The Value of Mentorship
Published May 21, 2022 · 17:31 · 241,498 views
About This Video
Van's Simpsons is Tom Sachs. He looks around his world and the echo is constant. Sachs already did it. The Swiss Army knife engraving Van thought he originated in 2010? Sachs had it on a museum piece dated 1999.
The episode is about apprenticeship as formation. Van got the job because Joe Torksen at Scholastic Publishing kept saying "you should work for my friend Tom Sachs," and one day brought Sachs to the cafeteria. The studio visit that followed was life-changing: the first time Van saw contemporary art and understood why it was art. Not beautiful in a museum-historical way, but art about his people, made by his people. The crossroads: stay at Scholastic as a corporate guy, or quit and build sets for an artist. The Sachs studio was like the military. Eliminate your identity, serve the mission. But this mission had creativity in it. The big thing Sachs taught him: the ability and significance of earning a living from your talent.
Transcript
There's this South Park episode where after many, if not all of the bits and gags,
one of the characters on the show says The Simpsons did it. Oh Simpsons did it. Simpsons did it. No!
No! And it was Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park, sort of tipping their hat
to the extent to which The Simpsons had an influence on South Park.
And my Simpsons is Tom Sachs, who incidentally is a big Simpsons fan.
And when I look around my world, where I live and my work, it's this echo it's like Sachs already did
it. Sachs did it. Sachs, you stole that from Sachs. You got that idea from Sachs. That concept come from Sachs.
And there are occasionally times when I think, oh no, that was you you beat him to it. And one
of those occasions was when I started engraving Swiss Army knives. It was like 2010, maybe 2008, 2010.
And then I was at a museum show that Tom was in, I think it was the Aldrich museum
in Connecticut, if that's the Connecticut one and on one of his pieces was a Swiss Champ. It
had his signature, Tom Sachs, and then it said 1999 which was like 10 years before I started doing it.
So this episode is about the experience of apprenticeship and the appreciation
of mentorship. When I think about big picture what Sachs taught me, the big thing that he taught me was
the ability and significance of earning a living from your talent.
The way I got my job with Sachs: he was building a huge project, a museum show.
He needed bodies. He needed laborers. And I was at the end of my
tenure at Scholastic Publishing writing for a kids' science magazine. One of my jobs at
Scholastic was to make science experiments in the magazine that kids in school could replicate with
just school supplies and a friend of mine Joe Torksen, who also worked at Scholastic,
would see me at my desk with all this stuff and he'd say you should work for my friend Tom Sachs.
One day he brought Tom Sachs to the cafeteria for lunch.
I met Tom Sachs. This is before you would Google people on the internet this was about 2000.
Somehow Joe got me a studio visit with Sachs and we went over during our lunch break and we saw
his studio and it was an absolutely life-changing moment for me. It was...
Human civilizations revere our artists. All of us. All of them.
Western Europe, the East; artists are revered. And some of the finest buildings built in the world
are to house the little objects or the performances that these artists create. When you're looking at
things that are centuries old or decades old, it's very difficult to understand
how it would feel to be a contemporary of this art, to be alive when this art was new and understand
why that piece of art was significant and why it was art. Because you know a Rothko
painting was done in the 50s or 60s and you know Jasper Johns was done in the 60s.
And yeah you could see why they were beautiful but I never really saw a piece of art that just...
I got the significance. Oh, I know why this is art. This is me. This is my people. this is
this is saying something about my people. And I went and I knew,
when I went to the studio i knew Sachs was a museum artist and that museums
around the world acquired his work. But I didn't really know what his work was.
I went into the studio where things were, you know, works in progress but I understood: oh, this is
art. This is art that I can make and I understand why this is art. I understand what makes this art.
And though I wasn't able to articulate it at the time, what I've come to understand is that art
conveys a feeling that the artist once experienced and it conveys that feeling onto its observer. And
so I came to this crossroads at Scholastic, where I was working there as a freelancer,
and I came to this crossroads where: am I gonna join the corporation and be a corporate guy
or quit. That was my choice my editor made it clear to me, look you can't just treat this as a gig if
you take this job I'm gonna vouch for you and it will reflect badly upon me if you just quit
in six months. And at the same time my friend Joe said look Sachs needs people and around that
time I had built for my bicycle this little rig to mount a camera on so I could ride through the
Holland Tunnel and make a video about it and I had made that video and the the rig was still on my
bicycle, which I kept locked in front of Scholastic and Sachs was walking by it one day and I happened
to be leaving the building, this is New York City, I happened to be leaving the building and there he
was. I only met him once and we chatted about it. And so I think
when it came time to get the job Sachs might have remembered that. So I got the job with Sachs
It was kind of like being in the military, as I imagine it. Where you sort of have to eliminate
all of your identity and just be in service to this mission and that's what your your body and
soul is for. But this mission had creativity in it it wasn't just following orders, it was following
orders, but you also if you wanted to like ascend you had to have some kind of creativity.
One thing I learned very early was that your main job was to not bother Tom is to do your task
without involving Tom Sachs at all because he was managing a huge team, he had all these projects.
And the first project I had was cutting little windows with a razor out of sheets of foam core
for this gigantic model of the Unité d'Habitation, this building that Corbusier built. This is the
world's largest scale model. It's in the Guggenheim permanent collection now, this piece that I helped
make. I had two supervisors, two bosses and one of them was the great John Ferguson who's can
make anything he's an unbelievably gifted, wonderful artist and the other was Rachel
Williams. Rachel Williams it turned out was a very successful, very famous model from the 80s.
She owned the apartment building that she lived in. She co-owned Bowery Bar with Sean
McPherson and Eric Good, and you know who Eric Good is because he directed and made Tiger King.
And her father was a famous architect and she was sort of the supervisor of building this big model.
In the Hero's Journey a helper crosses you across a threshold into the unknown and
that's where your adventure begins. And that's who Sachs was for me. Sachs was my Obi-Wan Kenobi.
And so I left this sort of like regular American life and I crossed over into
this life of the people who made American culture. And that's who would come to these
studio visits. I mean I was working on a Saturday by myself in the studio one day and John McEnroe
John McEnroe came in. "That ball was on the line, chalk blew up." And as I ascended with my commitment
to earning a living from my talents and as my technical skills got better and as I got to be
a better person I became more ingrained in this culture of America, of people who make American
culture. And now of course with the internet it's sort of all of us we contribute in some sort
of way because all of our stuff goes public. But in those days I was meeting all of these mainstream
people it was unbelievable. Now that was one side of it and that was one side that
you had to be very quiet about, the meeting the famous people and meeting celebrities, I guess.
And so Sachs says I was the best and worst assistant he ever had. The very first time I
assisted him with my hands my job was just to hold a steel pole while he welded it
and I dropped it on his head. It was like a 20 pound, more, steel pole and he's welding with a
welding mask and I dropped the thing on his head because I was just spacey.
And one of the things I learned, I was so committed to this job, one of the things I learned was like
to eliminate my weaknesses, work on my weaknesses. And that was the job where I learned to be
organized and on time and very luckily for me I had my own medium. I was a filmmaker, a video maker
and Tom was not. So a lot of people want to get a job at Tom's studio to kind of jumpstart their
career and Tom's, rightfully so, sensitive to that and he kind of sniffs you out and gets rid of you
right away. And what he's looking for is attitude and personality. He wants to work with someone
he really likes for obvious reasons and what was difficult for me to do and it's difficult
for a lot of creative people is to sublimate my creativity into someone else's work. So
I think one of the skills I had was I was able to sort of mimic Tom's world and then
be creative within it. Which worked out great for Tom because he just wants to tell you the job
and then you finish the job and then he'll go back and tell you what's wrong with the job. So
he'll go back and just say okay that's great but you need to to angle grinder off the
the screws that come out of the plywood. And that's why I was the best assistant he had because he
could just say all right make a video about this and it was this thing called 'A Handy Contraption.'
When building our project we had to improvise in order to work most efficiently. Hand gluing each
of these strips took too much time so we built this handy contraption, with spaces for both hot
glue and pre-cut strips easily accessible. It made installation of the strips much faster.
He didn't tell me to make the palette and he didn't tell me how to make the movie. He didn't
tell me anything. He just said put the strips on the model. So I invented the little palette
to do it and speed up the project and then when he saw it he said make a movie about it.
And it's one of his favorite videos and like that little palette thing when this
project was shown at the Guggenheim museum in Berlin that little handy contraption palette
that I had made was literally on a pedestal underneath glass it's called a vitrine
and just displayed as a work of art. And probably the most valuable technique that
Tom taught me was that that is where your best work is going to come from, this unintentional
subconscious, like utility to solve a problem. A series of problems it's not intellectually
driven the way that the art historians would have you believe. It's what's so
mercurial and mysterious about it is it's like it's your ability to
correctly portray your subconscious ideas or impulses. So he taught me the
technique and creativity side of earning a living from my talents and it just grew and grew and grew
and grew; our like video relations, Sachs started getting like budgets to make these videos.
And by the end of my working for Sachs which was probably I don't know five or six years,
five or six years of apprenticeship, he would just pick a subject and then I would kind of
write it from scratch and then we would meet and refine it and then I would just make it.
And Sachs has this concept within his studio of graduation. So I had graduated from the studio
I had gone off and done my own work and I had my own, I was starting to build my own kingdom.
Probably the last major production collaboration that Sachs and I did was called Paradox Bullets.
and Ed Ruscha was in it, who's a very important living American artist in his 70s.
So I only had him for three hours. We had to work with Ed Ruscha for three hours and the
process, Tom and my's process had become so tight that we finished early we had a
half an hour to spare and we got hail during the production, so we had to shut down, it took place
in the desert we had to shut down for hail and we still were a half an hour early. Werner Herzog
narrated that. Although a freak out is absolutely forbidden in the studio there is virtue in it.
After a good raging freak out the freaker is spent calm and humbled.
But he's also ashamed. Often he has created yet more problems for himself. Sachs was able to somehow get a budget for Werner Herzog, he was able to get a good budget to pay me.
And now we're collaborators. And last week he called me because he wants to remake
something that I made which is the solar powered air conditioner and I'm going to
help him with that project and when it comes out I'll be able to say: Neistat already did it.
This week on the patreon zine 1 has been retired. Zine 2 is available to the next 600 or so new patrons who sign up. Here's the link.
Products & Tools Mentioned
- Swiss Champ essential — engraved Swiss Army knives, started 2008-2010
- Swiss Army knife essential — Van's engraving practice
People Referenced
Tom Sachs, Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Joe Torksen, John Ferguson, Rachel Williams, Sean McPherson, Eric Goode, John McEnroe, Le Corbusier, Ed Ruscha, Werner Herzog
Films & Media Referenced
- opening analogy - Sachs is Van's Simpsons
- opening analogy - 'Simpsons did it'
- last major collaboration with Sachs, Ed Ruscha, Werner Herzog
- Van's first internet video, 2000
- Tom Sachs studio film Van made
- Eric Goode directed