Tom Sachs’ workshop in lower Manhattan is a warren of rooms jammed with cabinets, shelves, work tables, and sorting systems—all of them meticulously customized. Even the lowly drill press is heavily remade, with two machine lamps spidering off its top, a brush on a retracting cord to clean away debris, and a chuck key and center punch stuck to magnets on the machine’s face. These kinds of rituals, taken together, represent a shop’s philosophy of work.
Sachs is a sculptor, but he prefers to call himself a bricoleur. “It’s someone who cobbles together functional contraptions out of received or collected materials,” he explains. A decade ago, galleries and curators started noticing his provocative works—a cardboard hand grenade in a mock Hermès box, a Glock pistol decorated and branded as Tiffany. Today, he and his 12-person team mount exhibits in museums around the world, and art lovers collect his work faithfully. The team is constantly prepping for large-scale installations, such as a major project at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts that sends two “astronauts,” played by assistants, in a plywood mock-spaceship on a simulated mission to the Jovian moon Europa, which scientists believe might harbor life.
It is the third in his series of Space Program pieces. As visitors tour the studio, Sachs’ assistant, Sam Ratanarat, works to stabilize a cart the astronauts will wheel out onto the simulated surface, welding the titanium rods holding it together. Sachs tells Ratanarat her first weld looks gorgeous. “Talk about material bragging rights,” he says. “Titanium is up there!” But Sachs is less enamored with their old MIG welder, noting that the machine is beat up. When he asks if they can get rid of it, Ratanarat responds protectively, “We use it.”
Sachs himself is working on something edgier. Recalling past space missions where Spyderco manufactured white Delicas—folding knives beloved by knife enthusiasts—engraved with NASA’s iconic 1970s logo, he notes that Europa demands a completely different tool. “Europa is a mission about imperialism. We go to another planet, find some Europans, and abduct them,” Sachs says. “So what’s the knife of colonialism? A machete!” True to form, he is milling his own from a Japanese lawn-mower blade.
With multiple shows running concurrently in New York and the Europa landing opening soon at Yerba Buena, Sachs stands at the peak of a two-decade career. His cobbled-together, rough-edged, joyful contraptions have established him as arguably the most famous bricoleur in the world.
The Evolution of an Obsessive Maker
Sachs was a peculiar kid. He bought clothes at Goodwill and had them tailored, struggled academically as a solid D-minus student, was unpopular, bad at sports, and even repeated the ninth grade. Somehow, he managed to get into Bennington College. That is where he met Babs, a senior who taught him how to weld and introduced him to the works of Brancusi and Richard Serra. He fell in love, though she promptly dumped him for another student. “She showed me a more complex way of working, to make these objects and talk about them politically, socially, how objects could be used in the rituals of our lives,” Sachs says. He nursed his broken heart with an angle grinder.
Years later, encountering Sachs’ work through a video of a replica Landing Excursion Module on a simulated mission to Mars, fellow space enthusiast Tom Hanks helped bridge a connection, leading to a lasting relationship between Sachs and fellow maker Adam Savage. Savage, a former host and producer of MythBusters who runs Tested.com, found an immediate kinship with the artist.
“We’re both obsessive organizers. We both make replicas. And when we can’t think of what to work on, we build infrastructure—stands, shelves, benches,” Savage notes. Sachs even borrowed construction ideas from television programs like MythBusters. Over time, the two makers formed a collaborative bond, sharing workshops when traveling between coasts.
When Savage looks at Sachs’ workshop, the tools are familiar, but the true focal point is the ritual—the visible signs of how Sachs turns prosaic objects and materials into art. Savage’s own obsession involves building replicas of objects from movies and television shows, such as the pistol from Blade Runner, the space suits from Alien, or the mecha-glove from Hellboy. In doing so, he communicates with his 10-year-old self, creating items that are real enough to fool the adult he has become.
When Sachs replicates something to display or sell in a gallery, Savage believes he is also talking to his 10-year-old self, but with a different conversation: gifting that child all the art supplies anyone could ever ask for and letting him play. Savage tells stories with objects by layering on a patina of age and use patterns, while Sachs builds narratives directly into the construction. One can see the exposed edges of plywood, the screws, the marks made by greasy hands, or a stray tool mark. You always know the object is deliberately made. Sachs’ pieces are art because his rituals of manufacture tell stories about the artist.
Rituals of Tea and Space
This philosophy extends beyond the studio and into elaborate performances, such as a traditional Japanese tea ceremony re-envisioned by Sachs at the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City. In a classical ceremony, guests shed unnecessary items like keys, coats, and shoes to put on traditional Japanese footwear. At Tom Sachs’ tea ceremony, guests receive sneakers cut into sandals, while their smartphones and wristwatches are locked inside a Faraday cage.
Sachs delivers the ceremony earnestly, frothing the tea powder and pouring the water, but the performance is entirely non-traditional. Guests smoke from a handmade pipe, drink sake from cups made of stacked plywood circles coated in resin, and eat Oreos followed by Ritz crackers with peanut butter.
“People are into tea for three reasons,” Sachs explains. “Spirituality, like Zen. Sensuality, like the tea itself, the smell, the charcoal, the caffeine high. The third reason is the architecture—the teahouse, the kimonos, the bowls, the whisks. Obviously, I’m into it for that.”
This mirrors Sachs’ obsession with NASA and space exploration. While some people are drawn to astronomy for navigation or the existential questions of science and religion meeting, others are interested in the hardware, rockets, and rovers. “It’s the ritual,” Savage observes. “I think if I were to be honest with myself, I’m more about the hardware,” Sachs replies. “लेकिन it doesn’t mean anything without the ritual.”
Simulating Failure and Success on Europa
Astronauts practice for every eventuality, and NASA routinely examines its structural, personal, organizational, and philosophical failures to prevent future disasters. At its core, NASA operates as a large, ritualized failure-analysis organization.
That focus on ritual and potential failure is precisely why Sachs makes art about space. Like NASA’s missions, Sachs’ simulated space missions can go awry in numerous ways. For the Europa project, astronauts start in a quarantine trailer, transfer via scissor lift to the landing module, and launch via a model rocket filmed with a miniature camera to mimic real launch angles before the rocket flies on a length of yarn toward a spinning globe.
Landing remains the hardest part. One astronaut plays the classic Atari game Lunar Lander. If she uses up all her fuel or crashes the module, a TV screen displays a Richard Nixon impersonator reading the speech he would have prepared had the Apollo astronauts perished, bringing an immediate end to the show.
If she succeeds, the astronauts leave the lander in suits cooled by tanks of ice water in their backpacks. They shuffle to an ice-covered pool, drill through the ice under mission control guidance, and capture the “aliens” they find. While Sachs considers what creatures will inhabit the simulated Europa pool—weighing options like crawfish or shrimp, while keeping potential reactions from animal welfare groups in mind—the underlying mechanics remain grounded in genuine aerospace references.
Space agency professionals appreciate these endeavors. Dave Lavery, a NASA roboticist, notes, “It’s always intriguing to go beyond the roughly cut plywood edges and half-worn paint, and discover that all the details are technically traceable back to the reality of actual spaceflight hardware.”
The labor-intensive setups are intentional. Sachs’ materials are far from ideal; space suits are difficult to keep cool, and switches and hatches frequently break. Spending weeks transporting and assembling pieces across the country for just a few days of performance is all part of the process. While he cares about the broader philosophy behind space travel, it ultimately fuels his fundamental desire to make things. “I love getting my hands dirty. I only feel good if I have a cut somewhere,” he says. “If I have a little burn, it means that I’m probably doing something right.”
This dedication to physical making recently led to a collaboration between Sachs and Savage on a replica of the lunch box carried by character Heywood Floyd in 2001: A Space Odyssey. While Savage built his version using precision patterns, fiberglass casting, machined hinges, locks, and Mylar bubble wrap sourced from NASA, Sachs constructed his version from plywood, screws, and resin, letting the wood color bleed through the white paint. Both created accurate, highly personal interpretations.
Reflecting on the nature of their work, Sachs emphasizes the emotional weight of letting a piece go. “If you cobble together found materials into a bricolage of a prosaic object, but it hurts to let it go, you’re making art.”
