20 years of Break Down
When I started my undergraduate art degree in 2001 the YBA’s were big news. One of them was Michael Landy, who filled the former C&A building on Oxford Street in London with a Scalextric-like contraption, viewable from the inside and out. Everything Landy owned chugged along a conveyor belt like slow luggage at the airport and was systematically dismantled, separated into categories (such as clothing, kitchen, perishables) and divided into its constituent parts — glass, metal, paper and so on. Landy appointed himself site manager and supervised a team of boiler-suited operatives.
Last week, he revisited Break Down, discussing its’ outcomes and his impetus for creating it in a live streamed conversation with James Lingwood of ArtAngel, who commissioned the project, to commemorate its’ 20th anniversary.
Gaining success as an artist and self declared as being (for the first time) ‘materially ahead in life,’ Landy wrote an inventory of everything he owned, totalling more than 7000 items and had a growing desire to destroy them. He originally intended to make a static tableau of his shattered belongings then later, in a dialogue with Lingwood, decided instead to actively take the things to pieces in a public forum. Landy soon realised this was not just a spectacle but a participatory event where visitors were moved to share stories of their own possessions. He noted the objects that matter most to people were, predictably, not their cars and sofas but sentimental things like photographs; items of personal rather than monetary value. Friends of Landy whom he had not seen for years looked on as all the concrete signifiers of his being alive, right down to his birth certificate, passport and toothbrush, were deconstructed, giving the whole affair a spooky funereality.
Lingwood referred to Landy’s approach to the project as ‘dispassionate,’ (asked if he had any regrets he replied that he did not) and Landy described the 2 weeks of Break Down as a holiday, where he was absorbed in a rational, methodical, factory-line procedure. He did not want to engage emotionally and had to eject his own weeping mum from the building accordingly. I wonder if Break Down was an opportunity for Landy to have a so-called ‘proper’ job with a clear and quantifiable agenda, instead of the role of ‘artist,’ which (in my experience, anyway) can feel unhelpfully un-boundaried — the option to make anything can give rise to inertia. Break Down was an anti-process, one about unmaking rather than making, although Landy is attuned to the impossibility of separating destruction from creation.
Landy’s father was seriously injured in an industrial accident when he was 37 and Landy draws a connection between this life changing event and Break Down, which took place when he himself was the same age. After the accident, his dad assumed domestic responsibilities in the family home but ultimately became unable to do so; the uninvited, gradual deterioration of his body coincided with the decline of the domestic space. Conversely, Break Down was a decisive and controlled deterioration of the things Landy chose to surround himself with. His breakdown was a conscious choice.
Landy’s act of self erasure has an upside; the opportunity to start all over again, unencumbered by the inevitable detritus accumulated by a person going about everyday life in a consumerist society. The times I have chosen to shed my personal effects have been periods of sea-change; break ups, break outs, new beginnings where I wanted to rid myself of presents and letters and get a new haircut. Asked what happened to the leftovers when Break Down closed (they went to landfill), Landy says he was really only interested in the fortnight in which the installation was live, where a curious audience of shoppers and tourists were encouraged to consider their commodities, to question the necessity of all of their stuff.
All illustrations are © Lizzie Donegan 2021
