MAN IN OXFORD STREET IS AUTO-DESTRUCTIVE

Michael Landy

Michael Landy took almost a decade and a half to become an overnight success. A mammoth artwork called Break Down coaxed him towards the limelight. An award-winning television documentary about this project did the rest.

Landy was one of the notorious Goldsmiths College graduates who stepped into public view through the 1988 exhibition Freeze, curated by Damien Hirst. Many then thought him the most exciting and original member of the group. I still do. His work at this time, such as Market, commented on the social environment brought about by late Thatcherism and the just-beginning-to-simmer-and-boil cauldron of free market consumerism. He built vast installations from plastic milk crates and artificial grass whose basic units could be combined in an endless variety of simple formats like a Donald Judd sculpture. But whereas Judd’s work spoke of high-precision engineering, Landy’s was more thrift-store aesthetics ignited by barrow-boy or fairground barking.

Landy had his supporters, not least the gallerist Karsten Schubert. Outside his gallery he plastered banners declaring ‘Closing Down Sale’ and ‘Everything Must Go’. The mistake the dealer made was employing the artist and his girlfriend, Goldsmiths’ graduate Abigail Lane, as cleaners in the gallery in return for paying their rent. One morning, in the rubbish bin, they found a scrap of paper that referred to Landy as ‘dead wood’. There was a falling out. Landy immersed himself in another major work called Scrapheap Services which was a superfictive organisation for dealing with that larger mass of dead wood, Britain’s millions of unemployed. Surreal machinery, thousands of cut-out paper figures, and operatives wearing uniforms emblazoned with ‘Scrapheap Services’ logos turned installation art into performance art, but it didn’t pay the rent.

For a while Landy seemed to sink from sight. He emerged a few years later with a new project – Break Down – and a new girlfriend, Turner Prize-winner Gillian Wearing.

The documentary which followed was subtitled The Man Who Destroyed Everything. And that is precisely what he did. He destroyed his passport, his car, all his clothing (except for a pair of overalls he borrowed from Gillian), his CD and record collection, all his keys, all the traces of his childhood – teddy bears, early artworks, his birth certificate, and much, much more. Think of all of your own possessions – in his case up until his mid-thirties and numbering 7227. If you can imagine all this travelling around on a conveyor belt, a lifetime’s consumerism, then that is exactly what happened. With the help and financial backing of Artangel, the London agency that has done more for emerging artists with huge ambitions than anyone else, he took over the vacant C&A shop in London’s Oxford Street and set up an airport-type carousel that delivered all his worldly goods into the hands of a team of helpers who pulled each object apart, limb from limb (in the case of the teddy bear) and sleeve from jacket (in the case of the fur-lined coat that had been handed-down from his father and which his mother had spent an entire year saving up for). And this is where the human element comes in. We are introduced to the Landy household in their cosy, working-class home. His father, an Irish migrant, has been on a disability pension since an accident building one of the London Underground stations. His mother clearly cannot believe her eyes when she sees what her son is doing in the name of art. Endearingly, she refers to Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin in passing as if they are young kids who play up the road and sometimes lead Michael astray.

This all makes compelling viewing, but it is the artwork itself that is the masterpiece. From conception through to execution and final presentation it is orchestrated with reductive skills and graphic brilliance. On the walls of the shop appears line after line listing every personal item that has been destroyed – and at this level the work is a very satisfying piece of text-based art. Several objects, such as a Mont Blanc pen, are recorded for all to see as having been ‘stolen from the apartment of Karsten Schubert’. So there is no shortage of moral and ethical issues tied up in this work. Much of the shredded leftovers – many tons of it – were sent for landfill although at the last minute some was reclaimed to be on-sold as art objects. From the tabloids and quality broadsheets of Canary Wharf to the pulpits of the nation’s main churches and cathedrals, it seemed everyone had an opinion on the man who destroyed everything. But how do you follow an act like that?

As an artist from a generation whose work defined what Rosalind Krauss calls ‘the post-medium condition’, it is not surprising that Michael Landy has since created a series of very different projects. One of the most intriguing is Nourishment, a series of drawings of weeds from 2002. This project, for an exhibition in São Paolo, re-engaged him with art making.

According to a feature in The Guardian:

He has finally started drawing again, and now, he says, he can’t stop.
I’ve been doing drawings of street flowers, he says. They don’t need many nutrients; they can survive in very harsh conditions. I like that analogy of a plant that lives in little cracks in the street. I just pick them from around the estate where I live.(1)

Some time later Tate Magazine described Nourishment in more detail:

For the past two years, Landy has been botanising in little urban margins, looking for their earliest colonising flora as well as the longer-standing floral residents. Collecting weeds from urban brownfields, from cracks in pavements and the corners and verges of carparks, he has kept them fed and watered and has spent hours drawing each one, first on paper then on copper plates. The result is a series of etchings – little florilegia, not exactly garlands – that seem to refer back to artists of the Renaissance, such as Albrecht Dürer, as well as to botanical illustrators of more recent centuries. More importantly, these images play out a contemporary vernacular aesthetic that is Landy’s own distinctive contrivance.(2)

Later, Landy’s parents’ house made a reappearance, this time rebuilt entirely inside Tate Britain and titled Semi-detached. Reproductions of this spread quickly through the wire services and images of this suburban house, nestled between two imposing Doric columns, reached daily papers from Hong Kong to Honolulu. One variation on this work, a large Cibachrome image, was recently exhibited at Geelong Art Gallery in Victoria.

The drawings that Landy has made for his exhibition at Sherman Galleries take us from the world of weeds to the world of machinery. But it is a very broken-down mechanical landscape that we enter. The title of one of the works, H.2.N.Y. Failure of the Machine, where a giant balloon attempts to float free from broken bicycle wheels and seesawing axles, provides a fitting summary.

The Sherman works are part of a prolific series of drawings by Landy based on the sculptor Jean Tinguely’s self-destructing machine, Homage to New York, constructed in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art in 1960. It was set into motion for 27 minutes before bursting into flames but failed to fully destroy itself as firemen and museum guards were forced to take action. Landy’s fascination with Tinguely’s work dates back to Tinguely’s retrospective at the Tate, London, which he saw as an art student in 1982. As a result, for almost two years, Landy has been obsessively working on a range of drawings in charcoal, ink, oilstick, glue and gouache, all of which reveal both his extraordinary draughtsmanship and his far-reaching concern with concepts of auto-destruction in art. Some drawings have the delicacy of a sketch by Leonardo da Vinci, yet they are rendered with a Franz Kline expressionism that that fills the inky voids with pure emotion. A new maturity is evident in the execution of these significant works.

Peter Hill

Dr Peter Hill is an artist, writer, and critic. He is an Associate Professor and Head of Painting at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales in Sydney.

(1) Tim Cumming, The Guardian, 13 February 2002
(2) Heidi Reitmaier, Tate Magazine, issue 3, January–February 2003