Launching Pad: Tom Sachs's "A Good Shelf" An interview with the artist about his new London show

By Meka Boyle 

Every morning before Tom Sachs looks at his phone, he decamps to his bathroom where he’s set up a makeshift ceramic station atop a low Japanese table and makes a tea bowl. “I'm taking over,” he admits. “I make a mess but I only do porcelain because it's white so it doesn't fuck up the space as much as stoneware". He is both breaking larger social rules (working and making coffee from the bathroom) while adhering to his own structured routine. Or, as the New York-based artist says, “Output before input,” a philosophy he learned from graphic designer Edward Tufte.

‍Sachs loves rituals. He does them in his private life, incorporates them in his work, manages his team of 12 [...] and imparts his wisdom like a sensei to his hypebeast fans and art-world collectors. In the most pragmatic sense, these regimented actions, however big or small, give a needed element of structure to creative energy. And the way Sachs sees it, such practices can unlock why people do what they do, either driven by compulsions or discipline. He chalks this down to three impulses: “There’s spirituality, like, Where do we come from? What happens when we die? What's God?” he offers. “There’s sensuality, the taste and the smell of things. And there’s stuff, the cup, the cathedral, the rocket ship.” It’s the latter that Sachs is after. “I’m a maker. I'm a stuff guy,” he says, “but it doesn't mean shit without the spiritual questions and without the sensuality, which is what keeps us going.”

For an artist interested in the sublime of the everyday, Sachs’ interest in coffee is no surprise. He first debuted his original, hand-crafted coffee shop at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, which had various interactive add-ons: merch, an A.T.M. machine that printed zines, a screw-sorting station. “Then you would get points toward buying more coffee or a “Satan Ceramics” T-shirt or maybe even a trip inside of the lab,” he says. Sachs thought about selling the screws but decided against it. “I was never able to profit from it,” he adds of his coffee shop. “I didn't feel right taking money from people. The thing that I gained was giving people the opportunity to use their hands and to connect with materials.” In the last decade, iterations have popped up at the Brooklyn Museum, his conceptual storefront at his New York City studio, Abu Dhabi, Seoul, and now London.