Colourful, creative and controversial, David Mach has an international
reputation for his art. He tells Carol Pope how he arrived at Dundee as a naive and
quiet country boy in awe of his tutors.
It might be regarded as the Bayeux Tapestry of its day. Just as we examine the ancient wall hanging thirsty for detail of what life was like for our ancestors a thousand years ago at the time of the Battle of Hastings, so, a thousand years from now our descendants might pore over the UK's Self Portait - an epic collage, commissioned for the Millennium Dome, and featuring thousands of people at work and at play.
The artist charged with creating this defining snapshot of UK life at the turn of the millennium is Duncan of Jordanstone graduate of 1978, David Mach - a man accustomed to producing art on a large, public and frequently controversial scale. And it is big. A colossal collage. The final work, to be seen in the Self Portrait Zone, is nearly 600 metres long and three metres high. "The equivalent of 15 billboards," he tells me enthusiastically speaking from his south east London home over breakfast.
Its background is one big seamless landscape of Britain - mountains, hills, cities and superimposed upon the scene will be images - real images - of people in action at work and play. A plea for citizens to send in their snaps has deluged Mach with enough material to last him the rest of his life. His team of eight have collected and collated thousands of pictures of people in every situation from walking the dog to juggling firebrands. "People send things you wouldn't even think of. So you think oh we've got to put that in!" The images are photocopied, cut out, stuck down, blown up. "We're also taking stuff from the national art collections. We can take a tree straight out of a Gainsborough and use it just where it's needed. It might take someone a couple of days to cut it out so it looks like some kind of mad doily by the time you're finished with it." Mach can trace the origins of his obsession with collage - an art form he has refined in tiny detail over the years - to his student days when in a textiles class he remembers being asked to design "a wee part of a dress". "Everyone was painting and I'm cutting up bits of paper and thinking 'Am I allowed to do this?' I didn't know then that I would start using this in a big way."
As a student fresh from school in his hometown Methil in Fife, Mach paints a picture of himself as a greenhorn falling into a fantastic "otherworld" of new experiences. "I was a complete dope when I moved to art college. I had no idea what they did there. Other smarter people would have checked it out before hand. I wasn't all that compus mentis so it was a great surprise to find this fabulous choice of subjects."
Head of Sculpture today, Jake Kempsell had only recently joined the college at the time. He remembers Mach as "a tall languid character who always seemed to move very slowly but who produced a huge amount of very inventive material".
The Dundee years made a huge impression on the green and languid young Mach. He says: "I was a very quiet boy. I was scared to speak to these guys. I was in awe." But he was drinking in what was going on around him. His eyes were darting about all over the place.
He ate, slept and drank art, in all its forms, lapping up the opportunities for exploration in all the different media on offer. Today his praise is so effusive it's almost embarrassing even to a university PR officer! "The Dundee teachers were fantastic. I think it was probably the best art school in the world when I was there! I'm not joking! The teachers were of such a quality. People were so intense, the course was so great and the time you had to do it in… There were even quite good grants then and Dundee is such a cheap place to live. I lived like a king for five years!"
Such was the enthusiasm and intensity, he says, that students worked from 9am-9pm then adjourned to the pub "talking about art, even weeping about it".
"I remember all my first year teachers, in particular Jimmy Duff who taught us how to draw. I realise now that was such a valuable thing. We were more or less locked in the drawing class and taught not just how to draw but first how to look. Then he might teach you about making a few marks."
By the time of his degree show (pictured), Mach was making his own mark in a very distinctive way. Dundee still remembers his leaf carpet unrolling from the skies - thousands and thousands of beech leaves individually woven into a 15 metre length of chicken wire suspended in air - in Camperdown Park. "Can you imagine the time spent painstakingly placing each individual leaf for a concept of that scale?" asks Kempsell. But that has continued to be Mach's hallmark - attention to tiny detail within a massive format. When masterminding the gigantic brick train at Darlington, it is said, he would order the removal of a single brick "because it didn't look right".
As they might say in Methil: "Mony a mickle maks a Machle.." And some of that obsession with a mass whole, and its elements he says, goes back to his student summers when he worked in a bottling plant in Leven. "Mass production processes had their effect on me. You'd be seeing thousands of bottles pass before your eyes every day. I loved the extravagance of that mass production thing." Bottles, magazines, coathangers, shoes, telephone directories, junk, rags - they're all grist to the massive Mach mill. He might be known as an urban Andy Goldsworthy.
From tabula rasa to enfant terrible. Mach stayed on after graduating to complete a postgraduate year working in the atmospheric old Forebank Studios - a former church - under the wall shadow of an absent cross. A birdcage stuffed with rags, a walk-through wardrobe were among his conceptual creations before moving on to the Royal College of Art and a career which has seen him not just flirt with controversy but hot date it.
The makeshift Temple of Tyre in Edinburgh, the enormous Sumo Wrestler, the stunning brick train at Darlington, the Big Heids off the M8….. they've all made headlines (which in turn may well have found themselves in Mach's collages). One of his earliest and most controversial large scale public works was undoubtedly Polaris - a 60 metre submarine made from 6,000 tyres - on which a demonstrator tragically burned himself to death. This set the scene for the continuing love-it or hate-it reactions of the public.
What is less well known is that Mach first tried out his ill-fated submarine in Dundee. He had been invited back to the college to give a student workshop and proceeded, with the students help, to build a submarine with ten tonnes of tyres on the level five concourse. The concept, and more particularly its execution, within the confines of the building caused something of a stir even in that liberal environment. Stir grew to storm and the pre-Polaris was within an hour or two of completion - at the conning tower stage - when the tide of concern reached breaking point and the safety officers pulled the plug on the enterprise. Mach's first submarine was torpedoed.
Kempsell remembers he was then left with the challenge of disposing of 10 tonnes of old tyres. "It cost us a small fortune to get rid of them!"
In 1998, in a now customary storm of publicity, Mach was given the highest accolade and made a Fellow of the Royal Academy - a body about which he had been less than complimentary. Eighteen months later and now an insider, he's much more impressed, though not necessarily at home. OK, let's not beat about the bush. "Like a fart in a space suit" is how he puts it. But his attitude gives a couple of interesting insights into Mach the man - still, in many ways, like Mach the naïve awestruck boy arriving at art college.
"If I get invited to do something I think they've made a terrible mistake. I think 'You didn't really mean to invite me did you? Well it's too late now I'm in! 'And if you feel like that you maybe act like that as well a bit."
He describes a scene like a mini-government of fellows sitting at a long table. "I'm not outspoken until I'm forced. I'm almost incapacitated by formality… but sometimes something comes up that you care about and …we have some real rip roaring arguments."
He drops a hint that the RA is going to make something "colossal and amazing" happen in the next few years, something global with an educational side before sweeping the conversation elsewhere.
AD (After Dome) comes Paris where he's representing the first moon walk… in coat hangers. "It's a dirty great big thing - about 10 feet tall and about six months in the making". And there is Amsterdam. There he has been collaborating with Harald Vlugt on a project building a housing estate on the site of the old Ajax football stadium. They're making 20-30 sculptures, street signs, ceramic work, columns and using some of the old bits and pieces of the stadium in the process.
Some of the signs they are using are the Dutch versions of Stand A, B, C and so on. A word which translates as "vak" but has a more familiar phonetic ring. "So we're going to have this building ten storeys tall with 'vak' written all over it! It's the kind of thing you can't do with public art most of the time. I can't wait to see the reaction. Can't wait to give a lecture on the Vak Building!"
Neither can we.
