The Submarine “Polaris”

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...