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Brooklyn Museum

Art Music

Tom Sachs Brings Boombox Culture Back to the Brooklyn Museum

VIA HypeBeast

The Brooklyn retrospective covers 17 years of the artist’s career, but he has been making boomboxes for much longer; the New York creative warmly recalls trading his sister’s boyfriend a copy of Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti for a stolen car stereo. If you’re feeling adventurous, you can purchase a DIY zine from an ATM attached to Sach’s Bodega that dates the beginning of his obsession to 1981: “I hooked my Sony Walkman up to a set of mini speakers and Velcroed them to a block of plywood. It was a clusterfuck of wires.” The Bodega is a boombox too, of course.

The collection showcases Sachs’ balance of obsessive attention to detail and an irreverent sense of humor: one speaker has a perfect recreation of the Chanel monogram alongside the word “Pussy” written in Sachs’ signature scrawl; a Courvoisier bottle in Presidential Vampire Booth ‘s bar has been Wited-Out to read Corbusier.

Interesting retrospective, considering the resurgence of boombox culture, and innovative boombox technology like HI-RO.