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| Vol. 2, Issue 09 September 2010 |
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Arts & Reviews |
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Feature |
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The Democracy of Trash
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| Nothing’s too good for Michael Landy’s art bin, a monument to creative failure |
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By EMILIA TERRACCIANO
Published : 1 March 2010 |
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© SOUTH LONDON GALLERY FOR THE CARAVAN |
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| For Art Bin, Michael Landy has converted the South London Gallery space into a 600 cubic metre rubbish bin.
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HE FIRST TIME I ARRIVED on the scene of the Art Bin, a huge, see-through Perspex and steel container at the South London Gallery, I spotted the artwork’s creator, Michael Landy. He was immaculately attired, wearing a black suit and white gloves. With the coolness of an auctioneer, he hastened to the top of the staircase to dispose of one of his own |
2008 pencil portraits—it took the five-metre drop and joined the other discarded art in the giant bin. Viewers witnessed the framed work smash to smithereens. Against the gallery wall, waiting to join the common grave, stood a three-metre-long glistening painting of a skull by Damien Hirst. As work after work was dropped inside the art bin, the public registered their barometric approval or disapproval with cheers or whistling.
| © EMILIA TERRACCIANO FOR THE CARAVAN |
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The sorting, destruction and decay of all artwork is always available for public scrutiny. |
“The meaning of trash would seem to lie in a surreal absurdity, but by taking it seriously, this very quality may come to illuminate the real absurdity of the situation in which it is produced,” wrote the Marxist art historian Julian Stallabrass in Gargantua: Manufactured Mass Culture, (1996). Today, as the UK attempts to scramble out of one of its worst-ever recessions (Britain has endured eight recessions since WWII), Michael Landy hopes to raise questions around the nature, value and overproduction of art in times of boom as well as bust—by trashing it.
For Art Bin, which opened on 29 January, Landy has converted the South London Gallery space into a 600 cubic metre rubbish bin for the disposal of unwanted works of art. For a period of six weeks, the performance/installation will give artists the opportunity to destroy their own creative failures and throw them into the bin. After the show closes on 14 March, the gallery will have all the objects permanently disposed of in a landfill.
A graduate of Goldsmiths, University of London, in the late 1980s, Landy was considered one of the most prominent young British artists of his generation. It was while studying at Goldsmiths that he showed his work in the Freeze (1988) exhibition organised by Damien Hirst and Carl Freedman. Landy’s first major solo outing was Market (1990), an installation made up of empty market stalls, intended to be a comment on consumerism. As he didn’t produce artworks that could be sold, most commercial galleries soon dropped him. | | | |
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