Michael Landy RA (born 1963) is one of the Young British Artists (YBAs). He is best known for the performance piece installation Break Down (2001), in which he destroyed all his possessions, and for the Art Bin project at the South London Gallery.
Break Down, the work which put him in the public eye, was held in February 2001 at an old branch of the clothes store C&A on Oxford Street in London (C&A had recently ceased trading, and the shop had been emptied). Landy gathered together all his possessions, ranging from postage stamps to his car, and including all his clothes and works of art by himself and others, painstakingly catalogued all 7,227 of them in detail, and then destroyed all in public. The process of destruction was done on something resembling an assembly line in a mass production factory, with ten workers reducing each item to its basic materials and then shredding them.
I find this idea very very interesting and very liberating as he technically threw away everything he owns to prove the point that WE DON'T NEED ANYTHING BUT OURSELVES.
Landy includes the imperfections of each specimen. The simple beauty of the etchings which dignify the most commonplace of plants also made these works appealing to collectors.
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