Tom Sachs Space Program: Europa

On September 16, 2016, Tom Sachs and his team of astronauts set their sights on the next frontier of space exploration in Space Program: Europa. Targeting Jupiter’s icy moon, Sachs advances his quest to find extraterrestrial life with his playful bricolage sculptures. This expansive exhibition, organized by YBCA, will take over the galleries and public spaces, and include live activations by Sachs’s astronauts during the opening and closing weekends.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website

For over a decade, Sachs has pondered the technical ingenuity and romance with the unknown that brought America the Apollo program. Whether you go to the exhibition or not, Tom Sachs: Space Program , documents the culmination of Sachs' research: the realization of his own life-size Space Program, comprised of three main sculptural elements (Lunar Module, Mission Control, and Space Suit) and a Flight Plan, all put to use during a live demonstration of a lunar landing. In his exuberant manufacture of objects and scenarios, Sachs asks barbed questions of modern creativity that relate to conception, production, consumption, and circulation. Space Program features 797 full-color and 30 black-and-white images; a conversation among Buzz Aldrin, Tom Sachs, and Louise Neri; a critical essay by Arthur C. Danto, contextualizing this work among the artist’s contemporaries; and a comprehensive discussion of the work by Mark Van de Walle.