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THE MAN WHO DESTROYED EVERYTHING
Wednesday 9 April 2003 11pm-midnight; rpt Thursday 17 April 11.30pm-12.30am |
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In February 2001, artist Michael Landy systematically destroyed everything he owned in the name of art. For his installation artwork, Breakdown, he spent a fortnight in the window of the old C&A shop in London's Oxford Street destroying all his worldly possessions.
The Man Who Destroyed Everything examines what inspired Michael Landy to take all his 7,000 possessions, arrange then into eight categories and annihilate them.
Printed on wall sized sheets, the inventory of Landy's possessions resembled a makeshift war memorial. The public measured their belongings against his as they questioned whether they could live without their photographs or their address book, their CDs or their credit card. It made people examine their values.
He'd touched a rare chord in a consumer dominated society. A graduate of Goldsmiths College of Art, in the early 1990s Michael Landy was even more acclaimed than Damien Hirst. But as he didn't make saleable art, galleries dropped him as soon as they realised that he had no commercial value.
How did he feel after the culmination of four years work with nothing left: no identification (passport, birth certificate, driving license were all destroyed) only an overdraft and his cat?
Filmed over several months, the film records the artist's 'rehabilitation' back into ordinary life: his struggle with consumerism, his first acquisitions, including a credit card and his shopping sprees in Oxford Street with his one-time dealer Karsten Schubert.
The Man Who Destroyed Everything is an intimate, sometimes comic, portrait of an idealistic, unpretentious artist struggling to evaluate the meaning of his life in commerce as he begins to understand the real meaning of his breakdown. As part of the Brit Art pack, many of whom have made fortunes from their work, does Michael Landy stand out as a brave warrior or is he just making a bid for fame?
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