Sachs & Co.(The Talk of the Town)(Tom Sachs)

Moon rocks, wooden shotguns, and a life-sized replica of a Bosendorfer grand piano were just a few of the projects the do-it-yourself sculptor Tom Sachs--who has two big shows opening on May 8th, one at Lever House and the other at the Sperone Westwater gallery--was heading up one morning last week. They were not, however, the source of his breakfast-time agita. That he attributed, over toast and strawberry jam at a West Village cafe, to labor issues. "One of those great business-school things is that any job must be done by the lowest-paid qualified personnel," he said. "So if you need the garbage emptied, the C.E.O. doesn't do it, the janitor does. But if you've got a meeting and the office stinks, the C.E.O.'s going to empty the trash. I feel like that's the situation I'm constantly trying to avoid."

Sachs, who is forty-one, is curly-haired and obsessively boyish. He first gained attention as a provocateur: a concentration camp constructed from a Prada hatbox, a candy jar filled with live 9-mm. bullets. (They cost Mary Boone, then his gallerist, a night in jail.) Somewhere along the way, he morphed into a company man: he now employs fourteen full-time assistants, working in any number of media. "The real problem with management is how far to push someone," Sachs said, sounding as much M.B.A. as M.F.A. "If we were more efficient, I would be trying to do more complicated projects."

Seven-step books have been mildly useful--"Dale Carnegie? I love that shit"--as has an old McDonald's emloyee-training manual that he picked up around the time he was stamping fast-food containers with the logos of luxury fashion companies (see: "Chanel Value Meal," 1999). But Sachs, a benevolent if idiosyncratic bossman, seems happy to administrate with the bricolage equivalent of company memos: handmade signs, everywhere, proclaiming, "No Headphones, Bad Morale, by Reich Decree CDR. T. Sachs," or, Sharpied near the blade of a scroll saw, "Do Not Lift Here--No--Damage Will Occur." For the ride from breakfast to his studio, on Centre Street, Sachs handed a companion bicyclist a helmet emblazoned with a masking-tape peace sign and the slogan "Born to Kill." Arriving at the studio, he locked the bikes up at a metal rack beneath another memo: "These Bikes Are Being Watched--You Are Being Watched."

Inside the studio, Sachs--his uniform was half-executive (white button-down, rep tie), half-prole (Levi's, holey sweater, mismatched socks)--proceeded to his woodshop. There, four of his workers were engaged in what he called "pyrography"--using Excalibre wood-burning pens (they're normally for decorating duck decoys) to singe onto large plywood boards the delicate curlicues of an illuminated manuscript. Sachs had lifted the pattern from an 1857 edition of Goethe's "Reineke Fuchs," which he had come ...