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Lot Essay
'Hello Kitty is an icon that doesn't stand for anything at all. Hello Kitty never has been, and never will be, anything. She's pure license; you can even get a Hello Kitty car! The branding thing is completely out of control, but it started as nothing and maintains its nothingness. It's not about the ego, and in that way it's very Japanese' (Tom Sachs, quoted at www.wired.com).
Superimposed on a jaunty Burberry-style background is the figure of Hello Kitty, who always wants to make friends, surrounded by tiny cartoon birds. This explosion of the cute and the kitsch is jarringly subverted by the tagline beneath, which declares the threatening, out-of-line and out-of-order ultimatum: 'CHILL OUT JAPAN OR BE NUKED AGAIN.' It is in this bizarre, haunting and grotesque forced union between contemporary consumerist iconography and the history of violence that Tom Sachs illustrates the strange nature of modern capitalist culture and its gradual throttling of other types of culture. 'We're doing the same thing today with fashion and other industries that people were doing with war 40 years ago,' Sachs has declared. 'Now, if you want to kill a country, you don't bomb them, you just give them VCRs. It's the same kind of domination and violence, just without the bullets. You're basically bombing out their old culture and putting in this new, homogenized one' (Sachs, quoted at www.deutsche-bank-art.com). It is with this in mind that he has created such works as Hg, the Hermès handgrenade, the Chanel Chainsaw, the Prada concentration camp. While humorously juxtaposing extreme violence with consumer culture, Sachs also highlights the underlying threat of these brands, the 'cultural' baggage that they bring with them. In the present work, the atomic destruction wreaked by the United States on Nagasaki and Hiroshima at the end of the Second World War is recalled, used as a threatening lever, but has been incongruously packaged in a consumerist style almost endemic in Japan, thereby couched in an iconography that can be recognised and understood. And ironically, the message is contained in precisely the frenetic style seen in Japan that might prompt such a rebuke.
In Sachs' works, the visual language of fashion and consumerism has been adopted as it captures the zeitgeist, the now. Fashion is a cultural barometer, an ever-fluctuating record of our times. At the same time, fashion, in Sachs' hands, is shown to be what he refers to a 'cultural prosthetic', filling the void that has been left in our heathen times by culture. Sachs' relationship with fashion and design is not wholly critical. Indeed, it is from this world that he himself emerged. To him, it is more relevant than what is commonly considered high art: 'Art history is written by museum people. It doesn't tell the real story like a cathedral or a battleship does about the people or culture that built it. Art only tells a little bit' (Sachs, quoted at www.cockrockdisco.com).
Superimposed on a jaunty Burberry-style background is the figure of Hello Kitty, who always wants to make friends, surrounded by tiny cartoon birds. This explosion of the cute and the kitsch is jarringly subverted by the tagline beneath, which declares the threatening, out-of-line and out-of-order ultimatum: 'CHILL OUT JAPAN OR BE NUKED AGAIN.' It is in this bizarre, haunting and grotesque forced union between contemporary consumerist iconography and the history of violence that Tom Sachs illustrates the strange nature of modern capitalist culture and its gradual throttling of other types of culture. 'We're doing the same thing today with fashion and other industries that people were doing with war 40 years ago,' Sachs has declared. 'Now, if you want to kill a country, you don't bomb them, you just give them VCRs. It's the same kind of domination and violence, just without the bullets. You're basically bombing out their old culture and putting in this new, homogenized one' (Sachs, quoted at www.deutsche-bank-art.com). It is with this in mind that he has created such works as Hg, the Hermès handgrenade, the Chanel Chainsaw, the Prada concentration camp. While humorously juxtaposing extreme violence with consumer culture, Sachs also highlights the underlying threat of these brands, the 'cultural' baggage that they bring with them. In the present work, the atomic destruction wreaked by the United States on Nagasaki and Hiroshima at the end of the Second World War is recalled, used as a threatening lever, but has been incongruously packaged in a consumerist style almost endemic in Japan, thereby couched in an iconography that can be recognised and understood. And ironically, the message is contained in precisely the frenetic style seen in Japan that might prompt such a rebuke.
In Sachs' works, the visual language of fashion and consumerism has been adopted as it captures the zeitgeist, the now. Fashion is a cultural barometer, an ever-fluctuating record of our times. At the same time, fashion, in Sachs' hands, is shown to be what he refers to a 'cultural prosthetic', filling the void that has been left in our heathen times by culture. Sachs' relationship with fashion and design is not wholly critical. Indeed, it is from this world that he himself emerged. To him, it is more relevant than what is commonly considered high art: 'Art history is written by museum people. It doesn't tell the real story like a cathedral or a battleship does about the people or culture that built it. Art only tells a little bit' (Sachs, quoted at www.cockrockdisco.com).