There's this south park episode where, after many, if not all, of the bits and gags one of the characters on the show says the simpsons did it: oh sisters did it, did it? No? No and it was trey parker and matt stone. The creators of south park sort of tipping their hat to the extent to which the simpsons had an influence on south park, and my simpsons is tom sachs. Who, incidentally, is a big simpsons fan. And when i look around my world where i live and my work it's this echo it's like sax already, did it sex, did it sacks, you stole that from sex.

You got that idea from zax. That concept come from sax and there are occasionally times when i think, oh, no, you that was you, you beat him to it, and one of those occasions was when i started engraving swiss army knives. It was like 2010, maybe 2008 2010, and then i was at a museum show that tom was in. I think it was the albright museum in connecticut, if that's the connecticut one and on one of his pieces was a swiss champ.

It had his signature tom sacks and then it said 1999, which was like 10 years before i started doing it. So this episode is about the experience of apprenticeship and the appreciation of mentorship. When i think about big picture, what saks taught me the big thing that he taught me was the ability and significance of earning a living from your talent. The way i got my job with sax, he was building a huge project, a museum show he needed bodies.

He needed laborers, and i was at the end of my tenure at scholastic, publishing writing for a kids science magazine. One of my jobs at scholastic was to make science experiments in the magazine that kids in school could replicate with just school supplies, and a friend of mine, joe torksen, who also worked at scholastic, would see me at my desk with all this stuff and he'd say You should work for my friend tom sax. One day he brought tom sachs to the cafeteria for lunch. I met tom sachs.

This is before you would google people on the internet. This was about 2 000.. Somehow joe got me a studio visit with sax and we went over during our lunch break and we saw his studio and it was an absolutely life-changing moment for me. It was human civilizations revere our artists, all of us all of all of them, western europe, the east artists, are revered, and some of the finest buildings built in the world are to house the little object or the performances that these artists create when you're looking at Things that are centuries old or decades old, it's very difficult to understand how it would feel to be a contemporary of this art to be alive when this art was new and understand why that piece of art was significant and why it was art.

Because you know a rothko painting was done in the 50s or 60s and the you know, jasper john's was done in the 60s and yeah. You could see why they were beautiful, but i i never really saw a piece of art that just i got the significance. Oh, i know why this is art. This is me, this is my people.

This is this is saying something about my people and i went, and i knew when i went to the studio i knew sax was a museum artist and that museums around the world acquired his work, but i didn't really know what his work was. I went into the studio where things were. You know, works in progress, but i understood. Oh, this is art.

This is art that i can make, and i understand why this is art. I understand what makes this art and though i wasn't able to articulate it at the time. What i've come to understand is that it art conveys a feeling that the artist once experienced and it conveys that feeling onto its observer, and so i came to this crossroads at scholastic, where i had to. I was working there as um as a freelancer, and i came to this crossroads.

Where am i gon na join the corporation right and be a corporate guy or quit? That was my choice. My editor made it clear to me. Look, you can't just treat this as a gig if you take this job, i'm gon na vouch for you and it will reflect badly upon me if you just quit in six months and at the same time my friend joe said, look sax needs people and around That time i had built for my bicycle, this little rig to mount a camera on. So i could ride through the holland tunnel and make a video about it, and i had made that video and the the rig was still on my bicycle, which i kept locked in front of scholastic and sax was walking by it one day and i happened to Be leaving the building, this is new york city.

I happened to be leaving the building and there he was. I only met him once and i talked to him about and he you know we chatted about it, and so i think when it came time to get the job, um saks might have remembered that. So i got the job with sax. It was kind of like being in the military, as i imagine it, where you sort of have to eliminate all of your identity and just be in service to this mission, and that's what your your body and soul is for.

But this mission had creativity in it. It wasn't just following orders: it was following orders, but you also, if you wanted to like ascend, you had to have some kind of creativity, and the one thing i learned very early was that your main job was to not bother tom is to do your task Without involving tom sachs at all, because he was managing a huge team, he had all these projects and the first project i had was cutting little windows with a razor out of sheets of foam core for this gigantic model of the united habitation. This building that probousier built this is the world's largest scale model. It's in the guggenheim permanent collection.

Now this piece that i helped make. I had two supervisors, two bosses, and one of them was the great john ferguson. Who's can make anything he's an unbelievably gifted wonderful artist and the other was rachel williams. Rachel williams, it turned out was a very successful, very famous model from the 80s she owned, the apartment, building that she lived in.

She co-owned bowery bar with sean mcpherson and eric good, and you know who eric good is because he directed and made tiger king and her father was a famous architect and she was sort of the supervisor of building this big model in the hero's journey. A helper crosses you across a threshold into the unknown and that's where your adventure begins and that's who sax was for me. Saks was my obi-wan kenobi, and so i left this sort of like regular american life and i crossed over into this life of the people who made american culture and that's who would come to these studio visits. I mean i, i was working on a saturday by myself in the studio one day and john mcenroe john mcenroe came in that ball was on the line, chalk blew up and as i ascended with my commitment to living earning a living from my talents and as My technical skills got better and, as i got to be a better person, i became more ingrained in this culture of america of people who make american culture and now, of course, with the internet.

It's sort of all of us. We contribute in in some sort of way because all of our stuff goes public, but in those days i was meeting all of these mainstream people. It was unbelievable. Now that was one side of it, and that was one side that was we tried to be.

You had to be very quiet about the meeting, the famous people and meeting celebrities, i guess, and so sac says i was the best and worst assistant he ever had the very first time i assisted him with my hands. My job was just to hold a steel pole while he welded it and i dropped it on his head. It was like a 20 pound, more steel pole and he's welding with a welding mask and i dropped the thing on his head because i was just spacey and one of the things i learned. I was so committed to this job.

One of the things i learned was like to eliminate my weaknesses, work on my weaknesses, and that was the job where i learned to be organized and on time, and very luckily for me, i had my own medium. I was a filmmaker a video maker and tom was not so. A lot of people want to get a job at tom's, studio to kind of jump, start their career and tom's, rightfully so sensitive to that, and he kind of sniffs you out and gets rid of. You right away and what he's looking for is attitude and personality.

He wants to work with someone he really likes for obvious reasons and what was difficult for me to do, and it's difficult for a lot of creative people is to sublimate my creativity into someone else's work. So i think one of the skills i had was. I was able to sort of mimic tom's world and then be creative within it, which worked out great for tom because he just wants to tell you the job and then you finish the job and then he'll go back and tell you what's wrong with the job. So he'll go back and just say: okay, that's great, but you need to you need to angle grinder off the um, the screws that come out of the plywood and that's why i was the best assistant he had because he could just say all right make a Video about this - and it was this thing - called a handy contraption when building our project we had to improvise in order to work most efficiently hand gluing each of these strips took too much time, so we built this handy contraption with spaces for both hot glue and Pre-Cut strips easily accessible, it made installation of the strips much faster.

He didn't tell me to make the palette and he didn't tell me how to make the movie. He didn't tell me anything. He just said put the strips on the model, so i invented the little palette to do it and speed up the project and then, when he saw it, he said make a movie about it and it's one of his favorite videos and like that little palette thing. When this project was shown at the guggenheim museum in berlin, that little handy contraption palette that i had made was literally on a pedestal underneath glass, it's called a vitrine and just displayed as a as a as a work of art and probably the most valuable technique That tom taught me was that that is where your best work is going to come from this unintentional subconscious like utility, to solve a problem, a series of problems.

It's not intellectually driven the way that the art historians would have you believe. It's it's what's so, what's so mercurial and mysterious about it, is it's like it's your ability to to correctly portray your subconscious ideas or impulses? So he taught me the technique and creativity. Side of earning a living from my talents and it just grew and grew and grew and grew. Our like video relations sac started getting like budgets to make these videos and by the end of my working for sax, which was probably i don't know, five or six years, five or six years of apprenticeship.

He would just pick a subject and then i would kind of write it from scratch and then we would meet and refine it, and then i would just make it and saks has this concept within his studio of graduation. So i had graduated from the studio. I had gone off and done my own work and i had my own. I was starting to build my own kingdom, probably the last major production collaboration that saks and i did was called paradox.

Bullets and ed roushay was, in it who's a very um important living american artist in his 70s. So i only had him for three hours. We had to work with ed roushay for three hours and the our process. Time in my process had become so tight that we finished early.

We had a half an hour to spare and we got hail during the production, so we had to shut down. It took place in the desert, we had to shut down for hail and we still were a half an hour early werner herzog, narrated that, although a freak out is absolutely forbidden in the studio, there is virtue in it. After a good raging freak out, the freaker is spent calm and humbled, but he's also ashamed. Often he has created yet more problems for himself.

Sax was able to somehow get a budget for werner herzog. He's able to get a good budget to pay me and now we're we're collaborators, and last week he called me because he wants to remake something that i made, which is the solar powered air conditioner, and i'm going to help him with that project. And when it comes out i'll, be able to say nice, dad already did it, no, no simpsons did it simpsons did it this week on the patreon zine 1 has been retired. Zine 2 is available to the next 600 or so new patrons who sign up.

Here's. The link.