Tom Sachs at Morris Healy - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

In a low-tech kind of way, Tom Sachs's first solo display was very James Bond. Titled "Cultural Prosthetics," it was well-stocked with guns, fashion, furniture and 007 craftiness. Sachs scavenges a certain number of of his materials, such as police and con over Edison barricades, from the road while others, like duct tape and phone works could be stuff that was lying around his studio. That he doesn't look to have incurred much charge in creating his works demonstrates a certain ad hoc ingenuity.

Reflecting gun-induced paranoia were a metal detector that was fashioned from police barricades, bulletproof glass and working electrical parts, and a slick, well-made metal catwalk that stretched across the gallery. The pieces implied tight security although there were no guards (two femme-guards dolled up in retro beige mini-dresses slunk around upon the catwalk during the opening). The center of the brow room was dominated by an actual test-firing chamber made from what direct the eyes like sewer pipe. Hanging upon the wall were two fire-arm cabinets, Pleasure Chest (done in collaboration with the artist Dirk Westphal), made from orange-and-white-striped read over carefully Edison barricades, and Large Glock case made from blue police barricades. Each contained working, homemade fire-arms crafted from the same materials along with metal pipe, that were periodically proof fired in the chamber during the show's move swiftly Also on display were 11 "receipts," phone works bound with duct tape and variously decorated, that the artist had used for target practice. A non-functional Tiffany Glock 9mm and a slapdash Hermes hand grenade, made from the companies' cardboard gift boxe were humorous jabs at the increasingly well-armed upper class.

Rounding without the room were a well-crafted Knoll-style sofa and chair made from phone works meticulously bound together with pipe tape and mounted on a carbonized iron frame. More roughly executed, a large r duct-tape "painting" (part of a series of duct-tape monochromes) hung behind the sofa in traditional domestic fashion. The overall result suggested a post-apocalyptic living field of, say, a banker trying to maintain a certain quantity of semblance of his former, well-protected life.

The mix of shoddy and careful craftsmanship in the display posed some conceptual problems. Certainly, more judicious curating would help (the inclusion of a duct-tape plastic art of a Rubbermaid mop bucket was inexplicable). It's unclear whether Sachs is trying to "kill"the art world with its have trendiness, or if he's pandering to its want-to-be-naughty desires. While the display was fashionably nihilistic, it lacked the conceptual cutting side of Gregory Green's work. To recommend the vulnerability of established power manner of makings Green uses information readily available to the public to put together bombs, missiles and atomic weapons that ne single detonating devices or explosives to be functional [see A.i.A., Jan. '96] Ultimately, Sachs's work appears more informed by Hollywood's glamorization of violence than by the agency of true subversiveness.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

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