Tea Ceremony Manual

Tea Ceremony Manual is Tom Sachs's illustrated guide to the ritual he devised for performing the Japanese tea ceremony through his own workshop's materials and codes, plywood, foamcore, hand tools, and handwritten labels standing in for lacquer and ceramic.

Published by the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum on the occasion of the exhibition Tom Sachs: Tea Ceremony (March 23 - July 24, 2016), the 278-page book follows the format of the niche instructional manuals Sachs collects and imitates, laying out step-by-step host and guest procedures alongside a statement by the artist, an essay and haiku by curator Dakin Hart, a foreword by museum director Jenny Dixon, and a visual index of his tea-related sculpture.

Sachs has spent much of his career restaging systems of ritual and craft, from NASA space programs to McDonald's, using bricolage construction to expose the values embedded in objects and procedures; Tea Ceremony Manual applies that method to a tradition he first encountered as a teenager, translating its codes into his own workshop vocabulary.