BY OWEN FINDSEN
The Cincinnati Enquirer
The first thing David Mach asked for when he came to Cincinnati was The Cincinnati Enquirer. He didn't want one newspaper. He wanted 80,000.
He also wanted an airplane, a golf cart, some large chemical tanks and a personal ski-type watercraft.
Mr. Mach is a sculptor who uses no artists materials. He comes into town empty-handed and builds everything from real stuff gathered by the museum's staff. The work he has built at the Contemporary Arts Center, called The Great Outdoors, is a flood of newspapers, pushing, sliding, swamping everything in its path.
Mr. Mach, 42, was born in Scotland and lives in London. He has been creating monumental works out "stuff" for more than a decade. He once built a full-scale copy of the Parthenon out of old automobile tires and a Rolls Royce from 15,000 books.
The Enquirer contributed the newspapers (OK, for the record there are Cincinnati Posts, too, because the Enquirer prints the Post at its Western Avenue printing plant). Pallet after pallet of paper was shipped to the CAC.
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IF YOU GO
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What: David Mach: Theater of Excess.
When: 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Monday-Saturday, noon-5 p.m. Sunday through Jan. 17.
Where: Contemporary Arts Center, 115 E. Fifth St., downtown.
Admission: $3.50, $2 seniors and students. Free on Monday. Information: 721-0390.
Also showing: Henry Gwiazda, buzzingreynolds dreamland.
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The papers are starts and returns. Starts are the papers that are on the presses when they start up, while the presses are being adjusted. Returns are the throwaway papers that come back from our distribution centers.
"Newspapers work particularly well because they can be layered," Mr. Mach says. This work starts with a huge stack of newspapers piled to the ceiling, cascading down to a thin layer on the floor.
"It starts out violently and sort of dwindles out," he says. It's like the news, which starts with headlines for wars, scandals and natural disasters and fades over the days and weeks to small items on back pages.
The stacks suggest a flow of lava from a volcano, overwhelming everything in its path. Even the airplane, a home-built, single-seat model on loan from Cincinnati Technical College, has been partially overturned by the power of the flow.
It is curious that the devastating floods in Cental America happened while this work was being made. Stories and pictures in the newspapers that comprise the work report on the disaster.
"That's the kind of coincidence that happens in this kind of work," Mr. Mach says. "I would never exploit a tragedy. I didn't think about it when I planned this work, which was long before the flooding. But if it happens, that's fine. The stories of the floods are in the newspapers, and they've become part of the art."
Left with impression
Day after day Mr. Mach, his wife, Leslie, and a crew of workers tear and layer newspapers. The faces of the pages don't show. It's the folded edges that define the flowing forms that bulge out from the stacks.
The work is temporary and will be dismantled at the end of the exhibition.
"People ask me why I make temporary art. I don't think of it as temporary. It's permanent sculpture to me. It's the impact and the recollection of a work of art that we take away from an exhibition and we can have that forever.
"A sculpture that stands in an art museum is just an artifact left over from your experience on seeing it. It doesn't exist when you walk away from it. When I'm done with this work, it's over for me. I don't care about it any more because what excited me about it is over."
Talking as an equal
The exhibition is titled Theater of Excess, and it includes other, smaller works made from newspapers. But they all seem to be part of one work, the one he calls The Great Outdoors.
"I really don't like art galleries. People get dressed up and prepared to come here. I would like people to come across my work when they're not prepared. I'm not a preacher. I don't want to tell you what to think. I don't want to give lectures. I'm not any more intelligent than you are. I just want to talk to you as an equal.
"People who come across art outside of a gallery are free to think whatever they want. They see real things with their eyes, not what they think somebody wants them to see."
Perhaps the work is about the growing flood of information we're expected to absorb, tons of words that we need to know. The golf cart, the airplane, the storage tanks may signify subjects that are in the news, sports, technology, pollution. But the real objects are being overwhelmed by the words.
Not that it's to be taken entirely seriously. Mr. Mach is also showing a series of collages that reveal his humorous side. In one, a sky filled with household appliances rains on a peaceful landscape. Others show studies of his full-scale train that he built in England using 181,000 bricks.
In a few weeks the exhibition will be over and, although the artist hopes it will be a permanent work of art in people's minds, the tons of newspapers will have to be dismantled and shipped to recycling centers. How will that be done?
"I don't know. I won't be here," he says, wiping the newsprint from his hands.
