Further into Ourselves, Further into the Galaxy: Artist Tom Sachs

[Music] hello everyone and welcome to the Nationals 360 speaker series I'm curator of Education Anna Smith and today I'm pleased to introduce exhibition artist Tom sacks I've spoken with a lot of people who find the Nasher to be a restorative space and indeed rain Asher's urban oasis provides the perfect surroundings for a sublime meditative or enlightening encounter with art this fall Tom sacks has taken that experience a step further transforming the upstairs galleries into a handcrafted tea garden that merges ritual with playfulness while managing to avoid what the artist has described as the cringe lined road to whimsy [Music] saxs work has been exhibited widely in the US and abroad and has been collected by the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum the Museum of Modern Art the Whitney Museum of American Art the Santa George Pompidou the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Astrup fairly mosaic for Madonna kunst Oslo the artists recent solo exhibitions include the Park Avenue Armory the Noguchi Museum the Brooklyn Museum and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts San Francisco concurrent with this exhibition at the naturally west water in New York will present an exhibition of sculptures by sex called objects of devotion the artists interpretation of wonder common on view through October 20th of this year joining Saxon conversation is masher chief curator Jed Morse who has been with our institution since its inception and has recently organized major exhibitions featuring Michael Dean Joel Shapiro and Veronica Johnson's and giuseppe peano named i've really enjoyed hearing sex speak about his work throughout the week so I know you're all in for a really great conversation today please join me now in welcoming Tom sacks and Jed Morris [Applause] well welcome everyone to another edition of 360 and it's great to have Tom with us here just a little bit of some orientation for those of you who have spent time already in the galleries and seen the exhibition you may not have found everything there is to see there is quite a bit that meanders throughout the galleries and even out into the garden and so you know today we are going to try and talk about everything of course there is the tea garden in gallery 1 there are some important early works too that are about the origins of the tea ceremony in the small gallery outside of our executive offices and then there is a selection of objects from Tom's career that look at his at the influence of modernism and of course expounding and expanding on that is Tom's selection of works from the National collection in gallery 2 so hopefully we'll be able to get through as as much of that as possible but I wanted to start at the beginning at least of the tea ceremony material which of course was the space program 2.0 Mars performance at the Park Avenue Armory in 2012 and one of one of the reasons I'm glad we can talk about this with images behind us because it I think it helps give a sense of the enormity of of the task in terms of what it takes to create one of these monumental performances and it allows me to show the the LEM can you can you tell us just a little bit about I mean obviously the space program has a long and storied history within your your body of work but but tell us a little bit about the the enormous lunar landing module that you built for this and the space program 2.0 Mars performance well we call it a it is a performance but internally we have a swear jar every time you say the word performance you got to put a quarter in the jar but but we use the word live demonstration of our systems okay but in all external turn in fact I was I was there was a review on KQED where they described me as a performance artist and I felt really honored because there's no higher calling I mean that yeah and but our space program is a real space program we landed on Mars at the Park Avenue Armory two women took the first steps at human beings took on the surface of Mars we we excavated the 1850 landmark flooring we better to ask beg for forgiveness and ask for permission we ripped up the floorboards and collected moon rocks yeah those are on display it's brawny less water but if we can good to go back for a second this lamb there are a lot of if you look on the internet a lot of a lot of Schmucks have made their own lamb in their backyard for high school productions but only mine and the other NASA you know the ones who went to the moon and Smithsonian stuff have their own lamb that doesn't have a central column where they the whole weight of it is is supported by four feet and I just think it's an important distinction to make because that means the thing has to be made exactly right and the way the other ones are made and it's those details which we'll get into in the tea ceremony yeah that really define the thing and and details that it would take you days to go through to see I just you know that's my pleasure is exploring investigating and building all that and it's we should say that you know this is not this is not just a sculpture it's it's actually used people enter into it so the fact that it doesn't have a central column supporting it is significant because people actually inhabit that module and then of course you have an enormous command center from which you control all of this so the story of this Mars mission is is told from Mission Control there are 48 screens and then there's a switchboard that puts the screen that we're looking at at the top and you can see the the smaller earth so there's the large Earth projected then there's a smaller one below it and that that's a video and then if you look in the upper right you'll see the the small surveillance of that same image and it's a camera on a model of a globe on a string on a motor getting closer or farther away one of 48 special effects so one of the important and momentous happenings within the mission to Mars is this is where the first tea ceremony took place so we so at the other NASA where I did a residency at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena they are very careful to scrub their spaceship there's their ships and probes so that when they land on Mars they don't infect Mars with earth bacteria it's called it's an accord called a planetary protection protocol and it's taken really seriously by scientists and my space program I didn't want to miss the opportunity to represent myself as sort of the darker side of humanity as imperialists who you know go to from Europe to the new world and affect Aboriginal people with smallpox or go to Argentina and bring back silver and ruin their local economy and in Europe I want to sort of infect Mars with the best of what humanity has to offer and that's a huge arguable thing you know we were talking about the art of the African Diaspora as being the most important thing and it certainly is from the American experience but the tradition of the tea ceremony the Japanese tea ceremony which has its roots in China but the modern tea ceremony which starts in the 16th century is Japanese and this tea house in the gallery is a four and a half mat and you can see the formats and the centre-half mat traditional shape it's very kind of common and popular so we tried to represent and continue to and I think that we're successful in our own hillbilly kind of way many aspects of the ceremony and with the with the depth and seriousness that we take to everything whether it's the space program or so what why was the tea ceremony the the the you know the important aspect of you know human values that you would want to infect Mars with it well you know there's so many reasons you know there's sort of four reasons why you do a tea ceremony for hospitality tranquility harmony respect the tea ceremony represents all of the artistic practices you know there's performance there's religion you know or philosophy anyway would then depending on how you look at it there's architecture with a house and the tea bowls themselves there's crafts there's poetry in the scrolls it was a poem on the scroll in the tokonoma the shrine it's it's an elite activity it's something that is for aristocratic or wealthy wealthy Japanese people in the 16th century and it continues to be as you know if you have a tea house in your room it's a status symbol today or monks who have so beyond wealth they just don't even deal with money but you know so the lead is I love because I'm an artist I'm offended by because I'm a consumer yeah but somewhere in between those contradictions is where this this thing lies and I you in a way you could choose a lot of things to represent what human culture is but I like the tea ceremony in it if I can go on yeah yeah yeah you know there are just just by the way well we'll we'll walk them through the tea ceremony in the tea garden in excruciating detail during this conversation okay great so that you know there there are there are sort of three main reasons why people go to space or do the tea ceremony is that a good time for this yeah it's a really good one and this um you know so number one is like philosophy or religion you know Zen or in science community is what when we come from it was the origin of life you know before evolution you know what's the spark of life and science and religion don't really know how to answer that but there's there's there's philosophy and and spirituality in that and then the second reason people are into things in general is sensuality in tea ceremony it's the taste of the tea that caffeine high the smell of the tatami you know sound like the beautiful sound of boiling water if you really obsess over it it's gorgeous or in the space program it's adventure you know the sensuality climbing the top of a mountain putting yourself at risk adrenaline all those feelings and then the third reason people are into both any of any activity is stuff you know they're rocket scientists but they're also rocket engineers it's way more blue-collar although all my friends at NASA who are engineers are extremely philosophical you know they're all PhDs and and you can't tell who's an engineer and who's a scientist and they cross lines all the time and you know those guys are into stuff because they like Rockets because they go boom make noise and they fly through the air and when I was a kid that was the thing I was remember looking up the word space in the dictionary and my grandfather and being so annoyed that there wasn't a picture of a rocket it was just talking about literally the space between atoms or nothingness of course very zen in itself and then of course in the tea ceremony that the rocket is replaced with the stuff the architecture the tea bowls the whisks the scoop the water pot the kettle the house the kimonos the and that's what this show is made up of there's all the stuff and I can't think of a better two things as armatures for me as a maker than the tea ceremony you know I get to make 500 Chow on you can see my first hundred experiments in the cabinet upstairs upstairs my cabinet of losers it takes me a hundred to make one now my average is better I'm getting one in twenty but that's been five years and you know or I get to make a bonsai tree from scratch out of things that are everyday objects and connect with things that are part of my life know q-tips and toothbrushes yeah so so this you know this kind of obsessiveness about something that the tea ceremony and the mission to Mars opened up another rabbit hole for you a new universe in the universe of the Japanese tea ceremony and clearly you know the the first tea on Mars which we have memorialized and on display upstairs you weren't satisfied with the cup which led to all of these so this is a great story if we go back to the so I bought that cup on eBay and I engraved the NASA logo on and my very close friend the great artist they serve the ceramics master of New York City JJ Pete who's in as some of you may know and we'll know after this because you're gonna look him up online he said to me shame on you how could you buy that why didn't you make that I said JD I don't know how to make a ceramic Chawan and he said well I'll teach you and I said what do you mean it's like oh I'm a ceramics master I teach at a 92nd Street Y in Columbia University and so I started taking classes at the wine that and I've been working since 2012 say and making Jones and every morning I including this past couple of weeks here in my hotel room I make before I look at my email before I see the horrible things that are happening to our country in the New York Times I touch clay and I try and do something that channels my subconscious thought because the day will get in my emails will get in I can't avoid it all day long and it's my it's sort of my meditation I do every day so it'll be nine cha WA Dallas Jones I don't know how many of them will survive and so you went into the rabbit hole and you found these two guys you you do you recognize these images so this is a test so I know that send note tanaka on the right and that's Riku what is that Rick you well because I was gonna that would be the logical image but is that really him yeah well that was one of the depictions okay and the museum in his hometown so I'm not as familiar with this with this image no no I know you you use the other one another one as the basis for the scroll of Muhammad Ali that's in the tokonoma I just didn't want to assume that was Rick you never accuse uniformed it would have been like you know I don't want to say you know all Asian people look the same net but I don't recognize his face right that is his hat yes and as his monk's robe yeah and so Rick you was the monk adviser under Hideyoshi and hideo she was the you know the great unifier feudal Japan in the 16th century and he was kind of he became very powerful he was kind of like the Henry Kissinger of Beatle Japan and long horrible story short he you know did all these he got really cocky and he did all these pranks on Hideyoshi and he was the first guy to tell rich people that it was cool to dress and act like four people because Hideo she wore purple silk gowns and Rick you wore brown burlap and the whole tea ceremonies is it's really about avoiding ostentation you know how he was a guy who carved vessels out of out of bamboo and neither for the most thing the most important tea Bowl of all the tea bowls the dozen or so remaining tea bowls by chojuro Toshiro was a roofer he made like Japanese terracotta it's called raku ware but it's basically roofing tile and he made these terrible lead-lined tea bowls that are the most coveted in fact I spoke with a Japanese antiquities dealer and I said how much do those chose hero things come up and he said well they never come up and when they do they're automatically either important national property or national treasure the two rankings of like highest valued objects in Japan so then there are none in private hands and he was kind of the guy who started the raku school which there is a kitchen so mom 15th now there are 15 generations or 16 I think I should know someone in this room knows of descendants of chojuro who whose father was abducted from Korea because Hideo she in one of his imperialist gestures and one of his attempts to invade Korea he tried twice and failed but on one of the trips he brought back Korean Potter's and and forced them at sword point to make Korean pottery in Japan and that and the and Jef Japan emerged a generation later as a leader in ceramics through this this abduction in the same way that they stole or took on trips the tea from China and developed it or much later the way the sort of copied German optics around the time of the war and improve them so things that were made by like guns ice are perfected and made better and cheaper and more plentiful by cannon and and an icon and then on the right we've got that's n-no Tanaka yeah the son of Zen doe Tanaka send owes the Sun this is the father oh the father but the young in a young father the young photo yes that's right right thank you and so the son this guy's son wrote the date well the father wrote a book called the tea ceremony and his son wrote the second edition the tea ceremony and if there was a place somewhere in the book shop or a learning center be great to have a copy of this I don't know but if it Jed's got a copy and you can ask him about it but it's the Bible of the tea ceremony it's my mcmaster-carr catalog the teas are mine the sons version taken heart likes the father is one because the photography is better but the second one has more definitions and detailed as more of an addiction of a textbook yeah and they're both great so we have the this essentially the two you know the two fathers of the modern tea ceremony sentence said no Rikyu whose 16th century kind of codified the Japanese tea ceremony and said no Tanaka who wrote the book that made Japanese tea ceremony accessible to the english-speaking world and so that that brings us to your your tea garden you know and so I've I've arranged the images so that we can kind of walk them through the tea garden so that they so that you know they can have a sense of you know each each kind of element and of course you know these things are sculptures that are installed in a sculpture museum but of course you know they serve a ritualistic purpose and so I've interspersed some photos of you in Dakin from from the Noguchi Museum so when you hear us refer to Dakin or Dakin Hart he is the senior curator at the Noguchi Museum who initially organized the exhibition there last year so this is this is the entrance gate what you know what's what's the purpose of this kind of liminal separation before you go into the so the garden in a traditional tea house this would be the gate between the house that you live in and the and the gate to the garden and the idea here is an ideal sense you've kind of left left your possessions behind and you're beginning to go from your normal world into the extraordinary world or into the into a place where you've reduced your external inputs it's a little goat will go through several gates in this conversation but this is the first this is this is the first gate and it leads you into what's called the outer garden and here there there's knowing one exact perfect tea garden because it there are always in nature and they're always adaptations but if you look through the send note Anika's book you'll see a pretty good floor plan of all the major tro and we represent every one of them so you might see something like a koi pond you might see a brand kuzey might see some stones contemplative stones a sand a big bunch of sand raked by monks all kinds of things but you'll all feel awful often also see a an outhouse a place to go to the bathroom and a place to smoke cigarettes and that sort of on the I don't know if you have a picture of it later but on the that's a that's an outhouse but it's an airplane lavatory from a sit Boeing 767 that I meticulously crafted out of out of you know construction barriers and corrugated tin it's got an incinerator toilet for the waste and it's got a vacuum cleaner to suck the water out of the sink it works please don't use it but in a way you know that was an object that I've always been really interested in for a number of pop-culture reasons and also personal reasons the only place you can have a sense of privacy for a few moments in a place that we routinely or jammed into this room with 300 other people but it's also model of efficiency it's kind of one of the triumphs of modern design I even looked at installing one in my apartment in a renovation but it was just too disgusting the idea was cool but but then on the left you can kind of see a waiting are brought up I don't know what great so this is this is an important rest stop and and and here you would take off your shoes and maybe put on a pair of shoes from our shoe library and these are some Nike running shoes that I mangled into becoming a pair of slippers and maybe we you could also have a smoke there's a tobacco bond traditional tobacco bond or drink of water and there's also a Faraday cage I don't know oh thank you you're way ahead of me so this is a very very important object a Faraday cage is a is a mesh box that blocks transmission so you put your cell phone and in here and maybe your watch and jewelry anything that might distract you and distract the other participants in the ceremony and I got this idea when I was doing a kind of I did a little bit of a residency with the New York Rangers around this time and some friends on the team and the guy who was in charge of sharpening all the skates and doing repairing all the pads confiscated this the the two cell phones of each of the players so that they wouldn't text their wives or their girlfriends in during the in between periods and so there's a saying at the top and you can't really read it but it says to wives and sweethearts may they never meet and this duality of you know secrecy is also a kind of part of my Cold War obsession in the space program and you can see two padlocks and the idea is that you as the guests would have one key and I would have the other key so at the end of the ceremony we both have to reunite in order to unlock your precious precious cellphone which but not when she wouldn't be able to do anything important in your life and then I this is such a beautiful photograph right I haven't included and it's a small thing but it's it's visible within the shoe library what's what's the purpose of this this so what you're looking at is a bowl or if we use Dachau on which is not traditionally perfect but it's important to remember that with the T Sarah my fear you know bust my chops later for getting in something wrong and detail and if you look closely you'll see a lot that's wrong but it's important the tea ceremony is adaptation creative adaptation and some you know using the right thing for the wrong reason is as a Japanese world called metate and it also is linked to the ready-made and people I'm not the first I've read in other places but there was a great connection between Sen no Rikyu use of metate and marcel duchamp's use of the ready-made you know the urinal as a fountain a piece of bamboo as a Vaz and Rikyu was a famous prankster and he in in in that's it's the first recorded use of this concept is Rikyu so but this is ash and charcoal ash and in that is buried a lump of red-hot charcoal and with chopsticks you scrape off the top and those little concentric lines are are used with it by a chopstick by hand and to hide and bury the ash so it stays warm you know jet Japan had cotton but it didn't have wool so if you look at all those samurai movies they're always shivering and these houses with paper walls and but if you look into it a little bit more deeply and the best book on that if you want to geek out is Edward Morse his architecture of traditional Japan it's like it was a part of he was one of those guys part of those waves of Americans and Australians who first came to Europe and the to Japan and the at the end of the 19th century and he kind of got into describing how these in very racist terms how these savages live with greater civility than we do in Victorian England but and and one of the things that was done then and is traditionalist you'd be as you enter a house you'd be given a bowl of coals in your hands and you maybe put it your feet with a blanket over it to keep you warm so there's a tremendous amount of coal stuff going on and this is probably the best example of it because it's used just to light up a pipe it's a small amount it also is a you know it seems like a kind of microcosmic e vocation of Mount you know Fuji you know because that you know the sloping of the of the ash and this this kind of glowing coal in the middle it's like a little caldera at the top of a and a dead volcano and I thank you for reminding me that this whole project is really about these kind of subtle little gestures I'm thinking about the big picture because I'm trying to familiarize yourself yeah but that moment and we were together mm-hmm yeah when I was learning and if you watch this the movie has anyone seen the movie that world premiere of the tea ceremony movie so all right what it's playing how often at what times it's playing on the hour every day that the show is running in this room in this room so you all owe me a viewing it's ten minutes long and you can see all the stuff up upstairs in action and there's a moment where I am preparing that burying the coal and then there's a moment where my guest is using it to light her pipe and so in in this area where the guest kind of makes him or herself comfortable changes shoes has a has a smoke can use the lavatory there are also some some artifacts and artifacts play an important role in in traditional tea ceremony you were talking about certain tables having having such important cultural status and that in the the oftentimes the the host will select certain artifacts that have various importance of various meanings in order to as part of the kind of conversation that takes place throughout the tea ceremony with the guests so these are three objects that could be and that there's a shrine in the tea house called the tokonoma and the host would select something as any way of expressing something to the guests so for example a lobster in the shrine might represent long life because of that the curve of the lobsters back is like the arch of an old man's back walking with a cane these are traditional tropes in fact someone who knows the tea sari ceremony knows that that means that or there's that Kabuto helmet which is a it's kind of not super traditional to have a war or object in that room but it you could do anything it's like it's a it could be anything that you wanted to put in there and here is a sort of like a samurais helmet but I used a chainsaw operators helmet with a feather duster on top but what's interesting about putting these two things together is in the measure period when the samurai were obsolete and were rendered illegal the same craftsmen who made this helmet and you can see there's that neck protector and it telescopes it collapses up and it moves with the the warrior that kind of layering of lacquer or metal or in this case foam core is mirrored in the bronze lobster and if we go back you can kind of see the articulated carapace of the lobster with it the telescoping segments or and here used by script pliers and welded all together this the meji bronze lobster is one of the most coveted pieces of messy art and design and because it's got like you know a few hundred move moving parts its articulated some of you might know the a spray cavea silver caviar service objects is kind of like extravagant piece of silver this is kind of like my version of that and it's it's it's it's crazy detailed and you can pick it up it flops down just like a lobster made by Nature and so there there's also the saw house there and so the the the host would arrive before the guests begin to make prep prepare the garden make preparations for it and there's this photograph of you Oh doing so sorry best photo ever as in in the in the garden at the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City where the exhibition first was so you know the and you also get to see him do this in the tea ceremony movie so that you know it's important to show I thought it was important to show not only photographs of the objects but photographs of the objects in use and then turning towards the you know the inner garden we now have a much larger gate that separates the two of them yep so we've got ones one kind of circle of remove the outer garden and then there's another gate and then another circle of remove is the inner garden so as you pass through the middle gate the idea is that you're sort of stripped down you've lost your cell phone your jewelry or watch maybe you don't know what time it is hopefully they I've offered you water from the bottom of the well that I woke up it I collected at dawn when the water Rush's I'd prepared the kettle I'd cut the wood if I go back up yours I actually grew the tree harvesting the tree made that made the charcoal out of the wood made the fire all that stuff you know there are layers upon layers in this but the middle gates very important because that's really saying okay we that leave your problems behind or you've left them behind and you're in the the inner garden and the first thing you see is well it sort of depends on the garden but in this case you you know your goal is to get into the the inner gate the tea house but your view of that is obscured by in this case nature which is the bonsai and it's um that's one of the many tropes don't see the yeah but so you can't see the front door because it's it's blocked by something so its sight lines are important because they make places look bigger and more contemplative and of course there's nothing like nature to contemplate when I was becoming an artist I was that I had a spiritual experience at Storm King and I was looking at a mark 2 Subaru and a Alexander Calder and the next it was a gigantic oak tree and I was falling in love with these artists works and I was making work I was kind of emulating them in some ways but then I saw the tree as a giant lung of the earth instead of you know it was producing oxygen it was taking carbon dioxide and producing oxygen and so I've always loved the structure of trees there's nothing more formal yes with more formal aspects in a tree especially when it's lost its leaves you can see this the architecture of in the structure and this bonsai is based on the black pine that was this that was kind of the center of focus of the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens it's since died but there are pictures of it and this kind of cantilevered windswept design of the the bonsai but this is it's this is made of bronze and but the original maquette was made of cardboard tubes and toilet paper tubes and toothbrushes and q-tips and tampon plungers and anal douche tips and things that were meant to go inside of your body it was really trying to get inside of you with this piece and it's the most complex thing I've ever made it's got a couple thousand parts and it's resting in a cardboard box and I chose a cardboard box it was very near and dear to me it's the box of Eclipse heresy which is the speaker the official speaker of Tom sacks studio we don't do any real product endorsements but I like to talk about the things that have history with me in the and the heresy speaker was something that I never had in high school but my friend a friend had a pair and I always coveted them because they were so clunky they're like a cinder block and if powered and some of them there's this one called the decorator series it looks like I made it because you can see the end grain of the plywood's very primitive and when I buy these on eBay and Craigslist sometimes I meet the people that sell them and it's always someone who's recently married and he lost the fight with a wife get those big clunky things out of here and and ya know I don't have any in my house either but my studio has a dozen of them but there is something about electronics and in particular stereos that are fancy stereos that are about all about you know impressing other lonely men and alienating the beautiful women in your life I didn't want to miss that opportunity to share that experience the foundation and then of course in that space also is an important work that has traveled with this exhibition from the very beginning I do it's it's on loan to us from the Noguchi Museum in New York the salt sculpture by someone new Gucci called narrow gate from from 1981 what's in and what what what do you feel is it's its role within within the garden well we couldn't have gotten luckier with this piece I mean formally the shape it could it could be that pedestal it could be that heresy speaker I was just talking about it's really one of the most reduced of the late Noguchi 's and that's in in my view his best work are these basalts and because some of them some of the parts are just raw the salt that's like three and a half billion years old among the oldest rock on earth and you know many people are into basalt for its magical properties and joseph boys always use basalt and there are a lot of we could get into the whole basalt issue and that's what like a lot of stuff they found on the moon was that but you know from for me it's it's kind of like that 2001 Space Odyssey monolith of this project it's the you know it's calling the astronauts there or but it's also maybe this this symbol of imperialism maybe the astronauts had so much rocket fuel that they brought this big stone marker to put on the Moon or Mars or Europa or the Nasher to say you know hey we you know we we've got prowess we're imperialist punk there's Mayan markers the the having mine of the steel estilo yeah and the things that you know you might put next to it to a doorway to indicate power and sure so I and I think it's a it's okay that that I'm not deciding which of those three things it is yeah it could be all three of them oh no it works in a multivalent way yeah and it's got also this opening in the middle which is important because it's although it's a phallus you know it's a standing up thing it's got a Yannick it's got an opening also so it's kind of the ying and yang sorry you had fun not to get to know and then as as the guest enters or as you bring the guest in there's an important ritual that takes place before anyone can enter the teahouse and it's it's at this this this small wash basin it's called a tsuba cuckoo buy yeah and this is a traditional thing that you'll see in people's homes or offices or gardens as you enter as you go through the middle gate you go through a cleansing ritual where you wash your hands in your mouth and then ultimately you wash the ladle itself all religions have it whether it's the the ablutions of the Muslims or the hand-washing before lighting the candles and Judaism or the or the baptism and Christianity in fact some people think that this comes from the baptism that the portugee 20 or chi-chi's first came to Japan some people think this might come from that but in any case it's a gesture of purification and water is used often to like clean the rocks in front of the doorways and here we've got the soot goodbye but if you're not into water you can use Purell and there's a pump bottle of Purell and of course you know this process is something that is meant to take a long time so you know there was the there was the the waiting Arbor where where guests could could change their shoes and then behind this is another waiting Arbor and in fact there are two waiting arbors in the back of the in the inner garden so you means clearly there's an opportunity to kind of draw out this you know anticipation of before going into the teahouse so yes this is all about contemplation meditation and mindfulness when you're in the teahouse that it's it's really all about observing the most subtle things like I said before the the sound of water boiling a tea master can know the temperature roughly by the sound that it makes you can too if you've tried listening to it you know the sound of that kettle how hot it's getting and you can you know smell the charcoal burning you can smell and taste the tea itself which is this really bitter I know it's very trendy now I'm not trying to insult all the matcha drinkers in in the room but it's a it's a very very bitter flavor and that's why I often it's preceded by a sweet and oh sorry here's here's an image of the curator of the exhibition at the new Gucci Museum Degenhart cleaning the ladle itself after cleaning himself and then this is the other waiting Arbor that's in the back and I I love this because of the the detail the the kind of perfect circle that's drawn on the back this is this is called full moon and this circle I drew in the gallery and it was really a way to you know of course it's the Japanese flag but it's also a way to break the line and to create a Yannick shape versus the X on the floor and these are the two most primitive marks that you can make a circle and an X it's not just tic-tac-toe but there's a reason why those things happen and it's the Sun and it's the cycle of life it's a it these are the important symbols but also to have these most reduced things I'm always trying to do laughs and in the essay that I wrote about the collection that I curated I was always really interested in this arc of nothingness like you know Brent Road and you applied mayhem and took the heads and arms off of the figures and just showed the trunk and then his student Brent koozie went towards even less of less of a gestures like very very simple objects just the suggestion of a beak or a breast or an eyeball or something and then he you know was always trying to get Noguchi to go even more minimal but they weren't ready and then if you look over on the other side of the room you've got you know barnett newman it's here three this it's just a piece of structural stainless steel on a very modest pyramid base and you could see he wanted to make it even less but he was doing the smallest gesture that he could and i think donald judd is maybe the the pinnacle experience in that our you know my favorite piece which isn't in the collection is tony smith's dye which is just a big black cube but Judd in my view is kind of like the king of that and and and I did an Instagram live about it and I think at one point I said look at this it's nothing but it sounded terrible like I was insulting the piece but in a sense I think it was really the what we're all trying to achieve is a state of like how little can you get away with doing and it's something that I'm not good at because I always have to show a million screws there's that song it can't take that away from me you know I I'm not secure like Marcel Duchamp that says yeah urinal on a pedestal like yeah I'm a genius and backs it up too but I always still have to show a million screws and work I think maybe as I get older I'll get better and this also I mean you you know you do what your math teacher told you to do you show your work in everything yeah and even here because you left pinned to the the side of the waiting Harbor the the compass yeah the compass that you made to to draw the circle yeah and I think I could have removed it and left you guessing to see that maybe Tom Sachs is such a genius that he could draw a circle that perfectly by but I left the compass there because there's information and transparency in that and you can see the flaws and that's essential to what I do whether it's the weld on a bronze sculpture or the screws and you can see the two pieces of plywood are joined here I mean this is the advantage that the artist has over industry that iPhone is the best made thing that has ever been made but there's no evidence that a human being was involved in it and if and if and if there there is it's not a good thing for it means that something's wrong and so that's like that's my advantage and that's what I'm always trying to promote those values in the studio and I love the work of artists who are really like perfect and erase things you know like someone like Jeff Koons is it's great but it's a different kind of yeah way of telling a story yeah and so and then this is a detail that of course many people might might might miss as they walk through the gallery it's just a cheery ahna or the the waste bin which still it's explain that and then the this is an important connection to the beginning of the the the exhibition at the Noguchi as well so at the end of our say during the preparation of the tea garden the host sweeps the garden and puts all of the the sweepings the leaves whatever in this trash pit and then finally the sort of the last thing to say that the garden is ready a branch is placed across the top of it to indicate and that's a piece of the bonsai that's been broken off placed across the the berm as an indication of saying we're ready but the filth in there is from the Noguchi museum two years ago and there's a little that you can even see in this photo there's a little dot that I added for this show is a scrap of blue foam we can see it right in the middle fell off and I wanted there to be something that we swept up off the floor of the Nasher piece and then of course you know the mezuzah which is attached to the the tea house where you prepare the tea it's an extraordinary thing and it's very small and it has all of the materials that you would need the host would need to make tea and and other things for his guests one of the fun things about the photos that Johnny took of your tea ceremony with Dakin is that and here here here's the the tea house and you and Dakin serving tea to Dakin is that you actually see all of these elements come together so right here we're looking at the elements that are in the tea house that everyone can go up and look through the side wall and see these at anytime and you've been talking about a tokonoma yeah which is this space right here and it's it functions as a kind of a shrine is that right yep so the tokonoma is shrine and it and but it's the place where the host has his best up because traditionally the tea ceremony is done in silence so the communication between the host and the guests is done in this tokonoma so if I wonder do it like I said before wish you a long life you'd put a lobster in there flower arrangements of course the the scroll is the biggest thing of all because it can be a poem you could actually say something in words which is the most direct but here I choose three objects for the and this for this display and it's kind of a long story but I'll go through all three of them there's over flower arrangement and leaves opium pop dried opium poppies because those are the does the drugs of choice for the studio or narcotics fortunately we can't do them as much as we like because we're too busy working all the time but if we weren't working we'd be doing opium the cinder block is the symbol of our space program it's a symbol of imperialism you know the first thing you do when you show up in a new country or a new planet is you show up with a shotgun and a Bible and you tell them how it's gonna be and then once they understand that you start knocking down all the round buildings all the huts and dome buildings and you start replacing them with rectangular building occidental buildings that and the the symbol of that is the brick the cinder block and even this building is filled with large gigantic cinder blocks and when we you'll see in the foyer gallery there is a perforated cinder block a cinder block with weight-saving lightning holes and those that's for when we build our space station or International Space Station out of cinder blocks we want to make sure those are light we're not carrying extra weight into orbit but lastly that there's a scroll and this is sort of to answer any of the haters out there who think that maybe this exhibition is cultural appropriation I could like another some of you heard me say this before another middle-aged white guy who thinks that Japan is where it's at and I know I'm not alone because he's that's why you see so many koi ponds and and Zen gardens and Asian second wives but and in a lot of ways this entire exhibition is my Japanese midlife crisis I'm gonna use like my prowess as a sculptor to like deal with this problem that love men have and but I you know I the the tea masters that I've met are very appreciative of the depth that that I've gone to of the studio because we go all the way you know hundreds and hundreds of ciao on to display one and tons of research and many trips to Japan and reading and studying and working with people and studying with a tea master and and really trying to come to terms with what's important you know I'm not a great tea master as a server I'm not James Bond I'm more like Q the guy who makes all the weapons for James Bond I think that's and I've come to terms of who that I am that and that's I think that's that's cool for me and so the scroll is a picture of Muhammad Ali in his traditional like most famous white robe with black trim and red gloves and he's in the posture of Sen no Rikyu so if we went back to that other slide or one similar to it you'd see that posture and the quote is it ain't bragging if you can back it up so I I think I think that we back it up with all of this this work and that's why you know we show all the screws and details that's that's the backbone and so here these are some images of elements of the tea ceremony you know you you have taken traditional elements of the tea ceremony and made them your own so this is a what daikin likes to call a refinement on on lacquer ware and it's it's what you call resin wear yeah so it's it's plywood everything is plywood and I'd encourage you to look closely at these objects and their resin or eat and fiberglass reinforced plywood so we use this stuff called West systems epoxy resin and it's the same stuff they used to build America's Cup yachts and spaceships and there's there's a another element to this which is very important in the in the in the ceremony anyone who goes through it it's the addition of the Maglite to the to the the sake bottle and what's the importance of them well here you can see i'm using my hand as a reflector i'm aiming the the light it's because the tea house is always very dim and and I was billing sake all over the place and I physically couldn't see it so I put we mount a little headlight on the sake bottle that I would reflect with my hand and enough to get it into the bulb but of course and pure and total affectation we always fill the cup beyond its capacity so it overflows into the secondary cup or the saucer as a traditional way of saying the cup runneth over kind of thing so that it's always a big mess and then here it looks like bacon is being served one of the one of the treats that you offer to your guests this one is called brown wave brown wave and brown wave is the meal and the tea ceremony I'd encourage you to look at the amazing book that we made with the a Jew choy this is the book designer it's a reward winning book and it's in the gift the book bookstore and it's um it's called the tea ceremony tea ceremony manual manual oh yeah I'm just gonna bout one right there here brash you know I don't make any money off of this but this is very complete expensive elaborate I mean killed 10 people to make this book it's great and there are there are 50 pictures of that brown wave in here so so very very simple ingredients simple presentation but nonetheless beautiful a Ritz cracker a sloping bit of peanut butter that it looks like a wave there's there's something there's something you know akin to maybe this is this is very much in keeping with with the with the tea ceremony well they can wrote a great haiku and I'm gonna screw up the rhythm of it but it's basic to make one perfect brown wave there are used to do it a dozen times to get the wave just right and that makes for happy rats because when you're throwing these things out and and there's a there's a spread in this manual where it shows you how to make the perfect brown wave and then this looks like this is some Sun at midnight Sun at midnight that's and this is where three Oreos are served to three guests and there's a mirror underneath each plate and that's to check the calibration of the Oreo logo that it lines up on the front and the back of the Oreo because Japanese Oreos line up at American ones don't so we check that but it also comes from groose it also comes from in all fairness bruce nauman z' for john coltrane where there's a rock on top of a mirror right and then this perhaps is the most sublime of the various events that take place that's a really good picture that's John yes Johnny look so like there could be here all these pictures could be and have been here also Noguchi so this is the when the tin of and this is one of the that container that t cat there it was not made by me that was made by someone in Kyoto I bought it from and it's and it's very special eventually I will make mine but this is a lifetime's work and this this by the way work does not end with this show I will continue until the end of my life working on there there are so many elements but so this is a vacuum-sealed copper container and copper and tin and when you PIP pull the lid off it's so tight that it creates this vacuum and we call it green smoke and it's it's just a wonderful moment where you see the lighter than air or the particles of the matcha suspended an air for a few seconds and side lit and there there you are preparing tea the the the village of Yoda appears in a number of objects throughout the exhibition Yoda you know Yoda is important in a lot of ways yeah all right to me he's the he's the Jesus of Buddhism but people are saying well why not the boot why not Buddha Buddhism it's a different kind of thing because you know the Buddha you're supposed to just kind of ignore really and want to be like him but you were never him and but Yoda is a way of connecting the ideas of zaman to popular culture and he's I remember reading an article in a magazine about some rock star about his art collection and he said he for years he only collected all things Yoda eBay started he kind of got bored because it was too easy yeah and he's really for from my generation he was he was kind of also like an Alan Watts figure he kind of helped people come come to appreciate the philosophy and of course he's a you know he's a sword carrying monk so he's a kind of that school of Buddhism and and you know he only has about ten lines in the all of Yoda text if you like like there aren't only about ten meaningful things he says yeah they're all perfect like there there there is no try do or do not or there's only there's only do or do not and I think that's an important thing that I would say to anyone who is struggling with a career in the arts it's yeah it's hard or when Luke Skywalker says I'm not afraid to go into that cave and Yoda says you moment to be afraid yes yeah very valuable yeah and using the your your your homemade Chasen to whisk the tea what you you you've you've made an important improvement you know because you have to the the to learn how to whisk the tea appropriately is very difficult it they say it takes five thousand attempts five thousand bowls to get one perfectly right but I put a motor on it Americans and we get it about 80% right on the first try and that's kind of good enough I think that represents the level of degree it's kind of like a eighth grade level of education but if you do it across the board you can run a country [Laughter] and then of course the tea being served so I wanted to but you know we're we're running out of time and I want and and I'm sure people have questions so I just wanted to run through this one of the things that we're trying to connect with obviously there are you know the tea ceremony is something that really highlights this kind of distillation to the most essential elements of things and that's something that's also common to to modernism you know you were talking about you know the distillation of form from rode and brine koozie to you know Donald Judd and it's something that you find in your work quite a bit so we we created this this installation as you walk in with works from throughout your career that highlight different aspects of your engagement with modernism one of the things that we we were particularly excited about including our these quarter pipes as kind of another gate another kind of liminal marker of passage before you go into the the tea the tea garden well the quarter pipes are very important to me for a lot of reasons let's think formally first I mean these could be Donald Judd plywood sculptures or like the earlier one with a tube going through it and they're very simple forms they're uh you know they're traditionally these forms are used for skateboarding people build them and skateboard back and forth and these are I bought these on Craigslist in Arizona I bought it near my foundry so I wouldn't have to ship them and there's some kid made them in his garage with his dad's help or whatever and got sick of it or whatever built a bigger one and and so we cast them in bronze and they're here at the National sculpture Center is yeah but but there's more to it the back of them they probably there isn't really a picture but we cast the inside and you can see the structure underneath and that's the the private place that's a place for teenage sexual discovery and and you know for taking a nap whatever and that's kind of like it's like a it's like a tree house or something and I didn't want to miss an opportunity to connect both the important rigorous formal similarities between something a skateboard ramp and something of minimalism with you know the pop culture or the vernacular teen architecture of something like this that where I that I have probably a greater connection with because although I've studied modern art and made a lot of it I'm also had a a tortured childhood like adolescent was like everybody else in this room I didn't want to miss the opportunity to try and link those things because in school we learn one plus one equals two right and in the studio we learn one plus one equals a million right and the hardest thing and the best thing about being an artist is learn to trust your instincts and accept yourself for who you are as a Q and not a James Bond so that you can make just the right wrong decisions you can have that courage and put you know adolescent sex and minimalism in the same object and that's how you get a true expression of the individual and then in the middle of the gallery is this baby there's several you know homage --is to modernist masters who many of whom are represented in the collection and and and this is this is one of them it's one of the most extraordinary bronze objects I've seen because of the detail and the fact that it actually has all of the screws that have been tapped and drilled into the box they're stainless yeah stainless screws tapped and drilled into the bronze so this I made Bren koozies large in plywood and you can see the mosaic pattern is in brain koozies our original eye hat I was forced to those shapes so that I could articulate a compound curves in linear strips of wood and I made it the same size and this is one that's at the Ren koozies Atelier in Paris and copied it exactly including the base and everything and then cast it in bronze and of course the detail the screws did not meet my exacting standards so we drilled out every one and replaced 2,000 fake screws with real stainless screws so this is bronze and stainless steel and a little bit of paint obviously all the exposed wood grain is represented by liver of sulphate patina but then the paint is regular you know oil paint and the if you get a chance to look also the base is sonotube that's concrete tube I mean it's bronze but it's a it's a the tube that you when you make concrete architecture that you've pour the concrete into this cardboard tube and then you peel it off after but some people leave it on which i think is a kind of fantastic white trash form of Brutalism you know because you know Corbusier famously left the you know the the concrete dripping out of unit a to habitacion B because the form work was done by unskilled laborers that's part of it and later the rust marks of the reinforced holes which of course tadao ando made popular by filling them with lead and you know it's an Ando building or if a condo building by those holes and and I've seen tons of buildings with a sauna tube left on for years and it looks great and then you you you made your own version of the Barnett Newman that you that you were talking about before that's in the Nasher collection here three and so we have the Barnett Newman on view in gallery two one of the works you selected but then you you wanted to make your own yeah I just you know part of one of my big motivations and all this is I've always made things I've wanted mm-hmm like I really wanted a Mondrian but I didn't and then I went down to Wall Street and I thought I have to work with these for over eight years to get enough money to get my own Mondrian and then so I you know I went uptown to the Museum of Modern Art and I studied Broadway boogie woogie enough and I went back to the studio I made one out of gaffers tape a model version not a forgery and because I'm very familiar with tape and I made things out of tape and I realized that I probably spent more time without Mondrian than Eli Broad did the guy who bought it gave it to the museum because I had I studied it and that was a pleasure of art and and it really opened the experience really opened my ideas to the notion of what authenticity really means I work near Canal Street in New York City that now sells a lot of fake sunglasses and I saw like gucci sunglasses that are $500 at Gucci or $5 on the street and when you leave your $500 sunglasses at a restaurant you turn your car around 20 minutes and you go back and you get them and I thought wow those sunglasses on you and the five dollar ones you just let go and move on with your day so those five dollar sunglasses have some advantages I'm not saying they're better or worse they're just they're just they're different and so for me to make you know barnett newman is kind of like he's an you know he's one of these gods of modernism he made so few sculptures it's so rare to see one and this represents a lot of the ideas that are in his in his fame his most more famous paintings oh thank you waiting for this image for six fantastic so just in case you're confused it's Tom Sachs on the left and Barnett Newman on the right thank you and then and then but I wanted to show this detail because it's so beautifully done on both works this is an important detail so let's start on the right barnett newman takes a column it's a piece of stainless steel structural stainless steel of three inches by nine inches or something like that and then found off-the-shelf ready-made piece of industrial stuff and he welds it to this pyramid base that is highly crafted this is this does not exist in the industry it's it's completely your turnaround it's the time so this pyramid base is made out of problem I don't know thick plate can't really tell it's welded here but the welds been ground away so you have no evidence of how thick it is and that's welcome to a solid three-inch piece of steel this is all core ten steel which is like like a Richard Serra a truss but then it stops rusting and stabilizes and then you can see the edges flame cut all jagged there and then this is all welded and then ground away and then allowed to rust but then it's welded with stainless steel filler rod to the core ten and the stainless so this is like a magic connection but you never see anywhere except for an only an artist would be ridiculous enough to do something like this and only an artist would have the the structural and philosophical issues where you need to make that kind of thing strangely enough I've seen it in New York City there are these gigantic plates of steel that are like ten feet square and the trucks drive over them and they sound like explosions and a 10-foot by square by one-inch plate you know probably cost like $10,000 so to prevent people and people do steel things like that in New York State to repeal from stealing those things with a crane and melting and selling in a scrap which happens the companies that put those plates down weld the name of the company into those sheets of court and steel on the use stainless filler rod so it's like this graffiti hand welded mark so next time you're in the streets of Manhattan take a look at those things so and then on mine this is a box made out of plywood that's painted first with with silver paint we use aluminum paint because it's what shows the filth the most we looked at stainless steel paint we looked at all kinds of different paints but aluminum paint is the stuff that looks right and then we made the pyramid using half-inch plywood and all the screws we showed and then the the magic joint is was insane we built it out of epoxy resin with stainless steel powder mixed into it and buffed it for three days and if you go into the gallery I'd encourage you to get on your hands and knees and take a close look at it inside this frame is an elaborate steel structure I'll enough to send you pictures yes it's look insane elaborate enough Sam's in the room who made it I don't think so but she's back you back there Sam good job Sam yeah very elaborate very very very precise looks like a bunch of nothing and I think that's why it's a success to do that much work to to have that experience so go to the next one let's so then there's your kiss which it looks like it's made after the 1916 version like the one at the at the the Philadelphia Museum yeah and and of course you know there's still one in the Nasher collection we'll go back so this one is a little bit different from brain koozies though it's made out again out of plywood and hardware this is made out of plywood and unlike the barn Numan where we obsess in every possible detail to represent it faithfully here I'll admit it we took a little license and I was element I was influenced by eBay because if you look on ebay there are a lot of the kiss available that are made in Romania you know that just that it's made and it's hard to find things made in Romania sure but you know the Naturals got one and maybe if you look on you could have one too but I think there were there's a lot of licence taken with all kinds of not authentic brand koozies but again by building it in plywood you can see the end grain you can see the screws it's not a forgery in any way we're really trying to adapt it into the language of the studio that we've been working on for 30 years and show it on a on the cinderblock base and but to you know have all the important tropes of the you know the interlocking gaze the arms wrap of the lovers wrapping around each other and there's just a very subtle distinction of sexuality with a breast on one side and long and short hair to represent man or woman or the other but I think was really trying to represent some of the ideas that we have in the in the curation of the permanent collection where I'm trying to really talk about ideas of reduction and simplicity and and to take of taking away let's jump I'm sorry yeah so David Smith you included in this he's very important to you because of the the kind of legacy that that you know you you grew up kind of imbibing yeah so I went to Bennington College I made sculpture on his anvil I think it's possible that I you know I have a pair of his pliers that I inherited that are hidden somewhere somewhere in this exhibition anywhere and here's an artist who made sculpture using found industrial things objects of the Rust Belt the things that were showing the agricultural and industrial decline of a mare and these are these are ideas that are still live in my work and he's also someone who was conflicted personally with class issues or you know he came from an affluent educated background yet was working as a blue-collar guy these are issues that you know I'm time to get into now but they're still alive with me and the studio represents constantly and then this was important for you to include as well what is it about this one I mean Giacometti is fantastic but what is it about diego in the sweater well I mean besides just being the best thing ever yeah and it could almost leave it at that the things that appealed to me about Jack maybe in particular Diego sweaty sweater is it's a supreme nugget right this is a gold nugget this is an object of intense density nuggets is like a slang that we use in the studio like a goal goal now I got a meteor I have a I have a rock that came from outer space it's made of iron and it's like a coveted thing and you know it's um melted from entering the atmosphere and and there's so many things about Giacometti you know his touch that this must have been terribly shocking at the time the the surrealist distortion although I never think of Giacometti the surrealist as it is and the the roughness of you know that the cast what seeming seems like a casual approach to marking well appears to have been done very quickly and I you know I don't know I wasn't there but there's a tremendous refinement in this this combination of rough and smooth and finding just the right balance is uncanny I don't really have the language to talk about it other than if I could get a cast of this and make it in plastic with the same detail and sell it at Kmart so everyone could have one I think it would be a happy it would be it would be a cool thing to do just because it's it's the it's the form yeah it's got it's just perfect and it's so yeah [Laughter] and then you picked this too which I thought was interesting this is a bronze cast of one of de Kooning's very first sculptures that he made it's about about that big in 1969 I picked this because I thought it was heroic as displayed now it's in it's in a vitrine horizontally which much more humble position but I this is kind of a something in this position that I love as the as an abject mark you know it could be a bone it could be like a drumstick or something it's very very primitive it looks really casually done and thrown off to the side you know like de Kooning's gestures and his paintings they're done with with speed and vitality and there's something very quick about it of course once you cast almost anything in bronze and finish it right it can be the most heroic beautiful thing and I think this photo is better than the sculpture itself because of the scale yes much bigger this the sculpture is probably nine inches long and also it's displayed horizontally versus vertically I think it should be displayed like this where it could be an high in a pedestal head level so you could get into the salty because it's a little bit like nature if you look at a fistful of dirt or a cloud there's nothing more beautiful and you know when when Pollock his contemporary says I am nature you know yeah that's what he's talking about is all those little folds and that's also what you see when you look at the detail on a Giacometti well and I included this because there seems to be you know a lot that resonates a lot from Calder's work that resonates in your work that kind of dedication to hand making that you know the this the sense of engineering that goes into it you know and also the kind of very you know very simple beauty out of those that you get out of those forms well Calder was a great engineer yeah and I'm becoming okay engineer I mean I've got like enough knowledge to really hurt myself at this point and I admire as engineering and I love it I love the technical side of what I do it's a you know one of the great parts of my job is to educate and entertain myself and learning about physics and how materials go together is really great and this is an incredible piece spider yeah well I weave a the great thing about having Tom here is you you know you can ask him lots of questions and you don't want to let him go and that's been my problem because I'd see the severely gone over our time limit and I don't Tom if you're if you're not too tired we could open it up to maybe one or two questions but actually rather than doing that why don't we just ask questions with a drink in our hands because we've got that just outside the auditorium so I want to thank you for for staying with us the whole time thank you Tom thank you so much you

Channel: Nasher Sculpture Center

Views: 8,834

Rating: 4.8938055 out of 5

Keywords: Nasher Sculpture Center, Nasher, Museum, Dallas, Texas, Dallas Arts District, 360 Speaker Series, Contemporary Art, Sculpture, Modern Art, Bricolage, Assemblage, Collage, Space, Outer Space, NASA, Exploration, Japan, Tea, Matcha, Ceremony, Ritual, Tea Ceremony, Green Tea, History, Art, Artist, Yoda, McDonalds, Barnett Newman, Constantin Brancusi, Isamu Noguchi, Noguchi Museum, Mars, Moon, Studio, Culture, Tea Garden, Conquest, Detail, Oreo, Ritz, Peanut Butter, Pez, Cultural Appropriation, Japanese, Tom Sachs

Id: BtzyEdIKafo

Length: 88min 16sec (5296 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 29 2017