CARHENGE,GLASTONBURY 2023
2023, Glastonbury has once again its own Stonehenge.
Made of 24 mutated iconic vintage cars erected in the middle of the festival, Carhenge is a new monumental installation by the founder of the Mutoid Waste Company and master builder of rock’n’roll environments, Joe Rush.
Dedicated to the pillars of Counterculture, a culture liberated from conformism and consumerism, a culture of subversion that stems from the uncompromising desire of a few rare visionary and revolutionary originators from Quentin Crisp to Hunter S Thompson, Carhenge celebrates the Underground and the punk ethos.
Each car is a tribute to those heroines and heroes from the margins of society.
A symbol of the Mutoid credo : the art made of waste, the parties and the road, Carhenge will be set alive by a show of lights created by the great lighting designer Ed Warren and by the inventive congolese jump up beats of Fulu Miziki or “music from the garbage” in lingala. At the centre of the henges, from Thursday 22 June, these “African Mutoids” from Kinshasa, dressed in scrap, fusing music, art, dance and fashion will perform and play their afrofuturist sound with percussion instruments made of trash from flip flops to plastic tubings.
Celebrating the spirit of Glastonbury and the visionary and pioneering 38-year artistic collaboration between the formidable Michael Eavis, founder of the 'world's best festival' and Joe Rush, the revolutionary underground artist, this new and revisited “Mutoid Wastelands” offers for the first time an artistic retrospective of Joe Rush’s work at Glastonbury.
Since 1985, and his first “art invasion” of the festival, this dreamer of mutant worlds has ceaselessly created iconic mechanical and monumental sculptures and installations (including Carhenge on a much smaller scale in 1987 and the iconic giant mechanical Phoenix atop the Pyramid stage in 2013).
For the first time in the history of the festival, “his museum in the wild”, seven of his major installations will be shown together.
