“We are not working with Tom’s studio at this time and have no release dates planned,” a Nike representative told Complex. The comment signals that, at least for now, the brand is no longer working with Sachs, though it might not be the definitive end to their relationship.

The apparent decision by Nike followed a report by Curbed in March that alleged Sachs’s studio had a toxic work environment. Soon after the report was released, Nike representatives said the company was “deeply concerned” by reports of Sachs’s behavior, which allegedly included calling employees “autistic,” and “retarded,” throwing things at them, and other hazing behavior.

Nike and Sachs have long collaborated on sneaker design, in particular a project called Mars Yard, named after a rocky stretch of terrain in Pasadena, California, where engineers test out rovers that will explore the red planet. The Mars Yard 1.0 debuted in 2012, with features such as vectran fabric from the Mars Excursion Rover airbags, billed as a shoe for the modern rocket scientist. Mars Yard 2.0 came out in 2017 during an exhibition at Governor’s Island that, presciently enough, also showed a film that Sachs made with artist Van Neistat titled “The Hero’s Journey”. The film follows a Tom Sachs apprentice through an indoctrination process in his iconic SoHo studio.

At the time he told ARTnews of the film, “There is always humiliation and failure in the beginning, and we wanted The Hero’s Journey to accentuate that. No one who has had success hasn’t also had a humiliating beginning with lots of failure.”

Six years have passed since Mars Yard 2.0 was released and 3.0 was expected to debut sometime soon, with rumors swirling recently about a new release date. Sachs’s more accessible Nike collaboration, titled General Purpose, was due to come out in more colorways in April, yet this too has yet to happen.

Multiple former employees of the artist alleged a “destabilizing and scary,” work environment, according to a Curbed investigation published on Monday. Former employees quoted in the story alleged that Sachs made multiple inappropriate comments related to sex and employees’ appearance, threw objects across the room in the direction of employees, called a storage room in the basement the “rape room,” walked around in just underwear while in the studio and called employees “autistic,” “retarded,” “bitch,” and other names.

Nike, a long-time collaborator with Sachs, said it is “deeply concerned by the very serious allegations” in a statement shared with FN.

“We are in contact with Tom and his studio, seeking to better understand the situation and how these issues are being addressed,” the company said.

Sachs allegedly once showed up to a zoom call with female Nike employees while in his underwear, according to a former administrative employee cited in the report. The company’s studio commented to Curbed that these “weekly virtual fittings” were a “normal part of the design process.”

One former studio manager told Curbed, “It’s almost as if he goes out of his way to sow discomfort and pawns it off as if he’s a genius. It’s like a ruse. So many people out there know that he’s cruel, but the art world is tiny and no one gives a shit.”

Nike first partnered with Sachs in 2012 for the launch of the NikeCraft Mars Yard 1.0 sneakers and has since produced a series of high-heat releases with the artist. Most recently, the two entities released a General Purpose Shoe at a more accessible price point.

According to a Wednesday report from Complex, Nike altered the packaging for its NikeCraft Mars Yard 2.0 shoe collaboration with Sachs in 2017 and removed the words “work like a slave” from the lid of the box before the shoes launched.

Curbed said that it spoke with over a dozen former employees, almost all of whom requested anonymity due to nondisclosure agreements or fear of retaliation.

The former assistants alleged that Sachs threw objects or screamed at employees, labeled a storage room “the rape room” (and then later changed it to “the consent room”), dispensed gifts of different values to, in Curbed‘s words, “demonstrate one’s standing” in the studio, and routinely made comments about employees’ appearance and sex life. In addition, multiple former assistants said Sachs called them “autistic,” “retarded”, or “bitch,” among other names.

The only named former studio assistant, Owen Zoyt, told Curbed that he dropped out of college in 2021 to join the studio and spoke positively of its “tightly knit” and “fast-paced environment.”

One employee told Curbed, “It’s almost as if he goes out of his way to sow discomfort and pawns it off as if he’s a genius. It’s like a ruse. So many people out there know that he’s cruel, but the art world is tiny and no one gives a shit.”

Sachs declined to be interviewed for the story and, in a statement to Curbed, a spokesperson for the studio “denied almost all of the allegations,” and said the behavior described by Curbed‘s sources was  “not in line with the values of our studio.” 

Curbed‘s exposé comes just weeks after an anonymous art world couple’s job listing for an assistant went viral after the New York Times reported on the egregious list of responsibilities.

Not long after the article was published, Artnet News speculated that the couple in question was none other than Tom Sachs and wife Sarah Hoover, a former Gagosian director. Curbed added to that speculation, with former assistants telling the publication that the job listing’s references to “systems” pointed towards Sachs, who is apparently known for the eccentric and firmly held rules that dictate the people who work for him in his household and studio.

Some of these rules have been released by Sachs himself, in a video entitled 10 Bullets. The video shows Sachs’ studio, taped with labels and rules, from the reasonable request to put dishes away to “Always be knolling” (arranging objects at 90 degree angles). These mildly controlling, but basically benign studio rules were just the tip of the iceberg, according to Curbed.

Tom Sachs’ studio did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for his gallery, Sperone Westwater, declined to comment on whether the allegations would affect their relationship with the artist.

“He was an ultimate do-it-yourselfer,” Sachs said of Kubrick (with whom he also happens to share a birthday). The 53-year-old sculptor was sitting cross-legged in his bedroom upstairs from where Neistat worked on Ritual, a short film—due out in 2020—set in Sachs’s surf house and devoted to the ceremonies and rites of surfing culture across the globe.

Sachs and Neistat have worked on movies of disparate kinds, but Ritual stands apart as a culmination of their shared pursuit of surf-borne pleasures and Sachs’s singular dedication to sculptural history and lore. The beach house that serves as its setting is a sort of Tom Sachs sculpture—an abode-as-artwork in the tradition of Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau. The exterior is tiled with corrugated steel slats, fishing nets hang over the front from an observation deck, and the porch floorboards are made from old blue New York Department of Transportation barricades. Inside, storage places for nearly everything are labeled in Sachs’s signature scrawl: “spoons,” “paper towels,” “mugs,” “anal barbell” (the nature of that last one was unclear). A wall full of favored sustenance—cans of Heinz Baked Beans—bears teal labels that match the color of a Makita drill mounted over the kitchen sink.

The house is as much an experience as a residence. In the guest quarters, bunk beds are arranged under a womb-like red light to give the effect of being in a submarine, and recordings of whale song play—with a knob for volume control next to a list of recommended amphibious-warfare-related movies (Hunt for Red October, Das Boot) to watch on the TV. In the bathroom, instructions for how to flush a toilet are mounted to the wall, in a scroll-like fashion reminiscent of the opening credits to Star Wars. Outside, a gate bears a sign reading “All ye who enter must washeth thy feet else thy shall perish 666” beneath a bright-red pentagram. Beyond that, more than a dozen surfboards stand at attention.

“This house is in service to surfing,” Neistat, 44, explained. “The rituals around surfing are more interesting than the actual surfing.”

A speaker (with a knob for volume control) that emits recordings of whale song is mounted next to a list of recommended amphibious-warfare-related movies at Tom Sachs’s surf house in Rockaway Beach.

In October, Sachs and Neistat’s How to Learn How to Surf—which opens with the admission that no one in the movie is particularly good at the maritime pursuit—won “Best Surfing Short” at the Paris Surf & Skateboard Film Festival. Central to it is a consideration of what it means to be at peace with a certain lack of success.

“There’s a tremendous amount of failure,” Sachs said of surfing, a sport notorious for its steep learning curve. “But still, you go for the goal, go for the home run, try and make that cut right. Do things safe, clean up after yourself, show up on time. You’re going to be late—it happens. You just accept it and move on. That’s the goal of these movies: to provide a context in which we can simultaneously have excellence and accept our failures and not let it ruin our lives.”

Suitably, Sachs’s beach house contains a lot of purposeful imperfection. Seams are on proud display, lettering is crossed out and rewritten, the artist’s two-year-old son’s shoes (miniature versions of a line that Sachs designed for Nike) lie scattered across the entryway. “In a sculpture, you’ll always see a pencil mark, a glue drip, a weld, or whatever—because stuff happened there. It’s the same with the house: we want it to be real,” Sachs said.

Imperfection plays a similar role in Sachs’s films, emphatically low-fi productions in which iPhone shots have been known to appear in the final cut. As Sachs put it, over the course of their filmography, he and Neistat created “a language of moviemaking that was the same as the sculptures in that the movies are built—they always show the process of their making.”

Sachs met Neistat (brother and former collaborator of the famous YouTube video star Casey Neistat) through a happy accident, when the latter stopped on the street outside Sachs’s studio in downtown Manhattan to test a camera rig he had crafted for his bicycle. Sachs expressed curiosity about the contraption, and the rest is history.

Neistat started out as a fabricator in Sachs’s studio, where every gesture and every object created answers to the strict language of Sachs’s rhetoric and rules. With the movies, though, Sachs surrendered some of that control to Neistat, whose vision brings with it a reverence for straightforward instruction as well as an appreciation of absurdist kitsch.

A NASA-inspired espresso machine at Tom Sachs’s surf house in Rockaway Beach.

On the set of Ritual on a rainy day in October, Gray Sorrenti—the star of the film and daughter of famed fashion photographer Mario Sorrenti—was using an espresso machine adorned with hand-drawn NASA lettering (and, as it happened, sitting next to a 14-inch dildo) to instruct viewers how to make the perfect cup of coffee. Many films by Sachs and Neistat are meant to serve as training manuals, covering tasks as simple as “how to sweep” or as ambitious as building interconnecting parts of a ramshackle enterprise for travel to Mars; Sachs put this latter project into action at the Park Avenue Armory in New York in 2012 and then, three years later, in the feature-length film A Space Program. “I’m very overwhelmed with the number of systems in my life,” he said.

Sachs’s best-known film, Ten Bullets (2010), epitomizes his practice in the form of a 20-minute meditation on the dogma behind what it means, physically and psychologically, to work in his studio, which has long been mythologized by his fans. When he hires new assistants and studio hands, Sachs has them watch Ten Bullets or Color (2011) for a kind of human-resources orientation featuring lessons like “In the interest of balance, the studio maintains a work hard, play hard policy” and “There is no place for the color purple in the studio.”

“Ten Bullets is like the Ten Commandments,” Sachs said of a film that—like many others in his oeuvre—transpires through a sort of voice-of-God narration and a filmic approach that is simultaneously playful and austere. “No one can live up to that high [a] standard—no one can do all of them. But it’s a compass.” Sachs’s ultimate goal is for anybody he works with to move out and make art or whatever else on their own terms. “But while you’re with us, working at the studio full-time or just for the minutes it takes to watch a movie,” he said, “we want it to be an enriching experience.”

There’s a certain Zen approach that Sachs wants his initiates to follow, and aspects of that figure in an interest in rituals that found expression in Tea Ceremony, an elaborate installation he first presented at the Noguchi Museum in Queens, New York, in 2016. In a setting that once served as a live/work space for the storied sculptor Isamu Noguchi, Sachs created self-styled buildings and accoutrements for traditional Japanese tea ceremonies accentuated with hyper-American fare such as Oreo cookies and Ritz crackers.

Wetsuits appear in various places throughout Ritual (2020), Tom Sachs’s short film.

The idea for Ritual presented itself in the spring of 2019, when Neistat and Sachs, on a surfing trip in Japan, noticed the precise manner in which surfers in Kamakura hung their wetsuits up to dry on what Sachs described—with gusto—as a perfectly fabricated hook. “Originally, we wanted to do it about hooks, just hooks—a whole thing about hooks,” he said of the initial idea for cinematic subject matter. “But then we got carried away with all these other things we saw the surfers do.”

“It connected so well to Tea Ceremony,” Neistat said, “because Tea Ceremony is almost entirely about ritual.”

The rituals surveyed in the new film range from maintaining surf gear and getting sand off your body to both hosting guests and being a guest. “In our dream,” Sachs said, “it’s the movie that Airbnb hosts point to and say, ‘You can’t stay in my house until you watch this.’”

Other tips in the film involve practical matters like how to heat up a can of beans using only uncooked rice and how to put one leg into a wetsuit before the other to prevent having to shimmy too much. “Some of this stuff might seem preposterous, like really obsessing about a cup of coffee or how to hook a wetsuit,” Sachs said. “But anything can be taken up all the way to the most extreme art. I just want to champion the values of hard work.”

A version of this article appeared in the Winter 2020 issue of ARTnews, under the title “New Wave.”

Tom Sachs, Sandcrawler, 2018.

©TOM SACHS/COURTESY TOM SACHS STUDIO AND VITO SCHNABELPROJECTS

Aficionados of mezcal and modes of transport in Star Wars movies will find a lot to like in sculptor Tom Sachs’s newest offering in New York: a wooden curio constructed in the form of a so-called Sandcrawler that has been cut open to house a mini bar holding bottles of fine Mexican libations along with citrus and salt to help them go down. Small ceramic cups are included, with hand-scrawled NASA logos of the kind that feature in Sachs’s “Space Program” accessories, and among them are signs of more earthly concerns: pictures from porn magazines and a box of condoms tucked away in a corner. All the elements add up to the makings of a starry night.

“It was this form begging the question: what’s inside?” Sachs said of the sculpture, which he had started as a Star Wars fan—the Sandcrawler is a giant vehicle that first featured in Episode I: The Phantom Menace—but then amended. He said he liked the contraption’s original unsullied shape, comparing it to something by Max Ernst, Tony Smith, or Lynn Chadwick—“all the high-modernist forms.” But after a couple years of it lying around, “I was like, ‘Fuck it—let’s cut it open.’ Then it turned into—or became a vehicle for [Ed. note: the pun was not lost on him]—all the ritualized activities I’ve been interested in.”

Tom Sachs, Sandcrawler, 2018.

©TOM SACHS/COURTESY TOM SACHS STUDIO AND VITO SCHNABELPROJECTS

Among those are the many meticulous gestures in the art of Japanese tea ceremony, which has figured in Sachs’s performative and sculptural “Space Program” works as well as a particular body of creations—a makeshift tea house, koi pond, and countless jury-rigged gizmos to help whip matcha into refined drinkable form—that he has installed in institutions including the Noguchi Museum in New York.

To show Sandcrawler, Sachs found an accomplice in Vito Schnabel, who is exhibiting the work for two weeks (closing after December 13) at his Vito Schnabel Projects space in Greenwich Village. “We used to surf in Rockaway together and I’ve always been a fan of his work,” Schnabel said. “This is kind of a prelude to our exhibition at my gallery in St. Moritz [in 2019], which has to do with space, Joseph Beuys, and an espresso machine that is kind of Nam June Paik-esque.”

For Sachs, the selection of his preferred tequila-affiliated elixir has different valences. “Mezcal is the drink of my studio,” he said. “It’s been the social lubricant of choice in the studio for 30 years of degenerate behavior—studio visits gone right. It’s also a drink that I discovered through an artist friend, Ron Cooper, who started bootlegging it across the border from Mexico to New Mexico in his jacked-up Cadillac. I first tasted it in Taos and have this kind of romance with it and artists from the ’60s.”

Among the characters he associates with it are Ed Ruscha, Dennis Hopper, Frank Gehry, Larry Bell, and Ken Price, who designed the graphics for bottles in the revered Del Maguey line of mezcals started by Cooper. “It’s like a combination of finish fetishists, Pop artists, conceptual artists—those are all like my fathers, and that was the drink of their community.”

There’s a seasonal valence, too. “I wanted to celebrate the holidays and alcoholism and ritualized drug consumption,” Sachs said, pointing at the bar/sculpture’s mirrored surface. “The thing I like about cocaine is that you’re in a very private space with people you may or may not know doing something illicit. You become bonded through that. It’s a lot like the tea ceremony—and having mezcal with someone is akin to that.”

A page from a zine made for the occasion of Tom Sachs’s “Space Camp” on Governors Island in New York.

COURTESY THE ARTIST

Five hundred dollars will allow for the purchase of many goods, among them a number of pairs of artist Tom Sachs’s Mars Yard Nike sneakers now up for sale on eBay. Not all of them, though—some pairs are tagged with prices much higher, moving from $700 to $800 and, not especially rationally, up to $2,999.99. (Other pairs in various sizes can be had for around $150.)

Many of the auction listings do not seem ashamed about their betrayal of the sentiment behind the limited-edition shoes, with some explicitly showing photos of writing on the official product box that says—in Sachs’s handwritten font over top a sleek Nike swoosh—“These shoes are only valid if worn and worn to death by you. Posers need not apply.”

Many posers applied. But they had to work to get their wares, or at least that was the idea. Access to the shoes was available earlier this summer at an interactive Sachs-styled “Space Camp” installation on Governors Island in New York. Sneakerheads and assorted others took ferries there to make the scene, which surrounded an obstacle course arranged inside an abandoned building. Initiates on the day I went were greeted by the sounds of Wu-Tang Clan booming on stacks of speakers outside. Once in the hovel, orientation began with a screening of The Hero’s Journey, a new film made by Sachs and his frequent collaborator Van Neistat that traces the path of an apprentice in the artist’s storied SoHo studio. The indoctrination process is harsh and unstinting, with physical as well as mental endurance a topmost priority. “It is by will alone I set my mind in motion,” Sachs has his aspiring studio hands repeat in a sort of mantra in the film. Another one intoned: “Power tools are a privilege, not a right.”

After the film, the group of “Space Camp” trainees was ushered into a holding area wherein workout clothes were provided, with silver strips on which to write one’s name in Sharpie for the purpose of identification. Once outfitted, activity commenced. The obstacle course itself, hidden from view and thus a mystery to anyone for whom neither sneaker-buying nor art-experiencing typically involves much in the way of ordeal, was, in no small way, intense. The first stage called for climbing up and ringing a bell suspended from the ceiling, reachable only by way of rope. (That is, if one chose “hard” as opposed to “easy” when asked for a preferred course of action; the “easy” way offered use of a ladder, but what’s the point of not even trying?)

A chart in the “Space Camp” zine.

COURTESY THE ARTIST

It is not easy to climb a rope, and failure, it turned out, was very much an option—in that and then also other stages that tested different feats of physical ingenuity and the workings of the mind. One scenario involved piloting a miniature remote-control helicopter to pick up a would-be space capsule from a would-be ocean with a hook, moving it onto a platform, and then landing safely on another deck. Patience and finesse were required, in high supply.

Another stage played as a ramshackle take on a Sol LeWitt wall drawing: on a wood plank marked with squiggly etchings on the wall, course-goers had to lean over and trace the shape of the lines while maintaining close proximity and without letting their pencils leave the surface for any reason. It might sound simple; it was not—especially with arms already tired and sore from rope-climbing, plank-holding, weight-lifting, and more.

“We’re marking a big red X”—at points where lines touched or pencils disengaged—”and owning that, so it becomes a field of failure,” Sachs said of the wall drawing, which would remain in-the-works until all of “Space Camp” was broken down and carted off the island. We were sitting outside after a run through the course was complete, sweat still dripping, while workers in “Space Camp” paraphernalia milled around. “This is an obstacle course and, in a way, a consumerist intervention because I’m heartbroken to see all those fuckboys lining up to buy sneakers at Supreme on a Saturday instead of skateboarding, playing soccer, doing math, or whatever inspires them. I didn’t like that these kids were lining up and waiting, so I thought, Well, if they’re going to go stay up all night waiting for sneakers, let’s make them really work for it.”

Like the aspiring apprentice in the film screened earlier, a participant in the “Space Camp” program navigated a journey of sorts. “There is always humiliation and failure in the beginning, and we wanted The Hero’s Journey to accentuate that,” Sachs said. “No one who has had success hasn’t also had a humiliating beginning with lots of failure.” It’s a tale as old as time, he noted: “This is the story of Luke Skywalker and Odysseus and Cher Horowitz in Clueless.”

Another page from zine depicting Ernest Shackleton’s expedition to the South Pole in 1908.

COURTESY THE ARTIST

Exercise is integral to an art practice that, for Sachs, could not be more holistic. “We do this to make our bodies stronger so that there’s a more solid foundation to make difficult decision with our minds,” he said of himself and his acolytes at his studio. “If you have a strong body, you can flow better, think better, sleep better. If you know you have to show up in the morning, you may not have that last drink, you might get to bed a little earlier. It’s a lifestyle. To me there’s nothing more important than work. This obstacle course prioritizes work itself over [getting to] the end.”

As for the art of shoe design, which he first engaged with Nike around the time of his four-week inhabitance at New York’s Park Avenue Armory in 2012 for his sculpture/performance installation “Space Program: Mars,” Sachs said he was intrigued by the notion of the foot as a point of contact. “It’s a connection to the ground,” he said. “Something I learned from Brancusi or David Smith is the way an object connects to the earth is important: it communicates the formal structure of the whole thing. If you’re talking about a physical body, look at anyone and there are these curves and shadows underneath as the object—the person, the figure—floats on the surface.”

He was interested in the shoe-design project as a way to stage a kind of insurrection as well. “A lot of this has been my way of trying to come to terms with the issues of an artist working with a company like Nike,” he said. “I approached this collaboration with some apprehension because, in doing a cultural intervention with the culture of Nike, what is a way to make a product 100 percent Nike and 100 percent me? Of course I want to change them, but me and 100 Noam Chomskys couldn’t make a dent—it’s so big. So this was my way of trying to mitigate my experience with storytelling, not about the way Nike is or should be—but the way it can be in some small way.”

The patch one received upon completion of “Space Camp.”

ARTNEWS

The Mars Yard 2.0 sneaker, with updates on the original model made five years ago, features a preponderance of Sachsian flights of fancy. Custom eyelets and aglets do duty next to special “donning straps” and elements that have been designed to age with grace. The idea for the original shoe was that it could be worn and re-soled and worn again, for the rest of time. But it turned out that the high-grade Vectran fabric employed, though strong enough to be used for airbags to land contraptions on Mars, turned to tatters when subjected to much different use in the integrated structure of a shoe. So adjustments were made, all of them almost superhumanly specific and, in typical Sachs fashion, invitingly home-spun. “I was really trying to work with Nike to make something built the way I would build it,” the artist said.

The project also allowed him to engage audiences different than the ones that make the circuit of museum and gallery shows. “The sneaker-fetish thing is big—so much bigger than our little weird white art world,” Sachs said. And then there is a cousin of his that he has kept in mind: “I made these duct-tape paintings [years ago] and he said, ‘Can I ask you a personal question, Tommy? What does it mean?’ I found myself in this horrible situation trying to explain the history of postwar painting to my cousin Marty, the car salesman from Long Island. I was like, Fuck, I’m not doing something right. That’s when I stopped making things that needed an explanation. I love abstract art—you know, Judd is my Christ figure, personally.”

But rarification is not part of the Tom Sachs mindset, which seems to revere all objects and regard them as equals on the highest plane. “A Judd is an everyday object the way an Air Jordan or a fighter plane is an everyday object,” he said. “It’s a real object in our world, as is a Barnett Newman, and we have to take them all seriously because they all relate to each other. It’s about finding the Venn diagram where a stealth bomber and a Nike sneaker interact.”

Walter De Maria, 360˚ I Ching / 64 Sculptures, 1981.

©THE ESTATE OF WALTER DE MARIA/BILL JACOBSON STUDIO, NEW YORK/COURTESY DIA ART FOUNDATION, NEW YORK

Anything like a clear through-line connecting what I marked down as the year’s most affecting shows has proven elusive. As happens often when in my own head, though, I can’t help but think of sound. It didn’t figure highly (or even at all) in every one of these, but sound for me has a habit of attaching to memories, even—or especially—when silence is what ultimately remains. Herewith, a rundown of exhibitions and events that left an indelible impression, with sound as a sort of unreliable guide…

1. Walter De Maria’s 360˚ I Ching / 64 Sculptures at Dia:Beacon
The first one, fittingly, is a portal to disquiet. Unveiled this spring in two enormous galleries at the upstate sanctuary of Dia:Beacon, Walter De Maria’s little-seen floor piece 360˚ I Ching / 64 Sculptures is made up of white wooden rods arranged in the shapes of hexagrams—cryptic pictograms from the ancient Chinese text I Ching said to hold secrets to all the wisdom in the cosmos. Dating back more than 3,000 years, the 64 hexagrams exhibit different patterns thanks to simple variations in series of broken and unbroken lines, like Morse code but more rudimentary (or less rudimentary—it’s hard to say). In any case, the symbols for concepts like “force” and “thunder” and “dispersing” literally change meaning as you circle De Maria’s work and spy it from different angles, which happens often when taking in a piece that sprawls over 10,000 square feet. And the look of the bright white rods, set against red carpet in Dia’s natural light, quivers like a digital display as the mind tries to reconcile the size and scope of such a thing (the artwork and the I Ching itself). The stirring hope and inevitable failure of the exercise each serve an enigmatic artist who once, with what would seem a mix of sincerity and wryness both, made a work with the title A Computer Which Will Solve Every Problem in the World.

2. László Moholy-Nagy at the Guggenheim Museum
Synesthesia was in high supply at this wowing survey of László Moholy-Nagy, who never seemed to meet a medium or means for presenting art he didn’t love. Moholy-Nagy was so prescient and so good in so many different areas that his lack of world-dominating renown is kind of embarrassing, but the Guggenheim show (and its great catalog) helped reset the dial. Highlights included visionary photo work (via photographs, photomontage, and photograms) and stark graphical paintings on warped translucent plastic that cast shadows of still more stark graphical patterns on the walls. But even the little stuff was outsize in terms of imagination and ideas, from letterhead designed for the Bauhuas (the coolest-ever means for interoffice mail, it would seem) to a chess set to rival Man Ray’s.  Then there was the whirring of the motor within Light Prop for an Electric Stage, a machine conceived in 1930 and futuristic still.

3. David Brooks at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum
In Ridgefield, Connecticut, the sculptor David Brooks bought and disassembled a John Deere combine harvester—a bitchin’ 3300 model from 1976—and put its innards on immaculate display. Everything from large panels of green metal to giant tractor-like claws to tiny springs and screws figure in, some left raw and others polished or gilt to look like relics in an air-locked vitrine at the Met. Under the title Continuous Service Altered Daily (a nod to Robert Morris), the piece touches on mechanical devastation of the natural world but also ways that humans have been smart and resourceful too. Plus it is a wonder to look at, as something so simultaneously abstract and plain. At the entrance to the museum, a short video plays on a loop to show the giant alien contraption at work. The roar of its engine has been hard to shake.

Installation view of David Brooks’s Continuous Service Altered Daily, 2016.

TOM POWEL IMAGING/COURTESY THE ARTIST

4. “Blackness in Abstraction” at Pace Gallery
This unusually probing summer group show surveyed blackness as an idea more sprawling and diffuse than might have been expected. As a color (or a negation of color), black figured in work by the likes of Rashid Johnson, Ad Reinhardt, Ellen Gallagher, and Wangechi Mutu. Then there was blackness as a marker of identity, often attached to race but not exclusively—and not always adhering to lines as they have traditionally been drawn. Curator Adrienne Edwards made a good heady stew of work assembled from different locales and multiple generations, with an ambitious thesis that was easier to intuit than to communicate with any sort of precise mind. One work that stands out in memory is Pope.L’s Blind, a hole cut into the wall and outfitted with an invisible apparatus behind it to blow a beguiling breeze from out of nowhere.

5. Genesis Breyer P-Orridge at the Rubin Museum
An eerie and exalting survey of artwork by the founder of the aggressively freaked-out industrial band Throbbing Gristle, “Try to Altar Everything” gathered sculptures and talismans made as part of ritualistic practices by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge, a late life partner with whom s/he (the preferred pronoun for Genesis and Lady Jaye both) tried to fuse into a genderless form known as the pandrogyne. The objects were arresting—see: a sculpture of a wooden rabbit with a lock of human hair and a coat of blood gathered while injecting the out-of-body drug ketamine, or a golden altar filled with dead fish. Genesis performed during the run of the show with h/er current band Psychic TV too, sounding a call for a career still very much ongoing.

Installation view of Akio Suzuki’s pa chin ko, 2016.

COURTESY SOUTHFIRST

6. Akio Suzuki at Southfirst
At the historically astute gallery Southfirst in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the conceptual sound artist Akio Suzuki built a room-size pachinko machine out of slapped-together wood, metal, and glass, with nails all over it to sound when metal balls were rolled from the top to the bottom. It was an aural extravaganza, made from the most modest means, and another stirring showing from an artist whose work dates back to the 1960s in Japan.

7. Tom Sachs at the Noguchi Museum
Tom Sachs’s elaborate Tea Ceremony took over much of the Noguchi Museum in Queens and managed to make more sense of that union than could have been foreseen. A teahouse structure (plus garden accoutrements like water fountains and trees) served as the setting for real tea-ceremony rituals performed in Sachs’s anything-but-pretentious bricolage style, and the artist’s reverence for materials, however raw and seemingly slapdash in their presentation, took on new and rightly impressive airs in close proximity to Noguchi’s serene sculptures. A makeshift pool that played home to swimming carp had a motor that whirred and made the water gurgle in the background.

Installation view of “Tom Sachs: Tea Ceremony” at the Noguchi Museum, 2016.

GENEVIEVE HANSON

8. Blank Forms
As the longtime artistic director of Issue Project Room, a pointedly and purposefully experimental performance venue in Brooklyn, Lawrence Kumpf programmed work from different disciplines—music, dance, theater, polyglot incarnations of all at once—and effectively created his own culture. Now, as of the beginning of 2016, he has gone nomadic and organized memorable events at partnering spaces big and small. He helped create the Cecil Taylor portion of the Whitney Museum’s “Open Plan” initiative, worked on activating the archive of the psychoacoustic composer Maryanne Amacher, booked the insanely great Indonesian metal/folk/improv band Senyawa at Bridget Donahue gallery, and, at the Swiss Institute, presented a proto-minimalist composition for solo cello by Terry Jennings and La Monte Young. Other events were just as good. Here’s to more to come.

9. Harry Bertoia at the Museum of Arts and Design
Best known for furniture that ranks up with Eero Saarinen and Charles and Ray Eames in the annals of mid-century modern design, Harry Bertoia also devoted a significant part of his life to making “sound sculptures” that he kept in a barn in rural Pennsylvania. Made of metal in ways that clang and ring out in long, lingering durations, they play kind of like chimes but delve deeply into a sound world that is more intensely musical and resolute. Visitors to the Museum of Arts and Design—which also exhibited prints and recordings by Bertoia, as well as a separate show of his great biomorphic jewelry—could play some of the sculptures, which were displayed all together on a platform. Three months after the show closed, it is not entirely clear if the long-tail sound (also celebrated this year on an 11-CD Bertoia box set by Important Records) has ended.

10. “The Folk Art Collection of Elie and Viola Nadelman” at the New-York Historical Society
One of the first studious and deliberate collections of folk art in America, the incredible holdings of Modernist sculptor Elie Nadelman and his wife Viola showed this summer at the New-York Historical Society, with objects ranging from a 19th-century roach trap to a wooden siren from a clipper ship to the most beautiful clothes pins you could ever see. So much in the show was animated and dynamic in the way of art that is lived with rather than observed at a distance—art that fulfills a double-function as something else. Piano Player (Pianiste), a sculpture by Nadelman himself from 1921, seems aware of such an in-between state, sensuous and refined in its form but also with an energy in it that seems to want to get up and dance. The woman at an upright piano, with a note of sorrow in her and a metal bow on her back suggesting a kind of wind-up toy, seems to be playing at the end of a long night—or the start of a new morning.

Elie Nadelman, Piano Player (Pianiste), ca. 1921.

©ESTATE OF ELIE NADELMAN AND PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE/FOGG MUSEUM IMAGING DEPARTMENT/HARVARD ART MUSEUM

Installation view of “Tom Sachs: Tea Ceremony,” 2016, at the Noguchi Museum. 

GENEVIEVE HANSON

‘If you think of Tom as a 21st-century Zen monk, setting up to build a tea garden retreat, and you think of Noguchi as the natural landscape, that’s the kind of mindset being established here,” explained Dakin Hart, curator at the Noguchi Museum in Queens, as he passed through the glass doors separating the entrance vestibule from the outer garden of the exhibition “Tom Sachs: Tea Ceremony.”

As glimpses of Sachs’s signature style blossom into a new-age sanctuary—fitted with bricolage works (crafted predominately from plywood, Con Ed barriers, and powder-blue foam core) set against Isamu Noguchi’s basalt and limestone sculptures—it becomes clear that Hart has a point.

“Tea Ceremony” is the first solo exhibition to be held at the museum since it opened more than 30 years ago as a site to house and exhibit Noguchi’s work. Sachs—known for his witty cultural appropriations, his interest in precision engineering, and his boyish fascinations—might seem an unlikely choice for this project.

Tom Sachs collects water for use in his Tea Ceremony.

MARIO SORRENTI

Despite the ostensible differences between Noguchi and Sachs—Noguchi focuses on the sublime, Sachs on social systems; Noguchi celebrates the majestic, while Sachs leans toward the satiric—“Tea Ceremony” establishes a correspondence between the artists that seems to push conventional interpretations of their work.

The exhibition itself centers on Sachs’s adaptation of chanoyu—the Japanese tea ceremony. Sprawling through four jam-packed galleries—including a large tea garden (fitted with a real koi pond and a model of Mount Fuji), two additional rooms dedicated to handmade artifacts (one specifically for tea tools), and a miniature Sachs retrospective (to provide context)—“Tea Ceremony” makes it evident that this isn’t the first time Sachs has tackled tea. In fact, Tea House (2011–12), the architectural space where the chanoyu is held, was literally excised and recycled from “Tom Sachs: Space Program 2.0: Mars,” a tea ceremony–based exhibition that opened at the Park Avenue Armory in 2012.

For those wondering what might connect a tea ceremony to a fictive Mars expedition, as seen in the video A Space Program, or why the artist would choose to meditate on chanoyu again, let’s just say that it’s a long trip to the lonely red planet, and a tea ceremony is an ideal way to resolve tensions between anxious crew members. Matcha—the signature drink—is both a stimulant and a relaxant.

“Tea Ceremony” then takes off from where “Mars” left off—a literal launching point for Sachs’s next chapter, an imminent trip to Jupiter’s moon Europa.

When the show travels to this distant moon—or the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco—later this summer, the exhibition will be modified and retitled “Space Program: Europa.” However, when it moves to the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas, the subsequent year, the exhibition will return to its earthly “Tea Ceremony” state.

Haim Steinbach, The Blue Mushroom, 2016.

COURTESY TANYA BONAKDAR GALLERY

TUESDAY, APRIL 19

Talk: “On Ellsworth Kelly” at the Whitney Museum
Ellsworth Kelly, who died in December, won’t easily be forgotten—his color-field paintings show how far simple gestures can go. But before there was a master of painting, there was a little-known American artist getting his start in Europe, and this talk will shed light on Kelly’s early years. After being in the army during World War II, Kelly lived just outside of Paris. He was inspired by the Seine’s shimmering colors, which he then incorporated into his paintings. Kelly’s early work remains less well known than the paintings he made in New York, where he moved in the mid-1950s, and Yve-Alain Bois, who edited Kelly’s catalogue raisonné, will discuss them. He’ll be talking with Scott Rothkopf, a chief curator at the Whitney.
Whitney Museum, 99 Gansevoort Street, 6:30 p.m. Tickets $10/$8

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 20

Panel: “Sign/De/Sign” at Totah
To tie in with Totah’s show of work by Alighiero e Boetti and Mel Bochner, the Lower East Side gallery will be hosting “Sign/De/Sign,” a panel about “signs, symbols, and abstraction in the time of emojis,” as an email invite states. Bochner himself, who is known for making work based on numbers and repeated phrases, will be in attendance. He’ll be in good company, too—Brian Boucher, a senior writer for Artnet; Prem Krishnamurthy, a designer and curator at P!; and Martha Schwendener, the New York Times critic, will be talking with him. Jason Stopa, an adjunct faculty member at Pratt and SVA, will moderate.
Totah, 183 Stanton Street, 6:30 p.m. RSVP to info@davidtotah.com

THURSDAY, APRIL 21

Tom Sachs, Model One, 1999.

COURTESY THE ARTIST/COLLECTION OF PHILLIP AND SHELLEY FOX AARONS, NEW YORK

Opening: “Tom Sachs: Boombox Retrospective, 1999–2016” at the Brooklyn Museum
For this show, Tom Sachs will be setting up the museum’s glass entryway, the Rubin Pavilion, as a “living sound system that hovers between art and science, the functional and the mythological,” according to a press release. Expounding upon the idea of the boom box as an iconic symbol of street culture, Sachs’s show will feature 18 boom-box sculptures that play music and transform the typically silent gallery space into an immersive sound environment. The works, which are made of plywood, foamcore, batteries, duct tape, wires, hot glue, and solder, will be accompanied by playlists created for public hours.
Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, 11 a.m.–10 p.m. Suggested contribution: $16/10. The show is free for those 19 and younger.

Opening: Haim Steinbach at Tanya Bonakdar
Haim Steinbach has spent his career examining the power of the object—what it means in relation to various social and cultural contexts, and why presentation and display are so important. In his new show, Steinbach will carry on his investigations, using recontextualized found objects (including handmade shelves, wood and glass boxes, architectural installations, and text-based works) to impose his analysis of the objects’ psychological resonance.
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, 521 West 21st Street, 6–8 p.m.

Adriana Varejão, Kindred Spirits (detail), 2015.

COURTESY LEHMANN MAUPIN

Opening: Adriana Varejão at Lehmann Maupin
Adriana Varejão’s jarring abstractions look at the ugliness that lies underneath our everyday lives—the colonialist implications of everyday objects and the way identity is coded into them. In the past, the Brazilian artist has made sculptural works in which tiles from the Baroque period are blown open, revealing blood and guts underneath them; the beauty of colonialist structures is quite literally built on violence. But tiles, for Varejão, refer to the structures that guide life, and so, in her new works, Varejão will combine allusions to Minimalism, a style based on constructions, with Native American motifs. In new paintings, these visual motifs are laid over her face, making her image a toss-up of symbols that create identity. Meanwhile, in new works from her “Mimbres” series, Varejão continues making art about a New Mexican people that make pottery using a crackled technique. The picture plane quite literally bursts open, in reference to how forms are unstable when cultures come together. —Alex Greenberger
Lehmann Maupin, 201 Chrystie Street, 6–8 p.m.

FRIDAY, APRIL 22

Screening: Hockney at Metrograph
Director Randall Wright has pieced together a documentary of David Hockney’s life, based on the artist’s personal archive of photos and home movies. The movie takes a dynamic approach to its portrayal of Hockney, using both never-before-seen footage and candid interviews with close friends and associates. The film spans the breadth of Hockney’s career—from the days of his early success in the 1960s to private ensuing torments concerning his art, his relationships, and the AIDS crisis—while never losing its humorous, optimistic take on the artist’s life.
Metrograph, 7 Ludlow Street, 6:45 p.m. Tickets $15

SATURDAY, APRIL 23

Peter Fischli and David Weiss.

©JASON KLIMATSAS/ FISCHLI WEISS ARCHIVE

Opening: “It Takes Two” at the Guggenheim Museum
In honor of the Guggenheim’s current exhibition, “Peter Fischli David Weiss: How to Work Better,” the museum has organized a response on the topic of artist duos. A press release asks, “Why do creative minds gravitate toward one another? What is the unique result of creating in pairs? Why is the trope of the comic/tragic duo so prevalent in film and literature?” Participants in this all-night event will include artists Matthew Barney, Nate Lowman, Fischerspooner, Elmgreen and Dragset, Gerard & Kelly, photographer duo Inez and Vinoodh, filmmakers and producers Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi, and songwriters Kristen and Bobby Lopez.
Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, 8 p.m.–4 a.m. Tickets $30/20/15

Screening: Afterword Via Fantasia at 83 Pitt Street
Afterword Via Fantasia is based on musicologist George Lewis’s 2008 book, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music, which provides a history of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a collective formed on Chicago’s South Side half a century ago. Shot in both high-definition color and black-and-white 16mm film, the movie, which also premiered in opera form in 2015, involves several different possibilities for the staging of an opera about the AACM that are either similar or different to AACM’s own storyline—“Porgy and Bess,” “Two Trains Running,” “Waiting for Godot,” and “stop. reset.” According to a press release, “The settings provide speculative atmospheres for a discursive film about creative mobility, the AACM’s contribution to musical form, genre and political expression, and the contested histories of the avant-garde, especially in terms of class and race.” Actors include AACM members Douglas Ewart, Ann Ward, Coco Elysses, and Khari B., in addition to the artist William Pope.L.
83 Pitt Street, 2–6 p.m.

SUNDAY, APRIL 24

Maurizio Cattelan, L.O.V.E., 2010.

VIA FACEBOOK

Screening: Maurizio Cattelan: Be Right Back at Tribeca Film Festival
Just who does Maurizio Cattelan think he is? The art-world prankster has done all of the following: sculpted a plaintive little Adolf Hitler, drowned a sculpture of Pinocchio, buried a work under the new Whitney (maybe—this one might be Cattelan messing with us), and made a sculpture of himself in which he appears to be peeking out of a hole in a museum floor. The Italian artist has never been one to take the art world seriously, and he’s known to be elusive. Now comes a feature-length documentary about Cattelan, directed by Maura Alexrod, which will likely do nothing to demystify him, and yet will be worth seeing all the same. At this time of writing, only rush tickets are available.
Guggenheim Museum, 1071 5th Avenue, 6:30 p.m. Tickets $23.50

Omer Fast, Spring (still), 2016, HD video with five-screen projection.

COURTESY JAMES COHAN GALLERY

MONDAY, MARCH 21

Talk: Njideka Akunyili Crosby at Whitney Museum
Los Angeles–based artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby will speak about her work for the current billboard on the façade of 95 Horatio Street, titled Before Now After (Mama, Mummy, and Mamma). Akunyili Crosby’s work, which often manifests as a large-scale mix of collage, drawing, painting, and printmaking, frequently deals with contemporary African family life, as well as her experience living as an expat in the U.S. (She was born in Nigeria.) In this talk, Akunyili Crosby will discuss her sources for the work, as well as her process and her experience working with associate curator Jane Panetta.
Whitney Museum, 99 Gansevoort Street, 7 p.m. Tickets $8/6

Screening: “Anger: Four Films” at Metrograph
The newly-opened art house theater will be screening four of Kenneth Anger’s greatest short films on 35mm film: Fireworks (1947), Rabbit’s Moon (1950), Scorpio Rising (1964), and Kustom Kar Kommandos (1970). Not to be missed.
Metrograph, 7 Ludlow Street, 5:45 p.m. (also screens at 9:15 p.m.)

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 23

Tom Sachs collecting water for a tea ceremony.

GENEVIEVE HANSON

Opening: Tom Sachs at Noguchi Museum
In what may be the season’s most unlikely and most intriguing show, Tom Sachs will be one of two artists ever to have a solo exhibition at the Noguchi Museum. (The other is Isamu Noguchi himself.) For his show, Sachs will debut an installation about Japanese tea ceremonies, and even conduct a tea ceremony himself two times over the exhibition’s run. Sachs’s teahouse will be set in a garden, and here’s what it’s going to feature, according to a release: “lanterns, gates, a wash basin, a plywood airplane lavatory, a koi pond, an ultra HD video wall with the sublime hyper-presence of Mt. Fuji, a bronze bonsai made of over 3,600 individually welded parts, and other objects of use and contemplation.” There will also be three other installations, one of which is a mini-retrospective of Sachs’s work over the years.
Noguchi Museum, 9-01 33rd Road, Queens, 10 a.m.–5 p.m.

THURSDAY, MARCH 24

Opening: Rashaad Newsome at Studio Museum in Harlem
Rashaad Newsome’s collages, performances, and videos feature voguing, rap songs, twerking, showers of dollar bills, strippers, tricked-out cars, digitally manipulated limbs, and shiny jewelry. They’re visual overload, but it’s hard to stop watching them, and it’s even harder to say what makes them so successful. Like Kehinde Wiley’s glitzy paintings, Newsome’s work marries high and low, placing appropriated footage of Nicki Minaj videos on the same footing as images of saints and royalty. Campy yet still genuine, Newsome’s videos bring African-American LGBTQ culture into the gallery space, making the white cube reflective of real life. This show, Newsome’s first solo museum exhibition in New York, surveys the artist’s delightfully over-the-top videos and works on paper. —Alex Greenberger
Studio Museum in Harlem, 144 West 125th Street, 12–9 p.m.

Bracha L. Ettinger, Eurydice nu descenrdrait no. 1, 2006–12.

COURTESY CALLICOON FINE ARTS

Opening: Bracha L. Ettinger at Callicoon Fine Arts
Bracha L. Ettinger’s show at Callicoon Fine Arts marks the abstract painter’s first show in New York since her “Eurydice” series was shown at the Drawing Center in 2001, and features oil paintings as well as works on paper and notebooks. Blues, reds, and violets are crosshatched to reveal the same images of genocide that appeared in her “Eurydice” series at the Drawing Center, now printed directly onto canvases. According to Ettinger, “Abstraction that begins from the mind enacts from the painting itself a healing transformation that confronts the most difficult atrocities in reality.”
Callicoon Fine Arts, 49 Delancey Street, 6–8 p.m.

FRIDAY, MARCH 25

Opening: Omer Fast at James Cohan Gallery
Multiple-screen video installations have become clichéd—they seem to be everywhere, and rarely ever are they put to good—yet Omer Fast puts them to good use. Rather than settling for several screens showing different scenes, Fast combines different perspectives on the same event and exhibits them together. One screen won’t do it for Fast, whose work deals with how there is no singular viewpoint on an event, and how, by extension, there can’t be one version of reality. Fast usually applies this idea to war, showing how there are, sometimes even quite literally, two sides to all political matters. In his newest video installation, Spring (2016), Fast pits several narratives in a German suburb against each other. They culminate in violence, as they often do in Fast’s work, but we can never tell what truly led to a teenager, a male prostitute, and a couple coming together. —Alex Greenberger
James Cohan Gallery, 533 West 26th Street, 6–8 p.m.

Performance: Extra Shapes at The Kitchen
Extra Shapes, created by D.D. Dorvillier, Thomas Dunn, Sébastien Roux, Katerina Andreou, and Walter Dundervill, is described in a press release as “a dance event, a musical concert, and a light show—laid out like a giant slice of Neapolitan ice cream.” The 17-minute performance, featuring autonomous dance scores and light shows, is repeated three times, each iteration exploring the similarities and differences between sound (strawberry), light (vanilla), and movement (chocolate). Audience members, who will change seats each time the piece repeats, also play a crucial role via their shifts in perception.
The Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, 8 p.m. Tickets $15

SATURDAY, MARCH 26

Edgar Degas, Woman Reading (Liseuse), ca. 1885.

NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, WASHINGTON, D.C. ROSENWALD COLLECTION, 1950

Opening: “Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty” at Museum of Modern Art
Edgar Degas is primarily known for his paintings of ballerinas at work, but he, in fact, created his most dynamic pieces as a printmaker. Introduced to the monotype process in the 1870s, Degas was fascinated by the potential to create a textured drawing, and his subjects also expanded beyond dancers to electric light, women in intimate settings, and meteorological phenomena. Degas also used the monotype as an undertaking in revisionism, during which he could study form more extensively. The show comprises 120 of these rarely-seen monotypes, in addition to 50 paintings, drawings, pastels, sketchbooks, and prints that were in some way a byproduct of Degas’s experimentation with modern technology.
Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, 10:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.

Screening: Weekend at Brooklyn Academy of Music
In Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film Weekend, a young bourgeois couple’s car explodes into a fiery mess because the film strip tears and skips a few frames. This scene is a footnote, and one that happens over the course of a few shots—the rest of the film continues on as if this didn’t happen. So if that’s any proof, Weekend is one of Godard’s craziest, brashest works. It’s loosely about a couple trying and failing to go on vacation. The mob is involved somehow, and traffic jams keep them from getting anywhere. Violence and Godardian hijinks (read: long takes, intertitles, fourth-wall-breaking scenes) ensue as they travel the French countryside, where the couple begins to abandon society all together. Weekend remains one of Godard’s most potent works about a French culture obsessed with commercial objects and conservative politics. The way out, Godard proposes, is to destroy it all and start over again: burn the cars, kill the characters, destroy cinema, end capitalism. Fittingly, Weekend screens, with the short Zuckerland!, as part of a series at BAM about the Evergreen Review, a countercultural American publication active during the ’60s and ’70s. —Alex Greenberger
Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette Avenue, 2 p.m. (also screens at 7 p.m. and 9:30 p.m.). Tickets $14/$7