The Artist: Tom Sachs

Whenever I chew the fat with Tom Sachs, our conversations veer off-piste through the long grass. That’s no bad thing. I called him this week to discuss 31 Rue Cambon, the show he recently laid on at his New York studio with Thaddaeus Ropac, and we didn’t dwell on the nuts and bolts of the work for too long.

Speaking from said studio, he told me that he’s always been interested in the things the ordinary bloke off the street can’t always have. He wanted a Chanel suit. He wanted a Leica camera. He wears a Casio, although he wouldn’t say no to a Rolex, despite it not being his “kink”.

Instead of buying the object, or simply accepting that he couldn’t have it, Sachs started making versions of it himself. In the process, he told me, something happens to desire. “Through making the object, my lust for it is transformed into love, but not of the object,” he said. “It’s more the love of the making of the object.”

Façade of 31 Rue Cambon exhibition. Photo: Courtesy of Tom Sachs

31 Rue Cambon, which consisted of 31 “Chanel” suits made out of three-quarter-inch plywood, encapsulated this idea. Sachs transformed his SoHo studio into a fully realised Chanel boutique, complete with handmade versions of the house’s signature suits, accessories, packaging and retail displays.

He painstakingly painted and textured the plywood surfaces to mimic tweed and embroidery. Handmade jewellery incorporates Lego elements and bicycle reflectors, alongside furniture inspired by Coco Chanel’s Parisian apartment. A custom soundtrack, blending ambient music and horror-film scores with archival Chanel advertising, added to the effect.

Nothing was wearable, and almost nothing was what it appears to be. The joke was that these crude materials have required labour at almost couture level. But if the price of the original is part of what makes us desire it, what happens when you remove the price and leave the labour?

Chanel suit inspired by Princess Diana. Photo: Courtesy of Tom Sachs

This is when our chat hits the backcountry. Sachs is suspicious of money standing in for meaning. “New York’s art scene is now very much about money,” he said. “Artists are always asking: ‘Who’s your gallery?’ ‘Who’s selling?’ ‘How much are you selling for?’” At university, he talked about ideas with his peers instead. “We had no money, so it wasn’t part of the conversation.”

Sachs is obviously not an outsider to the system he criticises. His work has made him wealthy, and he’s candid about the fact that he reaps the rewards from the same financialised art world he distrusts. “Do I benefit from it? Yeah,” he said. “Money’s never the motivator. It’s an illusion, but it’s an illusion by which we all live and die. And I’m not immune.”

His answer to desire has often been to make the thing rather than buy it. Back in 1996, Sachs made his own Piet Mondrian out of tape. He said spending an entire career accumulating enough money to buy the original work — Broadway Boogie Woogie (1943) — would have been “an inauthentic use of time”. “Making your own Mondrian brings you back into the reasons why Mondrian made it to begin with,” he said. “It’s about ideas.”

I asked him, then, whether he openly embraced appropriation, a word that has become increasingly loaded in the culture wars. “Absolutely!” he replied. Is 31 Rue Cambon an act of it? “Yes.”

31 Rue Cambon installation view. Photo: Courtesy of Tom Sachs

Sachs sees Duchamp and Picasso as key figures in his artistic lineage. Duchamp, after all, made the appropriation of existing objects and images an artistic strategy, changing their context. For his Painting exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris, which ran from 17 January to 27 February 2024, Sachs made his own versions of Picasso’s paintings; the works were created in 2023. “It was a Duchampian gesture,” he said. “Just the subject was Picasso.”

The immediate ancestor of 31 Rue Cambon, however, was Claes Oldenburg’s The Store, the 1961 installation in which plaster became consumer goods: an inedible hamburger, an unwearable dress, an unwatchable television. Sachs has taken Oldenburg’s proposition and run it through Chanel. “You don’t get to do Oldenburg without Duchamp,” he told me. “These are absolutely appropriations.”

The word gets trickier when it moves from art history into culture. Sachs called cultural appropriation “disgusting and a culture crime”. Yet appropriation has also fuelled part of his practice. He takes things he admires, strips them down, rebuilds them and sends them back into the world.

Sachs said the distinction is what happens after you take something. For example, he’s practised Japanese tea ceremony for 15 years and still describes himself as “clumsy as fuck” and a “bumbling idiot”. He said some critics think he has no business engaging in a Japanese tradition. But the women in Kyoto who actually run the tea world have welcomed him because he takes it seriously, keeps practising and offers something of his own: “It’s not appropriation if you contribute to culture.”

31 Rue Cambon installation view. Photo: Courtesy of Tom Sachs

I asked him about fakes, too. After all, knock-off Chanel bags proliferate on market stalls, and Sachs has made his own version of the luxury brand’s suits using plywood for 31 Rue Cambon. His answer took our chat onto another tangent: he has no time for intellectual property. “I don’t believe in intellectual property,” he told me. “It’s a modern invention.”

He respects the “pirates” making fake luxury goods on New York’s Canal Street, and sees copying as part of the way ideas travel and mutate. In fact, he’s described himself as a “pirate”. Sachs’ take also explains his relationship with Nike. Via NikeCraft, he works with the brand to make shoes and clothing shaped by his ideas about craft, utility and making things yourself. Years ago, he made his own Nike advert — “Just Do It, Motherfucker” — as a kind of sympathetic magic for his Space Programme, without Nike’s money or permission. Twenty years later, his DIY move evolved into NikeCraft.

“I’m not interested in what fashion brands do,” he told me. “It’s more like what I can derive from them.” He sees Nike less as a corporate patron than as an equipment maker. “I’m an athlete. My art is my sport. My team is my studio, and Nike makes equipment for me the way they would do for a professional football player.”

Perhaps this is where 31 Rue Cambon is quietly subverting luxury, by stripping away its power to dictate value as opposed to simply rejecting it. Sachs takes the codes, mythology and desirability of the luxury world and puts them to work on his own terms. As he put it of Nike: “It’s not what you’re doing for Nike, it’s what can Nike do for me?” It’s a question he puts to Chanel, too.