12 THENEWYORKER,M AY4, 2020
ODDSANDENDSDEPT.
MAKEDO
T
he last time the artist Tom Sachs
was at his SoHo studio before he
began quarantining with his wife and
young son at their house in Queens, he
had only thirty minutes to grab what-
ever he might need in order to work re-
motely. “I thought it was just going to
be for a long weekend,” he said, on a
video call from his basement studio in
Rockaway. “I brought my laptop and an
extra phone charger. I brought a Cup
O’Noodles cardboard box filled with
the scraps that were on the table that
were really disorganized. I only brought
one pencil, so I’m shaving my pencil
perfectly.” Sachs, who is in his early
fifties, has the wavy swept-back locks
of a nineteen-thirties leading man, and
the seductively rounded speech patterns
and strong eye contact of a very good
pitchman. Pre-virus, he was used to a
more elaborate work setup. Sachs’s stu-
dio is typically a bustling operation; his
team of assistants, which he refers to as
a “coven” (“I take the word from the ma-
triarchy—we’re actually about sixty per
cent women”), labor side by side to pro-
duce sculptures and installations for
major museums, scheduled years into
the future, as well as collaborations
with Nike.
Still, Sachs is more ready than most
to take on the challenges of a suddenly
constricted work environment. His sculp-
tures—which have ranged from cheeky
takes on consumer culture, such as a
Chanel-logo chainsaw or a Prada toilet,
to gussied-up reimaginings of street-cul-
ture avatars, such as boom boxes—look
deliberately handmade, and are built out
of everyday materials such as plywood,
foam core, and duct tape. (“I can never
make something as perfect as an iPhone,
but Apple could never make something
as flawed as what I do.”) And his stu-
dio work has always involved a make-do
ethos that would not be out of place on
a Great Plains homestead—or during a
New York City quarantine.
For years, he modelled his team’s work
on that of NASA, creating large-scale in-
stallations that provide a Sachs-made
twist on a space camp or a Mars mis-
sion. With the arrival of the coronavi-
rus, he decided to reinterpret another
NASA tenet, I.S.R.U. (“in-situ resourceutilization”), a term meant to gauge how
astronauts can best use their limited on-
site materials in space. Sachs’s version,
similarly, urges people to discover how
much they can do with what they have
at hand. On March 31st, he called on
his quarter-million Instagram followers
to watch a weekly video of his I.S.R.U.
practice and submit their own. In one
episode, Sachs showed how he rescued
an AirPod that had fallen down a drain-
age hole by repurposing odds and ends.a move would be premature, because
COVID-19 cases in Georgia haven’t de-
clined sufficiently. When experts de-
nounced Kemp’s plan, Trump flummoxed
Republicans by joining them. Still, sup-
port for opening businesses quickly re-
mains greater among Republicans than
among Democrats or independents, and
there is a danger that, in response, Re-
publican governors and mayors may jeop-
ardize the nation’s recovery by lifting re-
strictions too soon. The Administration
has also failed abjectly to provide enough
tests to map the spread of the virus and
the rates of recovery among those in-
fected, depriving all governors and may-
ors of a vital means to manage risk while
trying to revive jobs and businesses.
Unable to stage his trademark rallies,
Trump has been forced to relocate his
reëlection campaign to the White House
press room, where, in the absence of fer-
vent fans, his mixtape of sober reflec-
tions, false boasts, rants against report-
ers, and irresponsible touts of miracle
cures—on Thursday, he speculated about
injecting disinfectant—doesn’t play so
well. The President’s inconsistency and
unreliability may at last be catching up
with him: only a quarter of Americans,
and just half of Republicans, say that
they trust what he says about the pan-
demic. But polls also indicate that he
remains ahead or competitive in the
states he won in 2016. The Democratic
Party leadership has unified swiftly
around Joe Biden, and yet on many days
he barely surfaces in the news cycle, while
Trump vacuums up attention.
Right now, voters are the Democratic
Party’s greatest asset; they have been
turning out in droves and knocking off
Republican incumbents with impressive
regularity since 2018, even when their
candidates are uninspiring. In Wiscon-
sin, on April 7th, Democrats chose Biden
over Bernie Sanders, as had been ex-
pected. But the voters stunned forecast-
ers by electing a liberal justice to the
Wisconsin Supreme Court, defeating anincumbent whom Trump had endorsed
and narrowing the court’s conservative
majority to one. The justices are sched-
uled to decide before November whether
to sanction a Republican-backed plan to
purge two hundred thousand people from
Wisconsin’s voter rolls because they failed
to respond to a letter inquiring about
their addresses. (Trump won the state in
2016 by fewer than twenty-three thou-
sand votes.) The proposed purge is part
of a long-standing effort by conservative
lawyers and activists to establish voting
restrictions that disproportionately hurt
Democrats. Trump recently called mail-in
voting “a terrible thing.” Perhaps the pan-
demic will have receded by November,
but, if it hasn’t, there is little reason to
think that the President or his allies will
surrender their positions. If homebound,
frustrated Americans want a cause to
rally around, they might consider de-
manding the right to vote without hav-
ing to risk their lives.
—Steve CollTom Sachs