He and Wolfgang Tillmans, who photographed ‘Break Down’, talk about consumerism, YBAs and what they’d tear up now
In 2001, artist Michael Landy gathered all 7,227 of his possessions — from paintings and love letters to his hifi and his car — in a former clothes shop on Oxford Street, London’s commercial heart, and set about destroying them. A team of assistants catalogued every item before taking them apart by hand or with scissors, razors, hammers and power tools. The nearly six tonnes of debris were sent to a landfill in Essex, just north of London, and Landy was left with only the blue boilersuit he wore during the two-week “Break Down” project. Wolfgang Tillmans, who in 2000 had become the first photographer to win the Turner Prize, documented “Break Down” and soon afterwards sent his 106 photos to Landy in a box, where they remained for 20 years. FT Weekend Magazine is publishing them here for the first time, ahead of a display at Thomas Dane Gallery in London, along with a new conversation between Landy, Tillmans and FT Weekend Magazine’s Josh Spero. Josh Spero: Michael, you and your team shredded books page by page; you cut shoes’ soles off; you removed every nail from chairs and every stitch from fabrics; you took the tape out of your cassettes and the wires out of your hifi; you weighed mugs and smashed them with a hammer; and then you disassembled your car and used heavy-duty tools to cut it into pieces. Tell us about how you came up with this idea. Michael Landy: I was at home in Tabard Street and I had just sold “Scrapheap Services” [1995], my fictitious cleaning company, to the Tate, and things had been a real struggle. Then suddenly I was ahead financially for the first time in my life and it popped into my head as I was at the kitchen table with a blank A4 piece of paper that I would destroy all my worldly belongings. Three years later, that’s what I did. Everything had been a struggle up until that point and suddenly I had a Richard James suit, I had a Saab 900 car, I had things, and then I started to think what that struggle was about and what did that all mean. Then I started to think about how I could go about destroying all my worldly belongings and I made about 17 drawings of different ways . . . You can give it away, you can do all sorts of things, but my choice was to destroy all my worldly belongings in front of people. Wolfgang Tillmans: It’s an ultimate self-effacing gesture and at the same time it puts all the focus on to you as a person. But I’m also intrigued — catching up on you talking about it and speaking about how you enjoyed being on that platform. I mean, you were like a performer. I remember, it was so enigmatic.
ML: Ultimately, there’s nothing to buy — I mean, [visitors] stole things — but it’s the experience. This is the experience of you watching this happen. That’s the main thing I was really interested in: what people came away with. As an artist, what you really want is for people to talk about it. It’s not in an art gallery, it’s in C&A on Oxford Street, where people go to consume things. People just wanted to know what motivated me to do it. I’d read a lot about consumerism beforehand so I was armed and primed to deal with that. JS: How did “Break Down” work? ML: We created these guidelines to break everything down, all my worldly possessions, into its material parts. It was very basic — metal, glass, ceramic. Obviously no one had done anything like this before, and we had 7,227 items to break down over a two-week period. Everything got inputted into this spreadsheet. All that being very methodical about it was very labour- and time-intensive. After about a week, James Lingwood from Artangel [the organisation funding the project] said: “We are going to have to speed up the process because we are well behind.” JS: Why did you want to take such care with the objects when disassembling? In theory, you could have just put everything in a trash compactor or even just thrown everything away.