideas and their influences from birth, through appropriation and cultural hybridity, on to image and brand as art–an American story.