Artist Tom Sachs Has 7 Rules for Creative Living
While our Instagram feeds are littered with burgeoning sourdough starters and amateur watercolor canvases, it can feel like there’s a lot of pressure to create a work of genius during this time of forced isolation. After all, haven't you heard Shakespeare wrote King Lear in quarantine?
But it’s not so easy to get down to work when you're wearing a weighted blanket made of existential ennui and genuine anxiety. For multimedia artist Tom Sachs, though, that's the perfect fuel for making cool shit. “I shouldn’t admit it, but I’m living my best life,” he confessed to GQ’s Mark Anthony Green in the latest episode of The Drop In on GQ's Instagram feed. “You’ve got this wonderful opportunity here to deal with the existential abyss. What are we doing with our lives? What are we doing with our time? What’s really important? It’s a scary time for a lot of people, and artists are experts at dealing with uncertainty.”
Sachs, who’s currently working from his “apocalypse bunker basement studio” at home, is using the small set of tools he was able to grab from his team’s Soho studio before the shelter-in-place order in New York went into action. During normal times, Sachs runs his own “space program” with what he calls a “coven” of twelve fellow artists. To keep their team dreaming up new endeavors, they employ the NASA’s ISRU—In Situation Resource Utilization—discipline. In outer space, ISRU allows Earth to send out a device that turns another planet’s natural elements into usable resources for astronauts a generation later. For Sachs—and all of us non-astronauts—it just means using what we have in our current confined spaces to make the most out of our lives.
Sachs selected a few tips from his Paradox Bullets to help you find some creativity amidst the chaotic blur of quarantine. So take a few minutes to put down that TV remote, flex your fried-out brain muscles, and finally get to work. Trust us, you’ll be glad you did.
Rule 1: Output Before You Input
"The first exercise of ISRU is first thing in the morning, before you look at your e-mail or Instagram or the newspaper or make a phone call or whatever: Write. Dance. Sing. Touch clay. Draw. Output before you input. I’m gonna give a shoutout to my homeboy Edward Tufte. He taught me this lesson and I employed it. So when you’re sleeping, you slept for, say, 8 hours. You’re spending 8 hours with your subconscious mind making sense of nonsense. Regular life’s crazy enough, and the surreal mind that the subconscious explores doesn’t make any sense, but it’s part of our brain trying to make sense of the things we can’t make sense of during the day. It’s very regenerative. That’s why we dream. It helps our mind reset. When you wake up in the morning you’ve got exclusive access to your dreams. That’s why people say write down your dreams. That’s a great exercise. If you don’t know what to do, definitely do that one first. You’re translating your subconscious mind, the crazy stuff, into your rational mind. Soon enough, your phone will ring. You’ll have an alert. Some fucked up thing will come into your frame of consciousness, you’ve got babies screaming...but if you steal those first five minutes, first hour, depending on how lucky you are or how busy you are—everyone can spare five minutes. Don’t watch another episode of fucking Ozark or whatever, some fun drug TV bullshit that you’re enjoying, it doesn’t bring you anything. The gold is in your subconscious ‘cause that’s who you are. That’s part of you that you don’t even know.
I like to do drawing first thing in the morning. I like to touch clay. And write. Those are the things that I do. Have I ever looked at Instagram first thing in the morning? Of course, we’re all guilty of it. This is just a compass, a direction for you to consider."
Don’t read first thing in the morning! Reading is input. Write. Don’t read.
Rule 2: Do What You Love
"Make it fun. This is not out of duty, this is not homework, this is for you. This is your time. If you don’t like it, do something else, but engage with your active mind. If you’re gonna play video games, play Minecraft so you can build something. I love Grand Theft Auto, but it’s kind of passive. It’s hard to be creative. I used to smash cars together and build pileups of cars and see if I could make a sculpture using the cars as an element. If you do a mission, you’re solving a puzzle. And there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s just a different activity. People are doing a lot of jigsaw puzzles which is good because it activates your mind. But do something else too. You should do different kinds of things.
It’s very hard to find what you love. Maybe this time in quarantine is a way to give us a little perspective about finding priority in our lives and doing what we gotta do to put those things forward."
Follow GQ on Instagram to Catch the Next Episode of The Drop-In
Rule 3: Setup Is Everything
"Your setup is your paper and pencil, minimally. So you have to have a piece of paper and a pencil and maybe a backup pencil in case it breaks, so you don’t wake up first thing in the morning, like, Oh, that was an amazing dream, I saw gold at the end of a rainbow! I just gotta write it down and I’ll be set for life! But where’s my pen? And then the memory fades.
The muse is so fugitive that you must be set up to capture her. If you’re gonna dance in the morning, move the furniture the night before. Roll up the rug, have your outfit ready to go. It’s called your setup. And again I’m gonna give props. This, I read from David Lynch’s Catching the Big Fish. I highly encourage that as a book on tape ‘cause you get to hear David Lynch scream the whole book at you in his own voice. He does sound effects with, like, wind noises. Wonderful if you’re on a long road trip. Perfect."
Rule 4: Start Easy. Or Don't.
"Do the easy things first as a warmup to do the hard thing. Make it easy. Don’t kill yourself. Or, do the hard things first. Get it out of the way."
Rule 5: Patience Is a Curse
"Another way of saying that is, procrastination is a good thing. This boombox I started in 2015, it’s still not done. But here’s the secret: if at first you don’t succeed, give up immediately. Seriously. Give up immediately, move on to something else, work that problem until you get stuck, move on to something else, work on that problem 'til you get stuck. By that time your subconscious mind is working on those other two problems and you circle back. Your subconscious mind, maybe even something you discovered while you were sleeping, 'cause your brain's active even when it's sleeping, solves the problem. And then you come back to it—'Oh! I just have to put a little golden acrylics carbon black paint, just dab it on...look at that!' "
Rule 6: Forgive Yourself for Perfectionism
"I wanna contradict what I just said. It’s important to contradict yourself. YouTube commenters—the most racist, xenophobic, sexist, antisemitic—the worst people...trolls hate contradictions. Because it’s a challenge, it creates uncertainty. And that’s the role of the artist: to create uncertainty and to challenge you. Otherwise it’s just fluffy entertainment and i’m not interested in that. I enjoy consuming fluffy entertainment, but I don’t wanna make it.
So you gotta forgive yourself, especially when you’re a perfectionist like I am. You’ve got to make those mistakes, learn to live with them, try harder next time if you want. I think there’s something to learn from those things. Sometimes you make a sculpture and it’s terrible. I do that all the time. But there might be a corner of it that is successful. Or a kernel of genius in all your stupidity. And that might be the stock for next week’s soup. But if you don’t take that risk and you only do what you know, you’re not gonna get anywhere. An artist’s best work lies just beyond his ability to understand it. That’s Sol LeWitt. If it’s already been done it’s easy to do, but who cares? It’s already been done."
Rule 7: Make Lists
"Every day I do a list. Sit down and do a list first thing in the morning or before you go to bed so you have a plan. Alfonso Cuarón and Alejandro Iñárritu are two of my favorite directors, but because I’m such a gringo I get them confused sometimes, so I wrote down all the movies that they made. And then I made this list of Chivo Lubezki, who’s their D.P. So maybe that’s what I’m into. He’s the linchpin that holds them together. Sometimes when you feel like you’re not being politically cool or you’re being racist 'cause you get your Mexican filmmakers confused, make a list! Put in the time. Figure it out. They’re all geniuses. And below I’m working on one for Korea with Bong Joon-Ho and Park Chan-wook."
The rainbow-haired star stopped by GQ's The Drop-In to talk about J.Lo and the Super Bowl halftime show, making new music, and his reggaeton heroes.
The actor, director, and film buff gave us 20 movie picks (plus 3 books) to fill our socially-distanced days.
Originally Appeared on GQ
