Tom Sachs Interview: Advice to the Young

“I became like a ninja black belt janitor.” The praised American artist Tom Sachs – who spent twenty years working as a carpenter and a janitor before becoming an artist – here offers advice to “everyone, everywhere, regardless of age, because everyone is a young artist somewhere inside.”

“The key to success is doing what you love,” Sachs argues, and you must keep trying until you find something that you love. Also, it’s important to have the right approach to what you do and – whether you like it or not – “do it a hundred percent. ” This is what Sachs himself has always done, committing completely to everything he has worked with.

Tom Sachs (b. 1966) is an American artist, who primarily works with sculptures. Sachs is widely known for his elaborate recreations of various modern icons, such as his recreation of Le Corbusier’s 1952 ‘Unité d’Habitation’ using only foamcore and a glue gun. Throughout his career, Sachs has built numerous space-related sculptures and his interest in space – in particularly the Apollo program of the 1960s and 1970s – resulted in his ‘Space Program’ in 2007, where he built a 1:1 model of the Apollo lunar module: A mission control with 29 closed-circuit video monitors and two female astronauts with handmade space suits. In 2007, Sachs launched his spacecraft at Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles, landed on the moon, and explored its surface – all of which was made into a video by Sachs and the Neistat Brothers. In 2012, he opened the elaborate Space Program 2.0 MARS exhibit at the Park Avenue Armory in New York. His works are held in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Goetz Collection in Munich, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, among others. He lives and works in New York City. For more see: https://www.tomsachs.org/biography

Tom Sachs was interviewed by Mikkel Rosengaard at his studio in New York City in August 2018.

Camera: Pierce Jackson
Edited by: Roxanne Bagheshirin Lærkesen
Produced by: Roxanne Bagheshirin Lærkesen and Christian Lund
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2019

Supported by Nordea-fonden


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