The Guardian’s Stuart Jeffries speaks to Joe Rush about how salvage art took him from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the fields of Glastonbury.
They thought we were terrorists,” says Joe Rush, remembering the day not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall when he and a fellow anarchist took over a patch of no man’s land at the heart of the German capital. They filled it with military hardware: tanks and artillery and the like – along with a MiG-21 fighter jet that they pointed directly at the nearby Reichstag.
“The authorities were furious,” he says. And no wonder. The police feared that, just as the cold war was ending, another military face-off had begun. “They thought we were going to fire missiles into the Reichstag,” says Rush. “So we pointed the MiG into the ground to make it clear we weren’t.”
What the authorities didn’t realise is that Rush and his travelling band of outsider artists had come to Berlin not to make war but to create a peace garden. His Mutoid Waste Company (MWC) crafted a huge gateway out of Soviet assault vehicles and called it Tankhenge. This then provided the entrance to the garden, which was an outdoor exhibition of found objects, some worked up into sculptures by the team.
“We stole most of it,” says Rush, who gives the impression that there was military hardware just lying around Berlin at the time... Keep reading on The Guardian.
They thought we were terrorists,” says Joe Rush, remembering the day not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall when he and a fellow anarchist took over a patch of no man’s land at the heart of the German capital. They filled it with military hardware: tanks and artillery and the like – along with a MiG-21 fighter jet that they pointed directly at the nearby Reichstag.
“The authorities were furious,” he says. And no wonder. The police feared that, just as the cold war was ending, another military face-off had begun. “They thought we were going to fire missiles into the Reichstag,” says Rush. “So we pointed the MiG into the ground to make it clear we weren’t.”
What the authorities didn’t realise is that Rush and his travelling band of outsider artists had come to Berlin not to make war but to create a peace garden. His Mutoid Waste Company (MWC) crafted a huge gateway out of Soviet assault vehicles and called it Tankhenge. This then provided the entrance to the garden, which was an outdoor exhibition of found objects, some worked up into sculptures by the team.
“We stole most of it,” says Rush, who gives the impression that there was military hardware just lying around Berlin at the time... Keep reading on The Guardian.