David Mach: 'It’s a great car - it’s almost a shame to destroy it'
The Oligarch’s Nightmare, by David Mach, at the Festival Gallery at Galway International Arts Festival. Picture: Andrew Downes
David Mach, the Oligarch’s Nightmare David Mach makes work on an epic scale. His sculptures and installations tend to occupy entire gallery spaces, and at least one of his projects would traverse 100 miles of his native Scotland if he ever saw it through to completion.
Also, he likes to repurpose functional objects. Shipping containers, a yacht, a caravan, rubber tyres and traditional telephone boxes have all been grist to his mill. So it is no great surprise that The Oligarch’s Nightmare, his new installation at Galway International Arts Festival, features a brand new automobile – a Range Rover, to be specific - manipulated to appear as if it has just crashed and burst into flames.
The installation is based on one of the maquettes Mach routinely produces while working through ideas in his studio. “I make drawings and maquettes so I can give people – financial backers and that – an idea of what the work will look like,” he says. “But I often think they haven’t a fucking clue what they’re looking at. Sometimes I think they’re scared to even look at them.”
This was not an issue with his commissioners in Galway. The Oligarch’s Nightmare is his fourth project at the festival - after Hellbent in 2006, Precious Light in 2012 and Rock’n’roll in 2018 - and artistic director Paul Fahy was happy to inspect all twenty-one of his maquettes. “Paul asked me to pick one of them and make it to scale,” says Mach. “Your last idea always seems like your best, so I chose the twenty-first maquette I’d made in this series.”
The Oligarch’s Nightmare required the inclusion of a particularly flash vehicle, hence the Range Rover. Mach bought one in Scotland, and drove it down to London, where he has lived and worked for the past forty years. One of his assistants then drove it to Galway. “It’s a great car,” he says. “It’s almost a shame to destroy it.” The Oligarch’s Nightmare is clearly inspired by the kind of corporate greed – late stage capitalism, as it is often called - that Mach believes has brought the UK to its knees.
“Millions of people are becoming poorer and poorer in this country all the time,” he says. “We’re a pack of tossers. And it all goes back to Thatcher; she was the one who kicked the whole thing off, the money-grabbing, and the stripping the country of its resources. The Tories are so corrupt, and what they’re doing is appalling. We need to get rid of the fuckers once and for all.”
Not that he has much faith in a Labour alternative. “The last Labour PM, Gordon Brown, was good, but I think Keir Starmer is as big a Tory as the rest of them. I don’t know what kind of socialist revolution it would take to change things, but some of the union guys - Mick Lynch, for example – are really inspiring.”
Mach is the son of a Polish miner and a Scotswoman; he grew up in Fife, and studied at Duncan of Jordanstown College in Dundee and the Royal College of Art in London. He is particularly scathing of how the Tories have cut funding for arts education, making it the preserve of the rich and privileged.
“Thatcher hated art,” he says. “But there was a thriving art scene in spite of her. Artists will make work anyway, but the Tories have done terrible things to the art colleges. When I went to art college over forty years ago, they were magnificent places, now they’re just shit. We need to get back to how they used to be, we really do.”
In Galway, Mach had a team of assistants to help realise his vision. “We had an incredible crew,” he says, “and a fantastic space to work in. It was almost a performance in itself, just making the thing, though we didn’t get to do it in front of an audience. But it’s beautiful. And once people came in, they didn’t go looking for work on the walls, they walked around the sculpture and engaged with it.”
Mach compares the Oligarch’s Nightmare to a still from a film. “It’s like there’s a storyline. It’s not a revenge story, as such, but there are elements of that in it. If I’d made a film, it’d tell the whole story, but a work like this still has an air of mystery about it. It’s a short blast that stops you in your tracks, and makes the hairs on the back of your head stand up.”
Mach turned 67 in March. He and his partner – the printmaker Lindsey Gibb – are expecting a child any day now, but the prospect does not seem to have curtailed his work ethic. “I’m off to Mauritius next,” he says. “I’m re-jigging a project there, using shipping containers. And I’m working on a massive project to do with Robert Burns… there’s going to be Burns Nights all over the world. Also, I’ve been writing a trilogy of novels. The first book’s finished, and I’m working on the other two.”
The third book will, he says, feature the Irn Curtain, the massive art project he announced on April 1, 2021, that was to involve building a 100-mile long wall out of 400,000 shipping containers between Scotland and England. It was, of course, an April Fool’s joke, but many would love to see the wall constructed.
“I’ve written a lot about the Irn Curtain,” he says, “in a way that can make it appear to be real. Making the thing itself would cost billions, it’d be like sci-fi or something, though I am making a model of it that’ll be about 200 feet long. But a lot of people still think it’s real. I’ve even had a couple of politicians tell me what a great idea it is.”
- David Mach’s The Oligarch’s Nightmare is at Galway International Arts Festival’s festival gallery until 30th July. 11am – 6pm daily. Late opening to 8pm Thursday – Saturday. Further information: giaf.ie
