Inside Tom Sachs's Studio Library
As he publishes the TOM SACHS GUIDE, a new survey of his own work, the New York City-based contemporary artist walks us through his eccentric book collection – and shares the five volumes he makes everybody read.
As told to Lili Göksenin
A lot of people know that I have a studio in Soho. And in my studio I keep a library. It’s actually very organized even if it’s not obvious to the casual observer. I’m always cleaning this room, discarding objects and adding new ones. The library is a living thing.
I’ve been in my studio, completely and utterly dedicated, for 40 years. So it’s important to me that the people who work here feel connected to each other, to me, and to the work we’re doing. My library is open to everyone during the day. I go in there all the time to look through my books.
I haven’t read every single page of every single book, but I’ve read a lot of them. I’ve definitely looked at every picture in every book. A few of them I’ve read several times.
Create Your Own Library
Whenever anyone joins my studio, I suggest they read five books. The first is kind of the studio bible. It’s Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing. Such a great book to geek out over.
There are other books about Shackleton, of course, but this is really the one to start with. It’s the ultimate book of perseverance and endurance.
Look, being an artist is hard. It’s hard to show up every day and do it. And this Shackleton book makes me look like a dilettante.
His expedition was so much more hardcore than anything I could do as an artist. When I’m really struggling with what I’m doing, I just read a few pages from that book, and everything comes back down to Earth. I always keep extra copies of Shackleton, just in case someone comes to work with me, or I meet someone who really needs it.
The second book new team members read is The Autobiography of Malcolm X. This book is about personal transformation – and Malcolm X probably made about four in his lifetime. I’ve made a couple. There are many reasons this book is one of the greatest ever written, but the reason I love it for my studio is that it’s about transformation. It’s through art, after all, that we transform ourselves.
Book number three is Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing That One Sees by Lawrence Weschler about Robert Irwin, which is the best book about an artist’s life. Before he was an artist, Irwin was a car customizer, and he gambled on horses for a living. Even after he became an artist he worked at Bell Labs, the telecommunications company. Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg and Richard Serra all worked with big companies like that.
I love that overlap, obviously, if you look at my work. The book is an existential journey into how important art can be – and also how small art can be.
I always have a few copies of The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, which is full of Warhol aphorisms. It’s about the poetry of modern life and it’s just really fun: so many great stories about Elizabeth Taylor, his belief that there should always be a “new girl” in town. Page after page, he talks about the people he’s met, and I just love reading about his experience. It’s essentially a book – the book – about New York City. The owner’s manual on how to make it here.
The fifth book on my reading list is Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans by Louis Armstrong. It sits in the section of my library dedicated to the African Diaspora. I love it because he really wrote it himself. He typed the whole thing out, misspellings and all. He even included his red beans and rice recipe. It’s just about his childhood in New Orleans, growing up poor and finding a coronet in the trash. He joined a band in reform school. That’s where he got started.
Anyway, those are the five must-reads but, of course, I have hundreds more.
What else do I have? A have a lot of zines.
When I was a kid, we made zines. We didn’t have the internet; we had fanzines and photocopies. Zines were how you communicated with your friends and with your fans. They were also the first time I ever participated in the grassroots art movement, all thanks to the American hardcore punk scene.
The year was 1987. I was in high school, and bands would go on tour and sell zines for five bucks at the door. This was DIY culture. You can see the influence in my sculptures – that do-it-yourself vibe is in everything I make.
I’m still making zines. Some are scrappy, some more highly produced. Some are stitched together, some are in binders. All of them are limited runs. And they live in my library.
Of course, I also make big books like the new one that just came out with Phaidon. But I like the intimacy of zines. They’re a way to make connections, kind of like liner notes of the past.
Some of the other books in my library have value (for example, I was once going through Eve Babitz’s trash and found an inscribed copy of Edward Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations), but many in my collection can easily be replaced.
That said, there are things I would never throw out, like my NASA books. I have a few shelves dedicated to space.
I also have a whole section on architecture. So many books on Le Corbusier. (And, by the way, the two most important artists of the 20th century were Le Corbusier and Louis Armstrong; everyone else ranks way below, their influence was so profound.) I have some very special Frank Gehry books. Some were made when I was working for him. I took some of the pictures printed within.
Naturally, I have the big art monographs, too, and art theory and research. I have a section on nautical exploration, survival, exploration and then space.
That flow is intentional since being on a spaceship and on a sailboat is kind of the same thing. Actually, it’s exactly the same thing. The farther you are away from your bed, the more dangerous it is and the more your equipment really matters.
In one corner, I have books from Japan and Korea, China, and the Etruscans. My photography clutch is a little light, but photography is in everything – so even my space books are photography books.
In the other corner I have, you guessed it, more zines. I have Emily Post’s Etiquette book because I think she was an artist and the book was her manifesto. I also have the complete McDonald’s handbooks for employees and franchisers.
I see the books in my library as problem solvers from other dimensions. There are very few perfect – and by that I mean really important – books to me. Probably about 100 out of over 1,000 in my library are truly “perfect.” But they’re all important.
I never buy books for their value. Well, I would never buy real estate or a book for value. I only buy them to use them. And who cares if they’ve already been used? I just want the information in them.
The curator Henry Geldzahler once said that the only things that matter are friends you spend your time with and the books you read. That’s why my library is so important. These are my books, and they matter to me.
Photography by Clark Hodgin
