Tom Sachs

Photo by Genevieve Hanson, courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York

Tom Sachs, "Balaenoptera musculus" (2006)

Courtesy the artist

Tom Sachs

Edouard Manet Tom Sachs When in… London Iran Inside Out Mickalene Thomas Shows to See in New England Before Summer’s Out D’Orsay Comes to De Young Lifted Off

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Well years ago, it was just this thing that my sister collected as a child. Then it stuck around with me because of its high quality of production, and also because it seems almost like a pure merchandising icon. It’s almost Buddhist — Buddhism for the consumer world. Some people might call it insipid or meaningless or banal, but I think it’s just peaceful. It has a serenity in what it is. It’s really the most direct thing that I’ve ever come across.

Let me ask you about what is probably the most striking piece here — Baleanoptera Musculus (2006). Why did you decide to put the blue whale on top of the piano?

For me, the whale is something that is, conceptually, pure good. There’s no consumerism to it, there’s nothing. It’s just simply the largest animal there’s ever been on the planet, and if I was an alien visiting the planet, that’s the animal that I’d want to talk with. There are all these great things about whales: they’re mammals; they have “hands” — each one of those flippers has five fingers inside it; they nurse their young; they work together to hunt; they communicate over thousands of miles using sound; and they travel the whole world. So they’re these animals that are probably a lot like us. For me, although so many of the things that I’ve worked with throughout the rest of the show deal with the nefarious aspects of our culture and the social problems we have, this whale is something that I aspire to, conceptually. I aspire to this level of greatness and purity.

On the other hand, it just looks fucking great: You can see the whole whale reflected in the surface of the piano. It’s really important to me how things look. Something that no one ever talks about in my work is the richness of detail and color and depth. Years and years ago, my mom said to me, “If you don’t make your things look really good, when you die, people are just going to throw them out.” She was referring to some sculpture that was stored in her garage, and she wanted it the hell out of there.

I think a lot of the artists of my generation and the generation after ours have an “anti-aesthetic,” where badness is cool, and it’s groovy to make things look bad on purpose — à la Manet, I think he started it all — but I don’t buy that. I grew up listening to punk rock and hard core, and the best bands — like the Dead Kennedys or Black Flag or Minor Threat — had beautiful musicianship and wrote gorgeous, melodic songs. In any genre, even within punk and hardcore, you have things of beauty, and it’s really important to me to maintain that in this whole show.

I’ve always sensed that that’s why you leave the traces of your work — because you see a beauty in that as well, as though it’s a mark of respect for craftsmanship.

Yes, thank you for acknowledging that. That’s hugely important to me. You can see exactly how we made the whale, and you see it on top of the Bösendorfer, which is at the other end of craftsmanship. We’ve spent 500 years getting to that kind of craftsmanship. Here is a $300,000 piano, and all of the craft that’s gone into it has been about erasing itself. The guys who made it worked so hard to get this incredible lacquer finish, so there’s no evidence of the work at all. This is my response to all of that: We work our asses off to show all the work.

Tom, it sometimes seems to me that your art is one big enjoyable game. Do you believe that artists who enjoy what they do make better art?

Oh, of course. And artists don’t have the corner on creativity; I think it’s true of everyone. If you don’t enjoy what you’re doing, you’re not going to get anything out of it. There are no exceptions to that.