Michael Landy at C&A Store on Oxford Street - Brief Article

Art in America, June, 2001 by Judith E. Stein

"I shop therefore I am," quipped Barbara Kruger in the '80s, tweaking us for the excesses of our consumer culture. British artist Michael Landy, now 37, took this modern credo to heart in the last decade, framing a multifaceted critique of consumerism using found and purchased objects. His flower-filled Costermonger's Stall, 1992-97, one of the more subtle art works included in the 1997 "Sensation" exhibition, addressed the mechanics of display.

For Break Down, 2001, commissioned by The Times/Art-angel Open, Landy devised a devastatingly effective strategy to unsettle our presumptions about what we own, what we need and who we are. In an empty department store on Oxford Street, a well-known mecca for shoppers, Landy orchestrated the dramatic destruction of all of his possessions, except the clothes on his back. At the end of Break Down's 15-day run, some 7,010 items had been pulverized, including his car, family photos and furniture, as well as art works by his girlfriend, Gillian Wearing, and chums Chris Ofili, Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst and Gary Hume. A considerable number of his own drawings were likewise obliterated.

Robert Rauschenberg did not invite observers to watch his audacious act of creation-through-destruction when he erased a de Kooning drawing in 1953. But Landy made a compelling show of his artistic process, employing material reclamation technology to reduce everything to its constituent parts. Break Down attracted thousands of art-savvy viewers and shopping-bag-laden passersby, who looked on as stunned witnesses as the artist and a team of operatives in matching blue overalls industriously and methodically annihilated both works of art and objects of daily life. Preparations had begun six months previously, when Landy commenced "an audit of his life," forensically logging, weighing, tagging and bagging all but his largest possessions. The tidy inventory of his property functioned as a dual hit list and memorial roster when mounted on a large wall at the emporium's entrance.

The helpers worked in arenas circumscribed by a looping, plinth-like conveyor belt, installed under the previous tenant's illuminated Please Pay Here sign. In one bay, an expert mechanic systematically dismantled Landy's Saab 900. A multitude of yellow plastic trays made their way around the rhythmically curved blue track every 10 minutes, displaying objects either before or after they had met their un-makers. Occasionally, records and CDs were given a temporary reprieve when a worker would play one on a remaining sound system. By the last day, the mechanical shutters and clangs of the machinery provided the sole audio component. During my visit early in the run, I saw a cricket bat that had been transformed into an appealing collection of red plastic granules, and a pair of Levi's, abridged to a fluffy, gray-blue mound.

Break Down, Landy's strongest work to date, embodied more than a social commentary on shopping. His gesture of publicly stripping himself of his worldly goods had a spiritual dimension. He behaved as a shaman might, enacting a purge for communal ends. Contradictorily theatrical and meditative, emotional and orderly, Break Down seemed a tacit homage to Shiva, the paradoxical Hindu god who was an ascetic and sensualist, a destroyer and restorer. Nothing associated with Landy's affecting work was for sale, save a modest catalogue with the doleful database of what no longer existed.