Tom Sachs by Arte Fuse at Jeffrey Deitch

Описание: “How did these get here!?” I was shocked to see a pile of stickers on my gallery reception desk in the Spring of 1996 with the outrageously provocative phrase “Nuke the Swiss” printed above a red cross. “They were left there by that funny guy who comes in here all the time,” my staff explained. A few weeks later, I was there when the culprit walked in, smirking as he handed me a fresh stack of Nuke the Swiss stickers. His engaging manner somehow neutralized the egregious content of his free art. This was my first introduction to Tom Sachs, who twenty years later, still visits during his walks around the neighborhood, and who continues to perfect his fusion of radical conceptual performance, Modernist idealism, bricolage and provocation.
Tom and I have discussed presenting his work in my gallery since 1996, but it took twenty years to realize an exhibition. There were several false starts. In the late 1990s, Tom amused himself by setting up a contest between three art dealers who were keen to show his work, Angela Westwater, Mary Boone, and myself. He even published a zine about the “competition.” He decided that Mary Boone was the winner and rewarded her with a solo show. I opened my copy of The New York Times on September 30, 1999 to see the astonishing headline, “Art Dealer Arrested for Exhibition of Live Ammunition.” Tom had placed a vase full of live 9-millimeter cartridges on Mary Boone’s reception desk for visitors to take home as souvenirs. Mary was hauled off to jail for unlawful distribution of ammunition and resisting arrest. She was also charged with possession of unlawful weapons and possession of stolen property for another piece in the show, which featured homemade guns. I was lucky to have dodged a bullet. There was much more water under the bridge, but I will save those stories for my memoirs.
Last year Tom called to invite me for a tea ceremony. He had transformed a section of his wunderkammer studio into a subversion of a Japanese tea house, constructed with Con Edison excavation barriers and Blue Foam instead of rice paper and bamboo. I was deeply entranced in Tom’s remix of the tea ceremony when he stunned me by lifting the lid of a lacquer box that I assumed would contain an exquisite tea biscuit. Instead of a biscuit, it was perfectly measured line of cocaine. The ceremony was confounding, but the taste of the carefully sourced matcha was transporting.
Some months later Tom told me the good news that his entire tea house along with its extensive Japanese garden and his bronze bonsai tree (made from 3,500 casts of Q-tips, tampon cases, tooth brushes, and enema nozzles) would be the focus of a major exhibition at the Noguchi Museum. In addition, his Boom Box retrospective, which had been enthusiastically received in Austin, would be coming to the Brooklyn Museum. Tom suggested that maybe now was the time to present the gallery show that we had been discussing for twenty years.

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