Michael Landy is the Holy Fool of the YBA generation, a charismatic barefoot friar urging the contemporary art world to give up its gaudy riches and embrace Our Holy Lady of Poverty – a Saint Francis of Assisi, in short, for the age of Conceptual Art.
Like Francis, Landy speaks with a sweet and smiling face as he preaches his subversive messages. Like Francis, who in the early years of the thirteenth century invented both Performance Art and Installation Art –having himself publicly scourged and crowned with thorns at Passiontide, then creating the first Christmas crib “to bring home to the people of Greccio what the birth of Christ at Bethlehem was like” – Landy both performs his beliefs and embodies them in the structure of staged mises-en-scenes.
In the course of Breakdown, of 2001, a project enabled by the aptly named Artangel Trust, Landy systematically and publicly destroyed every single one of his possessions: his clothes, his car, relics and mementoes given to him by his parents, as well as precious works of art given to him by old friends such as Gary Hume. As the artist performed that destruction of his own material existence, using the ground floor of Selfridges department store as his theatre, he evoked memories of Christ among the traders in the temple – and, yet again, the example of St Francis, called “another Christ” by his followers, who had announced his sense of spiritual vocation by renouncing all material possessions.
Make any of these comparisons to Landy and he will instantly deny them. He is a nonbeliever, he says, an Anglican by upbringing. But that only adds another link to the chain of evangelical associations stirred by his work. Take Landy’s latest and current project, the magniciently idiosyncratic Art Bin at South...
