Jumpsuits & Teleporters

Tom Sachs’ Space Program
Gagosian Gallery
September 8 - October 13, 2007 
See more photos of the exhibit at the artist’s website.
Buy a book of exhibition images.

For more than a decade Sachs has pondered the homespun technical ingenuity and romance with the unknown that brought America the Apollo program. Experimenting with models of varying scale (“Lunar Module (1:18),” 1999; “Crawler,” 2003) has culminated in the realization of his own life-size SPACE PROGRAM. Pirating the milestone in collective memory when man took his first walk on the moon, Sachs reconstructs its key components, built to scale his way. By recollecting this historic event as a custom-made experience from the free domain of public imagination, he renders it totally in and of our time, charged by a vigorous artistic idiom that is ambivalent to the core. In a new twist on his shameless cannibalizing of corporate identity, Sachs now has the giants of high-style branding - Nike, Prada, and the like - working for him to produce items (lab coats, space boots) for the detailed inventory of his funky space odyssey.

In addition to the huge, intricately built lunar module that is the centerpiece of SPACE PROGRAM - replete with such classic Sachsian features as a fully stocked booze cabinet, toolkit, and soundtrack necessary for survival on an alien planet - visitors will find a fully functioning mission-control unit. On a grid of monitors, the liturgy of space exploration unfolds in a live demonstration by Sachs and his team, involving countless rituals and procedures, from instrument checks to moon-walking and sample-collecting to splash-down. Thus the gallery becomes a sort of reliquary of both the material traces and special effects of the artist’s encounters with the terrible sublime.