Michael Landy
Encyclopedia
Michael Landy RA is one of the Young British Artists
(YBAs). He is best known for the performance piece
installation
Break Down (2001), in which he destroyed all his possessions, and for the Art Bin
project at the South London Gallery
. On 29 May 2008 Landy was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London. (As a "Royal Academician" he may use the letters "RA" after his name.)
. He first studied art
in Loughton
and Loughborough
, then at Goldsmiths College in London, having been inspired to take up art professionally after having a picture selected for display on the BBC
television art program Take Hart
.
After graduating from Goldsmiths in 1988 he exhibited in the Freeze
exhibition, organized by Damien Hirst
and Carl Freedman
—an exhibition which first brought together a group of artists that would later become known as the YBAs.
In 1990 Landy exhibited in East Country Yard with several of the artists from Freeze. His first solo exhibition was Market (1990), an installation comprising numerous empty market
stalls. Like much of his later work it was intended as a comment on consumerism and society.
In 1992 Landy started an association with Karsten Schubert by making Closing Down Sale for his gallery, an installation made up of a number of objects in shopping trolleys labeled "BARGAIN" and recorded announcements encouraging visitors to buy. The work was intended as a comment on the commodification of art, and might be seen as a precursor of sorts to Break Down, a work which produced no salable objects.
Before Break Down Landy's best-known work was Scrapheap Services (1995–1996), which featured a fictitious cleaning company which sought to change society by way of "a minority of people being discarded". Promotional videos were made for the company and a large number of cut-out men were made from old magazines to be swept up and destroyed. This installation typifies the YBAs' interests in transforming the mundane into art, and recontextualisaion. Its visual impact on one level is a typical industrial event, yet the gallery environment and bright red figures, along with the sinister irony of the title, is intended to force the viewer to address issues of humanity and consumerism.
In 1997 work which Landy had previously sold to Charles Saatchi
was included in the Sensation exhibition
at the Royal Academy
in London. This show later toured Berlin and New York, but Landy's work was somewhat overshadowed by some of the other more outrageous artworks.
Break Down, the work which put him in the public eye, was held in February 2001 at an old branch of the clothes store C&A
on Oxford Street
in London (C&A had recently ceased trading, and the shop had been emptied). Landy gathered together all his possessions, ranging from postage stamp
s to his car
, and including all his clothes and works of art by himself and others, painstakingly catalogued all 7,227 of them in detail, and then destroyed all in public. The process of destruction was done on something resembling an assembly line
in a mass production
factory
, with ten workers reducing each item to its basic materials and then shredding them.
Break Down, which was a joint commission from The Times
newspaper and Artangel, attracted around 45,000 visitors. At the end of the process all that was left was bags of rubbish, none of which was sold or exhibited in any form. Landy made no money as a direct result of Break Down, and following it had no possessions at all.
Landy made little art in the year following Break Down before returning with a solo show in late 2002, entitled Nourishment. The exhibition consisted of a series of detailed etchings of weed
s, rendered in the traditional style of botanical
draughtsmanship. The intricate detailing is reported to have resulted in lasting eye damage for Landy.
In 2003 Landy was selected to chair the judging panel for the Beck's Futures
art prize.
In 2008 Ridinghouse
published Michael Landy: Everything Must Go!, Landy's first monograph, which brings together over 20 years of the artist's work for the first time. It was in this year that Landy was elected a member of the Royal Academy.
Landy's Art Bin installation for the South London Gallery
in February-March 2010 was described by the artist as 'a monument to creative failure'. A large transparent skip was installed at the gallery, into which he invited the public to throw art work with which they were dissatisfied. Artists and collectors were invited to apply to dispose of works of art via a dedicated website.
Landy's partner is fellow British artist Gillian Wearing
.
Young British Artists
Young British Artists or YBAs is the name given to a loose group of visual artists who first began to exhibit together in London, in 1988...
(YBAs). He is best known for the performance piece
Performance art
In art, performance art is a performance presented to an audience, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance may be either scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated; spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participation. The performance can be live or...
installation
Installation art
Installation art describes an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often called Land art; however, the boundaries between...
Break Down (2001), in which he destroyed all his possessions, and for the Art Bin
Art Bin
The Art Bin was a scheme run by English artist Michael Landy at the South London Gallery in Peckham, London which ran for six weeks through February and March 2010...
project at the South London Gallery
South London Gallery
South London Gallery, founded 1891, often known by the acronym SLG, is a public-funded gallery of contemporary art in Camberwell, London - exhibiting artists included Alfredo Jaar, Ryan Gander and Chris Burden...
. On 29 May 2008 Landy was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London. (As a "Royal Academician" he may use the letters "RA" after his name.)
Life and work
Landy was born in LondonLondon
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
. He first studied art
Art
Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....
in Loughton
Loughton
Loughton is a town and civil parish in the Epping Forest district of Essex. It is located between 11 and 13 miles north east of Charing Cross in London, south of the M25 and west of the M11 motorway and has boundaries with Chingford, Waltham Abbey, Theydon Bois, Chigwell and Buckhurst Hill...
and Loughborough
Loughborough
Loughborough is a town within the Charnwood borough of Leicestershire, England. It is the seat of Charnwood Borough Council and is home to Loughborough University...
, then at Goldsmiths College in London, having been inspired to take up art professionally after having a picture selected for display on the BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
television art program Take Hart
Take Hart
Take Hart is a British children's television show about art, fronted by the late Tony Hart. It took over from Vision On, and ran from 1977 until 1983. The show featured Hart and the animated Plasticine character Morph, and other characters created by David Sproxton like 'Smoulder the Moulder',...
.
After graduating from Goldsmiths in 1988 he exhibited in the Freeze
Freeze (exhibition)
Freeze is the title of an art exhibition that took place in July 1988 in an empty London Port Authority building at Surrey Docks in London Docklands. Its main organiser was Damien Hirst. It was significant in the subsequent development of the Young British Artists.-Organisation:Freeze was...
exhibition, organized by Damien Hirst
Damien Hirst
Damien Steven Hirst is an English artist, entrepreneur and art collector. He is the most prominent member of the group known as the Young British Artists , who dominated the art scene in Britain during the 1990s. He is internationally renowned, and is reportedly Britain's richest living artist,...
and Carl Freedman
Carl Freedman
Carl Freedman is the founder of Carl Freedman Gallery . He previously worked as a writer and a curator, initially with Damien Hirst, to help pioneer the Young British Artists phenomenon.-Life and work:...
—an exhibition which first brought together a group of artists that would later become known as the YBAs.
In 1990 Landy exhibited in East Country Yard with several of the artists from Freeze. His first solo exhibition was Market (1990), an installation comprising numerous empty market
Market
A market is one of many varieties of systems, institutions, procedures, social relations and infrastructures whereby parties engage in exchange. While parties may exchange goods and services by barter, most markets rely on sellers offering their goods or services in exchange for money from buyers...
stalls. Like much of his later work it was intended as a comment on consumerism and society.
In 1992 Landy started an association with Karsten Schubert by making Closing Down Sale for his gallery, an installation made up of a number of objects in shopping trolleys labeled "BARGAIN" and recorded announcements encouraging visitors to buy. The work was intended as a comment on the commodification of art, and might be seen as a precursor of sorts to Break Down, a work which produced no salable objects.
Before Break Down Landy's best-known work was Scrapheap Services (1995–1996), which featured a fictitious cleaning company which sought to change society by way of "a minority of people being discarded". Promotional videos were made for the company and a large number of cut-out men were made from old magazines to be swept up and destroyed. This installation typifies the YBAs' interests in transforming the mundane into art, and recontextualisaion. Its visual impact on one level is a typical industrial event, yet the gallery environment and bright red figures, along with the sinister irony of the title, is intended to force the viewer to address issues of humanity and consumerism.
Charles Saatchi
Charles Saatchi is the co-founder with his brother Maurice of the global advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, and led that business - the world's largest advertising agency in the 1980s - until they were forced out in 1995. In the same year the Saatchi brothers formed a new agency called M&C...
was included in the Sensation exhibition
Sensation exhibition
Sensation was an exhibition of the collection of contemporary art owned by Charles Saatchi, including many works by Young British Artists, which first took place 18 September – 28 December 1997 at the Royal Academy of Art in London and later toured to Berlin and New York...
at the Royal Academy
Royal Academy
The Royal Academy of Arts is an art institution based in Burlington House on Piccadilly, London. The Royal Academy of Arts has a unique position in being an independent, privately funded institution led by eminent artists and architects whose purpose is to promote the creation, enjoyment and...
in London. This show later toured Berlin and New York, but Landy's work was somewhat overshadowed by some of the other more outrageous artworks.
Break Down, the work which put him in the public eye, was held in February 2001 at an old branch of the clothes store C&A
C&A
C&A is an international chain of fashion retail clothing stores, with its European head offices in Vilvoorde , Belgium and Düsseldorf, Germany...
on Oxford Street
Oxford Street
Oxford Street is a major thoroughfare in the City of Westminster in the West End of London, United Kingdom. It is Europe's busiest shopping street, as well as its most dense, and currently has approximately 300 shops. The street was formerly part of the London-Oxford road which began at Newgate,...
in London (C&A had recently ceased trading, and the shop had been emptied). Landy gathered together all his possessions, ranging from postage stamp
Postage stamp
A postage stamp is a small piece of paper that is purchased and displayed on an item of mail as evidence of payment of postage. Typically, stamps are made from special paper, with a national designation and denomination on the face, and a gum adhesive on the reverse side...
s to his car
Automobile
An automobile, autocar, motor car or car is a wheeled motor vehicle used for transporting passengers, which also carries its own engine or motor...
, and including all his clothes and works of art by himself and others, painstakingly catalogued all 7,227 of them in detail, and then destroyed all in public. The process of destruction was done on something resembling an assembly line
Assembly line
An assembly line is a manufacturing process in which parts are added to a product in a sequential manner using optimally planned logistics to create a finished product much faster than with handcrafting-type methods...
in a mass production
Mass production
Mass production is the production of large amounts of standardized products, including and especially on assembly lines...
factory
Factory
A factory or manufacturing plant is an industrial building where laborers manufacture goods or supervise machines processing one product into another. Most modern factories have large warehouses or warehouse-like facilities that contain heavy equipment used for assembly line production...
, with ten workers reducing each item to its basic materials and then shredding them.
Break Down, which was a joint commission from The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
newspaper and Artangel, attracted around 45,000 visitors. At the end of the process all that was left was bags of rubbish, none of which was sold or exhibited in any form. Landy made no money as a direct result of Break Down, and following it had no possessions at all.
Landy made little art in the year following Break Down before returning with a solo show in late 2002, entitled Nourishment. The exhibition consisted of a series of detailed etchings of weed
Weed
A weed in a general sense is a plant that is considered by the user of the term to be a nuisance, and normally applied to unwanted plants in human-controlled settings, especially farm fields and gardens, but also lawns, parks, woods, and other areas. More specifically, the term is often used to...
s, rendered in the traditional style of botanical
Botany
Botany, plant science, or plant biology is a branch of biology that involves the scientific study of plant life. Traditionally, botany also included the study of fungi, algae and viruses...
draughtsmanship. The intricate detailing is reported to have resulted in lasting eye damage for Landy.
In 2003 Landy was selected to chair the judging panel for the Beck's Futures
Beck's Futures
Beck's Futures was a British art prize founded by London's Institute of Contemporary Arts and sponsored by Beck's beer given to contemporary artists....
art prize.
In 2008 Ridinghouse
Ridinghouse
Ridinghouse is a company committed to publishing primary documents, art historical research, first monographs, anthologies of interviews and writings and editions. Established in 1995 by Karsten Schubert and Thomas Dane, the organisation has been rapidly expanding since 2004 and it currently...
published Michael Landy: Everything Must Go!, Landy's first monograph, which brings together over 20 years of the artist's work for the first time. It was in this year that Landy was elected a member of the Royal Academy.
Landy's Art Bin installation for the South London Gallery
South London Gallery
South London Gallery, founded 1891, often known by the acronym SLG, is a public-funded gallery of contemporary art in Camberwell, London - exhibiting artists included Alfredo Jaar, Ryan Gander and Chris Burden...
in February-March 2010 was described by the artist as 'a monument to creative failure'. A large transparent skip was installed at the gallery, into which he invited the public to throw art work with which they were dissatisfied. Artists and collectors were invited to apply to dispose of works of art via a dedicated website.
Landy's partner is fellow British artist Gillian Wearing
Gillian Wearing
Gillian Wearing OBE RA is an English conceptual artist, one of the YBAs, and winner of the annual British fine arts award, The Turner Prize, in 1997. On 11 December 2007, Wearing was elected as lifetime member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London....
.
External links
- Artist Project - Hello Weed — TateTate GalleryThe Tate is an institution that houses the United Kingdom's national collection of British Art, and International Modern and Contemporary Art...
Magazine, Issue 3 (brief overview of Landy's work and commentary on Nourishment). - Paper on Scrapheap Services
- BBC Four Documentary on Break Down
- Man in Oxford Street is Auto-destructive
- Break Down section on Artangel website
- Tate: Michael Landy on the Scrap Heap The artist talks about the influence of Jean TinguelyJean TinguelyJean Tinguely was a Swiss painter and sculptor. He is best known for his sculptural machines or kinetic art, in the Dada tradition; known officially as metamechanics...
on his work. 3 November, 2009. - TateShots: Michael Landy The artist on his drawing of portraits. 9 October, 2008.