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. 

 

 

How Things Protect Us From the Void

Pupils at Bosworth Junior School (Harold Hill) c. 1972

 

Rather like Sebastian Horsley, I have always been happy to have my existence confirmed by official documentation: police files, medical reports, tax returns, etc. are, as he says, for many of us, our "only claim on immortality" [1].

So you can imagine my distress when I discovered that my mother and/or sister acting as self-appointed memory police had thrown away my school reports, neatly handwritten by my teachers in royal blue fountain pen ink at the end of each year and offering an assessment not only my academic ability (limited), but character (flawed) [2].  

 

It is, as I say, not simply that these things had sentimental value; they had also existential import and their disappearance from the world matters to me more even than the disappearance of the schools themselves or the disappearance of old school friends.

 

Of course, my mother and/or sister didn't simply dispose of my school reports; toys, games, letters, and assorted treasures from the past that had helped ground me in being, were all brutally shoved into bin bags. 

 

In the name of tidying up and making space, all traces of my childhood which I had lovingly sought to preserve, were casually eliminated; "replaced by an emptiness that would not be filled" [3] ...  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Sebastian Horsley, Dandy in the Underworld, (Sceptre, 2008), p. 102. 

[2] From memory, I can recall that the consensus seemed to be that whilst I was capable of producing good work, I was too easily distracted, too chatty, and too keen to amuse my fellow pupils by playing the class clown. No doubt they would simply stamp the letters ADHD on the reports were they written today.  

[3] Yoko Ogawa, The Memory Police, trans. Stephen Snyder, (Vintage, 2020), p. 14. 

 

 

For further remarks on this subject, with reference to the work of Michael Landy, click here.