Connecticut Revolution

TOM SACHS VERSUS HIS REFRIGERATOR

One of the art world's bad-boy provocateurs, artist Tom Sachs, 37, is taking on his home state, Connecticut. Opening at New York's Sperone Westwater gallery this month, "Connecticut" is a group of paintings and sculptures, in the artist's signature bricolage style, furthering his exploration of consumer culture, brands, status symbols, riffs between high and low, and, always, functionality. This Westport native—Martha Stewart catered his Bar Mitzvah—is all about globalization and juxtaposition. In conversation he effortlessly puts Josef Albers, Colt firearms, George Bush, and McDonald's into one sentence, and, yes, they each have a Connecticut connection. From the start Sachs needed to know not just how things work but how to build them himself. This time he's taken on the G.E. refrigerator of his youth. "This is the core of the thesis so far," Sachs says. "The thing about the Custom Dispenser—it dispensed chilled water, ice, and crushed ice (we didn't have one, but our richer neighbors had it)—it was this object of desire and represented more than anything else man's contempt for nature or his unyielding quest for luxury, which Connecticut seemed to be about." He continues, "The really interesting thing is bricolage, learning how to build my own refrigerator; if you make it work you're going to really understand it in all its minutiae.... Bricolage is a thing that doesn't exist here, because it's a word from a culture that repairs rather than replaces. In Connecticut we replace things." Art dealer Angela Westwater says, "Tom is a sensor for all these different aspects of our culture. He's a keen observer of, replicator of, and ultimately critic of—he's not proposing any Utopian solutions, he's not idealistic, but he's certainly pointing out the contradictions that take place every day in our society."

A. M. HOMES