THE CULTURE SHOW, BBC 2, Upcoming Film on Michael Landy

Garbage God

A large part of Michael Landy’s career is about garbage, which is rather interesting as our lives are consumed with so much of it on a daily basis. in addition to installations Landy makes phenomenal black and white drawings that are exquisite in their detail, with subtlety absent in other works. In New York the sanitation department had a resident artist who largely worked in a garbage dump, perhaps that’s something for Landy and London to look into.

In earlier work, Landy picked up garbage off the street (for Scrapheap) then threw all is own stuff away (Break Down), now he wants to dispose of your stuff. Not just any stuff but your art. And not just any of your art, but the art he deems acceptable for the giant Perspex vitrine that he is presently having fabricated for his upcoming exhibit at South London Gallery called Art Bin. It’s a goldfish bowl of junk. He calls it a “monument to creative failure”. I say the whole thing sounds like someone else’s work.

No doubt Damien Hirst’s fabricator, who built an incinerator featured in Landy’s Scrapheap installation (this was proudly alluded to in a Tate Modern release), will also have a hand in the ambitious clear garbage pail being built for this project. But I guess the fabricator has nothing but time now that his biggest client has gone painting. in Art Bin, Landy is using our art as stand-ins for spot painting studio assistants.

Rather than the notion of creative destruction, which seemed prominent in Break Down, where Landy destroyed his personal belongings to make art (and a point?), here we have destructive creation, where he makes art but only at the expense of art by others. Landy’s destruction of other’s labors in the creation of a media spectacle and readymade artwork seem a bit gratuitous. When US artist Beth Haggart destroyed all her belongings in 1995 prior to Landy’s installation, she just did it without a fanfare and then joined the Peace Corps.

There’s a fine line between success and failure, as you can see everywhere around you. But art is a slow burning process, and what looks like crap today, can be tomorrow’s gold spun from hay. I'm sure there are more than a few of my own things that are ready for the trash heap, things I’ve collected and even made, but I’d rather save that job for posterity, or for my kids when I croak.

Then there is the page full of legal disclaimers on the official web site to sign up for the right to throw your own art away. “Michael Landy or his representative will decide which works go into Art Bin.” I wonder what special training it entails to be his representative, to make such discernments. Sounds like getting into Studio 54 in 1978.

Apparently there is some unspoken, very subjective hierarchy of aesthetics involved in this monumental creative failure. Which is an apt name. Or was it monument to creative failure? If he doesn’t choose you does that mean you didn’t make the grade because your art was too good? Is it a success to fail to be chosen? Or if you are chosen does that mean you really suck as an artist; so though you made it to the South London Gallery, isn’t it really under false pretenses? Michael Landy has gone from the Picasso of trash to the God of garbage. It’s the ego as expressed through castoffs, first it was street trash, and then his own, now yours.

“Art Bin exists to promote art and not to denigrate it.” Promote whose art? Certainly not the artists suitably awful enough to have their art accepted in the dump. “It is in no way the intention of Michael Landy to comment on the quality of any work placed and/or disposed of in Art Bin.” But he said it was a monument to failure. Is that not a qualitative comment?

“I forego my moral rights to my work” by agreeing to have it considered for Art Bin. Can you do that by agreeing to bury your art in someone else’s artwork? Can you divorce yourself from your own moral rights to something? It’s a shame to think moral rights don’t transcend art like a soul from a body. In the end the art will be worm ridden amongst empty beer and tuna cans, a fate not suffered by the art alone.

In Scrapheap, Michael Landy picked up garbage off the street, fashioned it into dolls and incinerated it. Then he systematically threw away all of his own possessions in the name of art. Now he’s throwing away your stuff. What’s next? Is he going to clean out Tate Britain of art he feels superfluous or that takes up too much space? Or will he permanently move into a garbage can like Seseme Street’s Oscar the Grouch, who put it so concisely in his theme song: “I Love Trash”:

“Anything dirty or dingy or dusty
Anything ragged or rotten or rusty
I love trash.”