Tom Sachs

American Handmade Paintings at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Paris

March 29th to May 3rd, 2014

Published at Hyperallergic as Tom Sachs’s Pointless Americana

http://hyperallergic.com/121667/tom-sachss-pointless-americana/

As an American living in Europe, I often need to rethink and reassess my American

values. The history of France has been distinguished by an elementary differentiation in

the relationship between the individual and society, with concepts of labor, leisure and

welfare different from the American ones. Of course, pushed by the economy of the

global market, France is becoming increasingly similar to the American social model, at

least in the middle and upper social classes. It is this global market dynamic that

propelled me, by curiosity and puzzlement, to re-evaluate Tom Sachs’s work through his

exhibition American Handmade Paintings in terms of the conceptual values around

handwork and high-technology that it calls to issue.

With American Handmade Paintings, Sachs’s seventh solo-exhibition in the Marais

gallery, he again brings to Paris an artistic project that reconstructs technological images

and objects (here for example, a Goodwill logo, a McDonald’s sign in Chinese, a Scotch

tape package and the American flag) in his signature gritty wood-shop fashion. Traces of

handicraft are willingly left perceptible, engaging the work with issues of finish and

labor.

This style of production of American Handmade Paintings cannot be disentangled from

an artesianal stance, posed cynically. Our time of digital fabrication and laser cutting

plywood cannot be wished away. Note that I am sharing this text and digital images of

his paintings online, hence far from the land of the uncomplicated hand.

Sachs’s exhibition features his paintings (well, wall works produced through the

techniques of pyrography and marquetry) that often vampire early Jasper Johns, such as

his “Three Flags” (1958). Thus the show is a double operation aimed against high-tech

authenticity and legendary art; one where pixie-dusted Pop Art American iconography

assumes the pose of a metamorphosed Folk Art. This strange strategy seems to deny the

possibility of a technological elegance given off by the perfection of engineering, and as

so, is merely agreeable craft. There may be a way of re-evaluating the hand and craft in

art today, but it is not Sachs’s old-fashioned work-intensive way.

The work’s forced evidence of the hand does not create an estrangement or distancing

effect that might draw us into an attitude of elegant escalation or critical judgment. There

is no bohemian defamiliarization here. What there is, is an obvious interest in brand

marketing contemporary art as hand-crafted, in other words, selling art to Europeans in

the form of an American cadaver, one smelling of a particularly disorderly anti-

intellectualism. USA! USA! USA!

No doubt, globalization and the crisis of the capitalistic economic system have

diminished the once held certainties of imperviousness confidence that seemed so

unyielding and absolute. Of course we now live with a strong sense of shaky vagueness

about the present and future. Yet I abhor the look back here: the neo-folk M.F.A. outsider

art fake DIY aesthetic stance that Sachs ties to an almost jingoistic Americana. It’s a

priggish impulse. There is something corny, boring, dull and work-intensive

about it ( like a square dance) and it lacks inevitability .

Of course the hand job emphasis is just hype. Sachs does not scorn digital technology,

and he himself admits he is hyped. But playing unrepentant provocateur, American

Handmade Paintings struts out a rudimentary reverse revolution that takes me out of the

extraordinary powerful vision of scalable technology (technology’s sorcery). Also Sachs

plays the tired game of "high art/popular culture" dichotomy and I have an anathema for

that kind of art branding. Thus American Handmade Paintings enigmatically suffers from

a form of futility at the level of consciousness by suggesting that people might still buy

into art as artesian trophy. It supposes that perception is reality in art - as in politics - and

Sachs proceeds here as if the Occupy Wall Street movement never happened, as if no one

is increasingly uneasy about a system that can no longer keep its promises. As if nobody

is holding the system up to its own high (tech) standards.

The idea of Sachs as occult American craftsman warring with technological progress kept

me away from his “SPACE PROGRAM: MARS” (2012) installation at the Park Avenue

Armory, because it seemed to me that the return to the hand touch in art is becoming

again a form of cultural hegemony plucked from the past. As if Barbara Kruger never

existed.

Considering the increasing rise of a migratory, flexible, and underpaid labor, the ideas in

American Handmade Paintings offer little in critical response or alternative proposals.

Indeed I see Sachs’s deliberate hipster clunkiness (commensurate with nationalist self-

centeredness) performing a form of cultural attack on standards of hi-tech perfection-

ability, a perfection-ability that is more than ever necessary. Plus, it is an attack on the

idea of art as malleable transcendence. His is an attack on Ad Reinhardt’s black

paintings, at once adamantine and absorbent and absolutely clean of human touch. It is an

attack on the all-white paintings by Robert Rauschenberg and Piero Manzoni, on the

classic silver pinstripe paintings by Frank Stella, an attack on the gray floor sculptures of

Carl Andre, on Donald Judd’s magnificent stacks, on On Kawara’s one-a-day paintings,

on Richard Artschwager, on Chuck Close, on John Baldessari, on Sol LeWitt, on Wade

Guyton, on Bill Viola, on all video art, on all photography, on all conceptual and post-

conceptual art ……

In a search for art that reacts against the inequalities of globalization, must art lose touch

with the sort of grace that exceeds the hand, a grace that couldn’t be anything but

artificial and technological?

Sachs’s wooden work metaphorically attacks the intellectual connectedness of cool

conceptual art and serene high-tech electronics that makes possible our body doubles. He

mocks the soothing coolness needed to produce our fantastic force fields of double life,

parallel to prodigious nature. I contend that these cool doublings are the basis of the very

American ability to produce art that imagines and desires enhanced futures.

I think Sachs knows this, for after all, as we know, Sachs is really a company man. In

2008 he employed fourteen full-time assistants, for God’s sake, and taught them to

pursue a “fucked up” look within craft-based technique for his brand. As we know,

Bertolt Brecht employed the use of techniques of fucked-upness to remind the spectator

that his art was a representation of reality and not reality itself. By highlighting the

constructed nature of the event, Brecht hoped to communicate that the audience's reality

was equally constructed and, as such, was changeable. Jon Kessler uses this technique

with excellent results, as does Thomas Hirschhorn (sometimes). But the question they all

must be asked is: Who’s hands are doing the fucked up hand work? As we know. As we

know.

Personally, while I support good pay for art and tech workers, and technological

abstinence from time to time for tech users, I think that digital technology has been a

miracle-grow for art. In American Handmade Paintings, these sorts of digital dangerous

pleasures are beside the point. Rather, Sachs projects a faux outsider hipster artesian vibe

that is, noticeably, conceptually pointless. In fact his “real” handmade art, like the “real”

America, is an ominous idea that suggests that our technological selves aren’t authentic

or meaningful. Which is not the case.

Joseph Nechvatal