Hamburg: “Space Program” by Tom Sachs in the Deichtorhallen – Reise

After the first moon landing in July 1969, when mankind was completely electrified by space euphoria, the Saturn rocket, the lander, space suits and everything else that had to do with the Apollo missions were considered the sharpest symbols of optimism for the future. These objects from the NASA space trek were correspondingly popular as toys, although they initially came from Japanese production. The battery-operated “Apollo Lunar Module” from Daishin with “4 Automatic Actions”, available in two sizes in 1969, should have made even the most defiant child love their parents again as a gift, although it was a fairly free copy.

This situation is now returning, albeit in reverse proportions. If you step into the 3000 square meter northern Deichtorhalle in Hamburg, you can expect an American children’s birthday party from the seventies, at which the children have shrunk. In the center of the hall is a “Lunar Module” in the original proportions of the transporters that were used for the six moon landings. And at this sight, many adults also look like children in front of it.

With shining eyes, many indulge in memories of the golden age of manned space travel – especially the older ones, who were still in their pajamas in front of the black and white television when Neil Armstrong stepped down from the steps of the eagle as the first person to walk on the moon.

With instant noodles and Budweiser into space

The gigantic object show with its twelve stations from the Welcome to the Mission Control Center is only pure Nasa nostalgia at first glance. The manic project with thousands of objects for the space mission of the New York artist Tom Sachs, on which he has been working with two dozen employees in his Manhattan studio since 2007, has its intellectual cradle not only in Cape Canaveral – but above all in the hobby room. Everything here is visible, made from plywood, glue, wood screws, but also from umbrellas, earpads and sanitary items.

However, Tom Sachs is not the successor to the master matchmakers who meticulously fiddled with cathedrals, aircraft carriers and mowing machines in the past – although the urge to perfect his plywood copies of NASA things also has something of these patience tests. But Sachs never denies his penchant for the fantastic and the absurd. For example, he built a flush toilet in his “Lunar Module”, although it would lead to disaster in weightlessness, as would the bar or the tool bench with loose hammers and pliers. Even catering with Campbell’s soup cans (those that Andy Warhol once immortalized as an art), instant noodles and Budweiser beer is not really suitable for space.

Every step that you take further into Tom Sachs’ “Space Program” brings you closer to the obscure, ironic and ambiguous. The American space patriotism of the Nixon era is only apparently reconstructed here. This is evidenced by the ambiguous title of the exhibition: “Rare Earth”. Officially, this exhibition serves to prepare for the fourth “flight” of Sachs’ familiar space flight (only astronauts fly with him). The goal of the Deichtorhallen mission is the fourth largest and brightest lump of material in the large asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, “4-Vesta”, 170 million kilometers away, 516 kilometers long, and allegedly full of “rare earth”.

“Rare Earth” is not only urgently needed by mankind for the 1.5 billion new cell phones that it manufactures every year. Above all, she needs the term “rare earth” in order to finally realize that there is nowhere in the vicinity a planet earth 2 to which we can fly when we have finally destroyed earth 1 with our growth-believing ” Wear ideology, “as Sachs explains it. That is why this extremely elaborate exhibition with a moon museum, an indoctrination and transubstantiation department, a re-education center and a gallery for special effects does not tell as much of a naive longing for space as it does at first sight. Actually, this is about a very earthly reflection on the essentials. It is no coincidence that another central object of this “mission” is a Japanese tea house.

Open detailed view

This invitation to contemplation on the threatened world on our planet, carried out with the symbols of the Space Age, is of course particularly evident in the funny carpenter’s mentality of this space program. Only objects that are unfit to fly and only look as if are produced here. But Sachs also develops – in the spirit of many science fiction films – a social ideology around his admiration for NASA. On the one hand, his ironic modernization program plays with the totalitarian features of hierarchical organization. Sect-like rules and military organizational philosophies for his studio, called “The Code”, are presented in short films as a satire on total discipline that should prevail in a workshop like in the whole world.

On the other hand, in the indoctrination department, the constructive occultism of the “Church of Satan” is propagated as the ideal of freedom. The religion of sensuality, respect and individualism, founded by Anton Szandor LaVey in San Francisco in 1966, is in itself a crude mixture of exaggerated American self-confidence and longing for earthly harmony. But this parallel world very nicely reflects the dreams and nightmares of that epoch of sci-fi visions, the Vietnam War and the modern hippie. The new person in space travel and the new person in the “Church of Satan” have astonishingly many things in common.

Games, fun and fun

There is a lot of educational things in this exhibition, for example when people can dismantle and shred their cell phones so that the body soul is freed from its digital chain. Or when the visitors are to experience a moment of total transcendence individually in soundproof rooms. But most of this impressive show is understandable even without a cultural-historical background or serious willingness to immerse yourself in Tom Sachs’ wild subculture cosmos. Because this exhibition about inner and outer space is mainly about games, fun and fun.

And through a lot of quotes from American pop culture. Rappers like Wu Tang Clan are at home here as namesake as well as sex toys, skateboards, texts by James Brown and a lot of “Star Wars”, especially Master Yoda and Darth Vader, who is ventilated with Budweiser beer from a refrigerator. There are Martian rocks made of concrete, a Saturn rocket made of toilet paper, a repair station for bloody fingers or a button for the “spark of life”. The craft and recycling culture of the 70s and the weird humor from the LSD age are at least as present here as the criticism of the destructive lifestyle of the present. And in this abundance of ideas and objects this “earth” proves in a very sympathetic way how rare and strange it is.

Additional Information: deichtorhallen.de