Press coverage

Evening Standard, 1 February 2001

The Daily Telegraph, 14 February 2001:
"Break Down brings to the surface of our consciousness something we instinctively repress – that we can do better things with our money, our lives, than to give storage space to cuddly toys, stereos, loo brushes, toiletries by Clinique, old pairs of Timberlands. But, of course, no one can escape from the consumer society. The ultimate irony of Break Down is that, as soon as it ends, Landy will have turned himself into the ideal consumer – a man who needs to be sold new underwear, pyjamas, shoes, toothbrush, hairbrush.

"And, because we are all consumers, whether we like it or not, we are what we own. We instinctively judge other people by the art on their walls, the clothes they choose to wear, the books they read, the CDs they listen to. Eliminate all this from your life and you commit a sort of suicide, an act of self-immolation

"Artists have been known to destroy their own work and even to kill themselves, but usually it is in a fit of despair or rage. Landy's art is quintessentially modern because it is so ruthlessly efficient, so mechanised. This work took him two years to organise. At first glance the scene inside C&A looks like a factory hard at work making things. Only up close do you see that a process of destruction is taking place which is as complex as the process of creation." (Richard Dorment)

Art in America, June 2001:
"The helpers worked in arenas circumscribed by a looping plinth-like conveyor belt, installed under the previous tenant's illuminated Please Pay Here sign. In one bay, an expert mechanic systematically dismantled Landy's Saab 900. A multitude of yellow plastic trays made their way around the rhythmically curved blue track every 10 minutes, displaying objects either before or after they had met their un-makers. Occasionally, records and CDs were given a temporary reprieve when a worker would play one on a remaining sound system. By the last day, the mechanical shutters and clangs of the machinery provided the sole audio component. During my visit early in the run, I saw a cricket bat that had been transformed into an appealing collection of red plastic granules and a pair of Levi's, abridged to a fluffy, gray-blue mound.

"Break Down, Landy's strongest work to date, embodied more than a social commentary on shopping. His gesture of publicly stripping himself of his worldly goods had a spiritual dimension. He behaved as a shaman might, enacting a purge for communal ends. Contradictorily theatrical and meditative, emotional and orderly, Break Down seemed a tacit homage to Shiva the paradoxical Hindu god who was an ascetic and sensualist, a destroyer and restorer. Nothing associated with Landy's affecting work was for sale, save a modest catalogue with the doleful database of what no longer existed." (Judith E. Stein)

The Guardian, 15 February 2001:
"The cliché of the starving artist is one of the many ideas that Landy has tossed into the air by publicly destroying everything he owns. This destruction is taking place in Oxford Street at what was, until recently, C&A (not, as I initially misread on the invite, the ICA). In this failed temple of capitalism he is feeding his clothes, furniture, love letters, car, artwork, passport, etc, into an industrial granulator. Since the artist is present but not naked, one must question the purity of his endeavour, but I found it most enlivening.

"It certainly engenders a good debate in the pub afterwards. One mover in the art world told me: 'We've just seen the death of British art.' Another person mentioned sadhus in India, who give up everything and go begging. It was pointed out that the integrity of the work was undermined by being sponsored by the Times (proprietor: R Murdoch). A radical woman in experimental tights said Landy ought, technically, to kill himself at the end of the event.

"I came to the conclusion that I must have a bit of a clear-out myself – I've got a biography of Van Gogh and some Guardian columns I'm keen to get shot of." (Arthur Smith: click here for full article)

Church News-Sheet (Thurgarton with Hoverington and Bleasby with Malloughton), March 2001:
"I managed to speak briefly with Michael and asked him what it felt like... to say goodbye to everything. He said that it was sad in one way, but joyful and liberating in another. The purpose of his experiment wasn't so much a moral one (his critics might protest: Why not give his possessions away to charity?), more a statement about consumerism. Porsche used to advertise their product by saying 'You are what you drive'! But Michael's statement was that all consumerism shapes who we are are. Take it away and what's left?

"...One of the statements in the Funeral Service, and which isn't morbid so much as declaring a fundamental truth is that which says 'We brought nothing into the world, we take nothing out. Blessed be the Name of the Lord'. I love the naked reality of that statement. God does not look upon us by the possessions we own or lose. He doesn't measure us by whether we are captains of industry or in lowly circumstances. He doesn't look at the size of our house or how well we tend our gardens. Nor does he look upon our worldly success or lack of it. He looks pure and simply at one thing: our HEART!

"Michael Landy's spectacle had other ends in mind than to preach a sermon, or to moralise. But what he did last month was something most of us – even with our attempts to have a spring clearout – would find it well nigh impossible to imitate."
(Rev Andrew de Berry)

The Sunday Times, 11 March 2001:
"Break Down was a real event, the first Brit Art gesture I have seen that transcended the new-establishment, new-elite, bad-boy banalities of Landy's contemporaries. He's a thinker, and a tough-minded one at that. Is it art? I don't know, but for once, thanks to the carefully reasoned rigour and impersonality of the project, I think so." (Bryan Appleyard)