Tom Sachs featured in 'Art of Noise' Group exhibition at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

'Art of Noise presents a century of visual artifacts of our musical experience, bringing forward decades of designs for presentation, performance, and playback through different eras and genres,' says Joseph Becker, curator of architecture and design and organiser of the exhibition. 'It tracks the revolutions of our listening devices and environments, from radio broadcasts to A.I.-generated playlists, playbills to music videos, and boomboxes to wireless headphones.'

Among the over 800 works in the exhibition are more than 500 concert posters, 120 record album covers, 100 design objects, and four sound installations. They include Milton Glaser’s Bob Dylan poster for the singer’s 1967 greatest hits record and Factory Records’ poster for Joy Division’s 1979 album Unknown Pleasures, iconic images that exemplify how visual art fuels connections to performers and their music. In its coverage of design objects, Art of Noise maps the evolution of groundbreaking playback devices, from early phonographs and transistor radios to the Sony Walkman and Apple iPod, products that have advanced the medium through greater personalization and portability.

 Going against the grain of sleek industrial design are works like Tom Sachs’s Model Thirty-Six (2014), an experimental stereo that challenges the established notions of form and function. Consisting of a boombox encased in a cinder block, Model Thirty-Six elevates what Sachs described in a 2015 New York Times Style Magazine interview as ''haute bricolage'—the glory of humble materials and the ingenious things you can build using them.'