A film by Van Neistat

(2015, 72 minutes)

In A Space Program, internationally acclaimed artist Tom Sachs takes us on an intricately handmade journey to the red planet, providing audiences with an intimate, first person look into his studio and methods. The film is both a piece of art in its own right and a recording of Sachs' historic piece, Space Program 2.0: MARS, which opened at New York's Park Avenue Armory in 2012.

For Space Program 2.0: MARS, Tom and his team built an entire space program from scratch. They were guided by the philosophy of bricolage: creating and constructing from available yet limited resources. They ultimately sent two female astronauts to Mars in search of the answer to humankind's ultimate question... are we alone?

Directed by Van Neistat, A Space Program is a captivating introduction to Sachs' work for the uninitiated, and required viewing for his longtime fans.

HOW TO WATCH THIS FILM
1. This movie proves that you don't need an education to understand—or to make—art.
2. This movie is about a space program made from scratch by hand.
3. This movie is NOT A DOCUMENTARY. It's an INDUSTRIAL film like the safety videos they make you watch in high school shop class so you don't cut your fingers off. Some say it's a comedy.
4. This movie is NOT A PERFORMANCE by actors. We say "demonstration," not "performance." It is a demonstration of simple yet sophisticated devices operated by carefully-trained studio team fabricators to send 2 astronauts to Mars.
5. After a meticulous vetting process, each space program team member underwent a grueling 18-month indoctrination. 
6. This movie stars the sexually attractive studio team fabricators who built the space program.
7. The studio team is an elite group of do-it-yourselfers—black belt fine artists who practice bricolage.
(Bricolage: creation or repair using available limited resources.)
8. We go to Mars not to exploit the resources of a new planet but to better understand our resources here on Earth.
9. Our space program sculptures are functional objects. We made this movie to show the aspects of the sculptures that have moving parts and how the sculptures function in our own homemade rituals celebrating science, faith, hard work and freedom.
10. This movie is a love letter to the analog era.
11. This movie demonstrates how astronauts go poop in space.
12. If you believe in God, you need to watch this movie.

Van Neistat
Tom Sachs
January 2016, New York City

Tom Sachs
(b.1966, New York)
Artist
The genre defying mixed media sculptures, often recreations of modern icons using everyday materials, show all of the work that goes into producing an object - a reversal of modernization's trend towards products with cleaner, simpler, and more perfect edges. Sachs's sculptures are conspicuously handmade; lovingly cobbled together from plywood, resin, steel, and ceramic. The scars and imperfections in the sculptures tell the story of how it came into being and remove it from the realm of miraculous conception. His studio team of ten, functions like a teaching hospital or cult, that worships plywood and an ethos of transparency. Known as an "Artist's artist" Sachs' work is loved by children and widely imitated by young artists in search of their own voice. His film collaborations with director Van Neistat (since 2001) have served to represent the aspects of the sculptures that exist in time. View them all at www.tenbullets.com.

Sachs' SPACE PROGRAM first launched in 2007 with a mission to the moon at Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles. In 2012 at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City, Sachs and his team ventured further than any human before by taking his SPACE PROGRAM to Mars in search of life beyond Earth. By using all of their resources and man power, they embark on a journey that, through their labor and commitment, becomes as real as any other NASA mission. By realizing details to an extreme degree the experience becomes authentic.

Sachs' work has been included in many exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad, and is in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst, Oslo. Major solo exhibitions include the Contemporary Austin (2015), Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (2009), Fondazione Prada, Milan (2006), Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin and SITE Santa Fe (1999). Sachs lives and works in New York.

Van Neistat
Director
Van Neistat is a filmmaker who lives in New York City. Neistat is the director of several Tom Sachs short films including "Ten Bullets." A Space Program is his first feature film.