Week 2 — Artist — Tom Sachs & Johanna Fateman
While checking out this week’s two artists, Johanna Fateman and Tom Sachs, I was immediately drawn to the punk attitude of Fateman’s zines. I mean, just from the above picture, there is anger, but this anger doesn’t fall flat like deli meat; the anger is energetic in the way the words are put on the page and in the clashing of handwritten and typed text, even more in the interruption of her rough, crooked portrait of Artaud with text. Her penned underlines, crossing out of mistakes, and misaligned text all work to undermine the target of her anger: Donald Kuspit and the “Institutional Critique” that he represents. Fateman’s zine is part fanzine for Artaud, part indictment of Donald Kuspit, and part diary — crazy! And made when she was just 22 years-old.
By comparison, Tom Sachs and his zines seem formal and orderly. This makes a lot of sense as he uses knolling (arranging one’s tools neatly on a desk) in his creative process. This preciseness and neatness shows in his zines as images are rarely broken up by text. At times, his zines look like magazines (see his Sengoku/Sandinista zine.) And all of this is not to say that Sachs is inferior or superior to Fateman. To me, Sachs’s orderliness is part of his satire on manufactured goods. He has made a Prada cardboard toilet and a fully functional, DIY, NASA branded, shotgun.
I definitely vibe more with Fateman (I’m listening to “Deceptacon” by her band El Tigre as I type this), but I do admire Sachs and his creative process (I can see how knolling can prime the mind). While looking through Sachs’s YouTube channel, I found his 10 Bullets series of videos (a sort of manual for new employees at his studio) to be oddly enlightening. In the end, Fateman and her art resonate with me more with all of its rebelliousness and confession.
