How Things Protect Us From the Void: Some Further Thoughts with Reference to the Work of Michael Landy

Exhibition leaflet produced by Artangel

 

 

I'm still distressed about the material disappearance of my childhood, which I wrote about here. 

 

Someone commented that the above post reveals me to be both superficial and sentimental and suggested that I abandon the world of things and learn to cultivate spiritual peace and happiness; "when you discover inner fulfilment, then you realise just how ridiculous it is to cry over spilt milk or lost teddy bears and school reports".   

Someone else, rather more sympathetic, wrote to remind me of the case of Michael Landy, the Young British Artist who, in February 2001, famously destroyed all of his possessions in a performance piece he entitled Break Down: 

 

"Perhaps, ultimately, we all need to find the courage to destabilise our lives and stand naked, as it were, in the middle of an emptiness or void, so as to feel ourselves 'on the verge of being drawn into its terrible depth'" [1]. 

 

Perhaps ...

 

However, it's interesting to recall when thinking back to the above work by Landy, that he couldn't resist cataloguing the thousands of items he had acquired during his lifetime, thereby essentially reducing them not to nothingness, but to information [2]. 

 

Thus, arguably, he didn't quite let go and stand naked etc. 

 

And, of course, it was his decision to destroy his things, whereas, in my case, I had no say or control over the destruction of those things close to my heart. And nor do I have a detailed inventory of all the toys, games, and other treasures that my mother binned and my sister took and gave to her own children (without my knowledge or consent). 

 

And so, whilst I do kind of admire Landy for gathering together all of his things - including his clothes, stamp collection, artworks, and car - and sytematically smashing, shredding, and pulverising the lot (with the help of several assistants) in a laborious two-week orgy of destruction [3], I don't draw any real solace from his work and still insist that we need things to ground us in being and stop us becoming ghosts. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] My correspondent is quoting Yoko Ogawa, writing in The Memory Police, trans. Stephen Snyder, (Vintage, 2020), p. 14.  

[2] The philosopher Byung-Chul Han would perhaps view this as anticipating precisely what is happening today in the digital age, when things vanish from the actual world only to circulate forever as Undinge in the virtual realm, not as memories, but as data. See his work Non-things, trans. Daniel Steuer, (Polity Press, 2022).

[3] This act of artistic potlatch took place at an empty store space on Oxford Street and attracted around 45,000 visitors. It produced nearly six tonnes of waste material, which was either recycled or sent to the rubbish dump. Nothing was exhibited or sold by Landy and he made no money directly from the event, although he did of course gain a huge amount of publicity and establish his name as an artist of note. 

      To watch a 16 minute video documenting the event, posted on YouTube by the London-based arts organisation Artangel, who - along with The Times newspaper - commissioned Break Down, click here.