The wizard makes the artist: Tom Sachs talk like a philosopher

Interview, May, 2008 by Ricky Jay

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Tom Sachs is an artist whose Pop-the-NextGeneration Art melds seamlessly such heady and usually disparate notions as bricolage, dub, and magic with masterful results. His friend Ricky Jay is a writer, an actor, and above all a transcendent sleight-of-hand artist. He is steeped in the lore of illusion and is well known for debunking occultists. This conversation anticipates Sachs's exhibition of new work, "Animals," at the Sperone Westwater gallery from May 8 to June 21. Sachs is unveiling 12 heroic sculptures at Lever House, including giant painted-bronze figures of Hello Kitty and Miffy that are also fountains.

RICKY JAY: How are you?

TOM SACHS: I'm good--a little frazzled over switching to a digital recorder. I wanted analog, because I don't think, if my life depended on it, I could fix a digital recorder.

RJ: I'm a complete Luddite. You build all your remarkable stuff. I can't put a nail in the wall to hang a picture.

TS: I don't believe that. You throw cards 200 miles an hour--

RJ: Sure. I'm very good at things that have no practical application in the world at all. But turning on my computer is beyond me.

TS: I think we're in a difficult time, because technical stuff is clearly becoming the dominant thing, but you and I both know how to do the supermanual stuff....Actually, I think the things you do with your hands with magic are akin to some of the things that people do with their hands with computers. It's all about how you change the world with your hands.

RJ: That's a funny thought.

TS: My girlfriend is a Photoshop wizard, so she creates reality as we know it. There's a manipulated photograph that you had in the show you curated at Christine Burgin's gallery a few years ago, and it turns out she photographed that exhibition, and those things created a kind of belief in spirituality. All that magic that was happening in the beginning of the 20th century was at a time when technology was very new and mystifying to people.

RJ: You're absolutely right. There was one point when the advances of magic were the advances of technology. It was technology couched as performance, which is a fascinating thing.

TS: In our last conversation, we talked about The Golden Bough and the power of magic and art to transform. I don't know if you had time to think about my exhibition.

RJ: It strikes me that there are lots of similarities and lots to be explored between the two of us. But this is supposed to be about your work.

TS: It doesn't have to be about my work per se. There are other places where people can learn about that. I think we shouldn't try to make this conversation be anything that it can't be.

RJ: That reminds me of David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross: "Are we speaking or are we talking about it?" I guess we're talking about it.

TS: We are. This exhibition that I'm doing is "Animals," and what I'm trying to do is ... I read this book, and there's a great quote in it: "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade." It's in a book by Dale Carnegie. It's all about how he creates his life. He has good things and bad things happen to him, and he manages always to be proactive in making changes that make his life happen the way he wants it to. It's not about manipulating, but about using all kinds of forces of creativity to make the best of things, or to use things besides science to generate real results. When I was reading your Cards as Weapons book, where you quote The Golden Bough, you talk about being "careful when you make a target out of your enemy's face." What's interesting to me is how you make a voodoo doll and your enemy winds up getting sick.

RJ: When Frazer talks about it in The Golden Bough, he talks about the idea of similarity. There's either the law of similarity or the law of contagion. That a magician can produce any effect he desires by merely imitating it--that's the law of similarity. The law of contagion is that whatever one does, whatever a conjurer does to a material object, affects the person who was once in contact with the object--the idea of the voodoo doll. They're both powerful. But in terms of scale ... well, that's a good place to start, because scale is really interesting in terms of your work. There really are illusions involved in it. You have pieces that exist in one-to-one scale, and then you have pieces that exist in scale that's much, much tinier, and then you often combine them. Right?

TS: Yes.

RJ: So do you find one scale more appealing than the other? Or is it the combination that you love?

TS: The key issue for me is always the scale and how it relates to our bodies, because we are all roughly the same size. We're between 4 and 7 feet tall, whereas a building is hundreds of feet in dimension. When it gets shrunk down to 1/25th scale, which is a reduced scale they use commonly, a gigantic housing block becomes only 18 feet long. The architecture gets shrunk down to a scale that's closer to us. So I'm always very selective about the kinds of objects and the effect when they're shrunk down and how they relate to us. I made a gigantic tank tread that was used on the crawler for the spaceship, and I made that full-scale, but in foam-core paper. That's about 6 feet long. It weighs 4,000 pounds as a chunk of cast iron. At 4,000 pounds, it always exists in a horizontal state, but in paper it's vertical, so it's almost like a figure. Then I have some smaller things like a Sony PlayStation controller, which fits in the palm of your hand, blown up large. But if you blow that up 10 times, it becomes like a porpoise or a dog or something. It relates to us still in a submissive role, the way a domestic animal would, but in a form of something that is like a symbol of manipulation and control.