Tom Sachs: Nutsy's

Using foam core, hot glue, plywood, steel, scavenged street lumber, asphalt, a radar gun, liquor, turntables and LPs, Tom Sachs has built a 4,000-square-foot installation that links the idealistic modernism of Le Corbusier with the commercialized modernism of McDonald's. Remote-control cars and their racetrack form the connective tissue that binds the disparate parts of Nutsy's together, from the ghetto and Modernist art park to the bong-hit station and piss station. Representing the culmination of Tom Sachs's studio activity over the past two years, Nutsy's was originally inspired by Le Corbusier's 1952 Unit d'Habitation housing block--a massive 12-story structure which has come to symbolize both the integrity of modernism as well as its subsequent corruption. In thinking about modernism's ideals, Sachs--ever the bricoleur--was driven to explore its other side. Modernism and bricolage act as a kind of foil for each other in Nutsy's, with the resourcefulness of bricolage standing in contrast to the grandiosity of Modernism.