Michael Landy
Michael Landy is one of the “Young British Artists”, whose installations provide an immediate experience of what our culture sells and discards. Born in 1963, Landy went to the Loughborough College of Art, and then Goldsmiths College. While he was studying at Goldsmiths, he participated in the exhibition Freeze, which was organized by Damien Hirst (1988). The artists shown in this exhibit became the group now known as the YBAs. Landy’s first major work was Market (1990), an installation of empty market stalls. In 1992, Landy created Closing Down Sale about the selling of art with art objects marked as “Bargain.” For Scrapheap Services, which is now in the permanent collection of the Tate, he designed a fictional cleaning company that brought the viewer into a world where we discard humans as easily as scraps of junk. Perhaps his most well-known work to date is Breakdown (2001). Installed in an old clothing store, Landy brought out all of his own possessions. Each of the 7,227 items was catalogued, from a stamp to a car. Then, while the public went through the exhibit, working with a team on an assembly line, Landy destroyed each and every object. He was left with no possessions, but over 45,000 people witnessed their destruction. Recent exhibitions have included Nourishment, using etchings of weeds to examine a sense of decay; and Semi-detached, at the Tate, which uses the story of his own father, who was permanently injured in a mining accident. In sculpture, sound, and video, Landy continues his exploration of what we consider useful, and what we value.
