Saturday evening’s lecture by David Mach was life-affirming. It was an insight into Mach’s process of making art and the drivers of his personality, and emphasised how creativity can be put to work. Forcefully.
For some reason, the University of Dundee runs these lectures in the Dalhousie Building – contemporary, with rather spartan interiors – whereas a parallel series of British Association lectures are held in the Tower Building – Modernist, with rich timber and carpeting. No matter. Neither venue would have been large enough for the crowd which turned up to see Mach. His appearance attracted many hundreds of people who were rewarded with an evocation of the artist’s pure joy at waking up in the morning then racing to the studio to start work on the ideas fermenting in his head.
Tower of Babel
Mach was brought up in Methil and studied in Dundee: the attitude he found in the city has never left him. He described how he was shy and unforthcoming when he arrived in the city but over time he found self-confidence. His first public artwork, a net of leaves suspended from the trees in Camperdown Park, encouraged him to interact with the public. After looking on intently for a few minutes at the artist at work, an auld boy came up to him – “What’s that you’re doin there, son? Is that a bridge for the squirrels?”
As a result of this early experience, Mach explained that he is more interested in engaging the art-hater - there’s something to work with there - than the uncritical art fan who loves everything the artist presents to them. When he came to Duncan of Jordanstone to study in the mid 1970’s, Mach discovered that the Dundonians were the most bolshie people he’d come across, and perhaps that has grounded him. He described art world players in New York who sidle up to him and explain how rebellious they are: Mach smiles because he knows the Dundonians would size them up shrewdly, see through their pretension and bullshit, then eat them for breakfast.
Temple at Tyre
I recall Mach’s first works in Dundee - from the “King is Dead”, a fibreglass gargoyle perched on the hammerbeams of the McManus Gallery roof, poised to throw a chimney pot down onto the art lovers – to the magazine stacks in the Central Library, enveloping concrete columns with tidal waves of old magazines. He went on to build several magazine installations, each bigger than the last, culminating in giant Corinthian columns at the Tramway in Glasgow – a colossal undertaking which took months of planning and a considerable amount of cash. Early in his career, he built the “Temple at Tyre” in Edinburgh - a Parthenon built of worn truck tyres - two enormous Sumo Wrestlers, and the Big Heids on the M8 motorway, which are seen by thousands of motorists every day.
Mach describes himself as a materials junkie: this is where the lecture became particularly interesting, because iterative pieces made with many thousands or even millions of repetitive components – magazines, bricks, matchsticks, pins, coathangers – have become a theme in his work. For example, we discovered the roots of his famous brick locomotive in Darlington. He began with a steam train made from stacks of magazines, but harboured a dream to build it full size, an express steam locomotive in brick, its clouds of smoke and exhaust thrown backwards and merging with a terrace of brick houses. 
Brick Locomotive, Darlington
The brick locomotive was one of the first National Lottery-funded artworks, and it was fascinating to hear about the years of battling with committees, dozens of maquettes and collages which it took to realise it. Once on site, he laid about half a dozen bricks, then the brickies chased him away! But he learned about the limitations of brickwork, and developed an understanding of how to communicate what he wanted to achieve to the folk who could realise it. The simple lesson was how to make progress with committees – the attrition of coming back at them again after they try to knock your ideas down. During the evolution of the Darlington brick locomotive, a series of collages emerged with brick trains glowered at by a Politburo of committee men in grey suits, and when someone suggested the voids inside the brick structure could house bat boxes, an opponent seized on this, so Mach made a collage with vampire bats to present at the next meeting....
Mach's work ranges from small scale sculpture – the painstaking craft of the “Matchheads”, to large scale public art – the brick locomotive in Darlington, and a Polaris submarine made of tyres outside the Hayward Gallery in London – and visually rich collages … which evolved from a studio perhaps unsurprisingly piled high with magazines. Much of it plays with notions of the monumental: the Temple at Tyre, his magazine columns in the Tramway, and the recent “Golgotha”, reach huge scale, yet they are temporary installations made from expedient materials. 
Golgotha
Similarly, Mach enjoys challenging peoples’ assumptions about what is possible - he admitted several times that the more folk say “There’s no way that’s going to happen”, the more he grits his teeth and says, “Yes it fucking it is!” Within that expression of Scots thrawn-ness lies the root of the works which have made his reputation. Some take years of planning, having begun gestating early in his career. Recently Mach became well known for the coathanger Christs at the City Art Centre in Edinburgh: but like the brick locomotive, it’s a concept which he had been carrying around in his head for more than a decade.
At the opening night of the 2011 Festival Fringe, he placed a bust of the Devil, made out of thousands of brightly coloured matches in a courtyard at the College of Art then lit it with a dowp. It burst into flames, which Mach artfully extinguished so that it could take its place alongside “Golgotha”: three huge figures of threaded coat hangers impaled on metallic crosses constructed in the City Art Centre, as part of Precious Light, a modern interpretation of the King James Bible. I recall pressing my nose against the glass one cold day while the exhibition was being installed, and gaining a glimpse of the ferment of activity inside. The result was a moving and unusual tableau of religious art, long viewed as unfashionable.
Don’t give a Fuck bear
I’ve often thought during lectures that I would rather fight a bear than be here doing this – but David Mach turned that notion on its head by presenting his “Don’t give a Fuck” bears, the mean cousins of the Care Bears. In a similar vein is a timber staircase carried by armies of Barbie dolls and other emblems of popular culture he has co-opted such as Neil Armstrong, King Kong and the 101 Dalmatians. As with Jeff Koons’ art, all these say something about celebrity, but set in mach's case against a background of waste, the post-consumer shite which piles up all around us. The magazines, tyres and matches make a point which Mach summed up his art's "criticism of materialistic attitudes, which I hope points right back into the art world, where there is as much of a commodity market as anywhere else."
This is the best lecture I’ve attended in years, and the rest of the audience thought so, too. Mach’s dry wit and plain speaking compliments a gift for communicating ideas. If you get a chance to see him, take it, for there is no post-modern irony or cool distance in David Mach’s delivery. Underneath the humour and pop culture references, there is a serious message being hammered home about unwrapping your creativity and seizing every chance you get in life.
Hell Bent
Images from davidmach.com, all copyright the artist
