To the Editors:
Herb Greer, in his “Letter from London” (December, 1983), has seriously misrepresented the facts about the burning of David Mach’s rubber-tire submarine Polaris. That part of Mr. Greer’s article reads as an example of his own category, i.e., “rash gestures under the influence of ideology,” the ideology here being a belief in the necessity of discovering an underlying social or political message in every purported or actual art work—Socialist Realism’s alter ego, in fact. This false ideology leads him to exalt the destroyer of an artwork and to suppress the name of the artist himself—and in the month before 1984!
The facts are these: David Mach, aged twenty-seven, built Polaris out of about ten thousand used car tires with the help of his wife, friends, and a band of supportive art students. He did this as one of fifty sculptors, all selected on behalf of the Arts Council of Great Britain to show their work at a very large exhibition, in galleries and out-of-doors, held in London last August.
The tires were donated and the only cost was for the hire of transport to carry them. He was not “prompted by—CND sympathies” but was driven by his wish to make a beautiful thing. This he did wonderfully well. Polaris, upon its completion, was awesome and resplendent, and indeed a work of art. That it was made of used tires and not of black basalt is immaterial.
Before the work’s completion, the
