The artist caused a sensation by shredding all his possessions – car, toothbrush, love letters, even his dad’s old sheepskin coat. Two decades on, does the former YBA have any regrets?
Twenty years and an epoch ago, Michael Landy destroyed his worldly goods, all 2,277 of them, in the just-closed flagship branch of C&A on Oxford Street in London. It was a wildly theatrical event. The mise en scène involved a snaking conveyor belt bearing tubs full of carefully catalogued objects, with a team of blue-boilersuit-clad “operatives” painstakingly disassembling each item, and the artist himself standing atop a high platform flinging items into great bins according to their material, prior to their long funereal journey to recycling or landfill.
In the centre of this tableau stood Landy’s red Saab 900, which gradually shrank as its doors, engine and electricals were removed. The whole thing took two weeks and his record collection was last to go: the team played Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart and David Bowie’s Breaking Glass over and over.
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