Date: 12-05-1992
Owning Institution: Karsten Schubert Ltd
Publication: The Independent 1987 - 1999          
Subject:   20th Century  Now      

There's a recession on in the art world, just like everywhere else, although the way most commercial galleries act you'd never guess. Same old frosty debutantes barricaded behind their desks, giving you the cool once-over if you dare to step inside. You can almost hear what they're thinking, behind the distant stare: ''Timewaster. He's not here to buy. He couldn't afford it anyway. Look at what he's wearing, for God's sake.'' So while the rest of the nation's retail outlets are busting a gut to let the consumer know how desperate they are for sales, the art galleries continue to work on the principle that feigned indifference is good for business. And one by one, so quietly and genteelly that most people have probably not even noticed, they have begun to close.

It's a little bit like the 10 Green Bottles on Cork Street and thereabouts these days. The list of casualties grows by the week. Nicola Jacobs Gallery has gone, along with Fischer Fine Art and Maureen Paley; there's a sign in the window of what used to be Odette Gilbert Gallery and David Hockney's dealer, Kasmin, has let it be known that he won't be renewing the lease on his gallery in Cork Street. The mood inside those galler-ies that are still trading is one of quiet desperation, while the dealers seem to be waiting tensely for the last chapter in the story to unfold: no more pictures, hanging on the wall.

At least one London gallery is not taking it lying down. Full credit to Karsten Schubert Ltd for breaking that awkward silence. They have taken a leaf out of the less posh sort of retailer's book and put on what the day-glo banner hanging on the outside of their premises in Charlotte Street bills as a closing down sale. The plate glass window of the gallery has been covered with messages daubed in white paint which announce, variously, ''RECESSION SMASHER!'', ''EVERYTHING MUST GO'', ''SAVE pounds pounds pounds S'' and ''IS THAT ALL???'' The effect is, to say the least, unusual. If Arthur Daley were an art dealer, this is the sort of exhibition he would put on. It's a winner, Terry. This is the way forward in the art game. You've got to think European, my son: punters, they're all the same, they want bargains. Discount, Terry, discount.

Walking into the gallery, you actually can hear Arthur Daley, or someone very like him. While you in-spect the exhibits, a man's voice on a continuous loop tape recording delivers a relentless sales spiel: ''Yes, we're mad! No, we're not joking! We are saving you cash, we are saving you money, and all you need today is a big bag because you'll walk in here sad and we'll send you out smiling, bow-legged, knock- kneed and knackered with bargains!'' The bargains on offer are not, it has to be said, that enticing: several supermarket trolleys laden with the sort of stuff - old record players, split stuffed toys, dodgy brollies - that even Arthur Daley would think twice before taking on as stock.

The thought occurs here that Karsten Schubert, a dealer normally associated with particularly spare forms of abstract and conceptual art, might have lost his touch or worse; that he might be, so to speak, a few trolleys short of a supermarket. But, of course, it's all a gag. Karsten Schubert is not closing down (that's his story, anyway, and he's sticking to it). The sale is not a symptom of recession but a symbol of it. It is the work of Michael Landy, a young British artist much exercised by the relationship between art and selling, between the tactics of the artist and those of the advertiser.

Landy's only previous one-man show, which took place a year and a half ago in a disused warehouse in south-east London, was called Market. It consisted of 94 replicas of street traders' stalls made from Sunblest crates and steel frames draped with greengrocers' grass. The stalls were unladen, so you were left to contemplate the apparatus of display without the goods. Closing Down Sale is, pretty obviously, a coda to Market, or at least its sequel. Like most sequels, it is garish, over- produced, desperately colourful and generally over the top.

Landy's most striking characteristic, as an artist, is a combination of bare-faced cheek and intellectual detachment. He's a wide-boy version of Marcel Duchamp (the artist who, famously, once submitted a men's urinal to the Paris Salon) and like Duchamp he has the rare ability to dream up works of art that look simple but end up complicated. Closing Down Sale is, admittedly, the art exhibition as joke, but the joke has several punchlines.

His exhibition might be said to mock the artful cool of most modern art, and of most modern art galler-ies. It is, after all, a shameless image of the economic reality that a lot of artists and their dealers consider it impolite even to mention: namely that art is product, and most of those who work in the art world depend for their livelihoods on shifting it. Then again, it might satirise the speculative art collector: the collector who feigns interest in art but is only really interested in bargains, whose primary concern is resale value.

Closing Down Sale is certainly one in the eye for a certain kind of contemporary art purist - for the sort of person who regards the art gallery as a refuge from the constant visual hectoring of the street. Walking into this gallery you are screamed at from all directions, which has the odd effect of making the ubiquitous advertising imagery of the city outside seem restrained by comparison. Signs are plastered over all the walls and dangle from the ceiling, pleading with you in bargain basement vernacular: ''FACTORY PRICES CRASH'', ''CHEAP IS BEST'', ''COR WHAT A BARGAIN'', ''THE MOTHER OF ALL MONSTER RECESSION PRICE BATTLES''.

But the paraphernalia of low selling is also changed by the context. Placed here, in an art gallery, these slogans acquire a curious poignancy. They even, in a few instances, acquire eschatological overtones: ''CLOSING DOWN''; ''LAST DAYS''. If Landy's installation is read as an emblem of recession, it is also a reminder that the usual visual styles employed to capture the reality of economic downturn - grainy black-and-white actuality photographs of deserted shipyards, say - only tell one side of the story. The pre-vailing colours of recession are Landy's day-glo orange and pink and yellow. Hell, recessions are colourful. But they are colourful in the way that Otto Dix's paintings of 1920s Berlin were colourful. Landy seems fascinated by that moment when selling turns into begging.

You can also find the ghosts of many previous artists lurking in Landy's jungle of cheap signage and hand-me-down goods. The ghost of Duchamp, certainly, since a Landy trolley stuffed with junk is a Duchamp variety pack, so to speak, where you don't just get the single urinal or bottle-rack but a whole assortment of such found objects, denatured and made useless by their designation as art. There are also echoes of Kurt Schwitters' collages of urban detritus like bus tickets or matchbook covers; and even closer echoes, perhaps, of Claes Oldenburg's The Store of the early Pop Art period, in which the artist rented out a small retail concession in Manhattan and sold his work at rock-bottom prices. Yet where all those earlier artists found a sense of possibility, of new vistas opening up before them, in the territory between high and low culture, Landy seems considerably less optimistic.

To look at Landy's crazily laden trolleys is to see what may be modern art's most blatant image yet of twentieth-century manufacturing excesses: the Disneyland of consumer durables once celebrated by the Pop Artists has become an appalling limbo piled high with obsolete goods. Papa Smurf perches on a rusting wok balanced on a defunct washing-up bowl jammed against an ancient laminated wooden drinks cupboard. Closing Down Sale is a cornucopia of crud.

Previous artists to make work by collaging or assembling found objects usually distinguished what they did as art, rather than rubbish, through telling juxtaposition. But in Landy's work, it is as if all the old features of art - composition, a sense of human drama or moral intent - have been forced out of the work by the sheer mad quantity of defunct objects that exist in the world.

You could, of course, say that much the same experience could be had from a trip to your local rubbish tip. But to see all this in an art gallery, a place which carries certain expectations of order and measure, is to see it that much more clearly. And Landy's piece makes, perhaps, one last point by virtue of its placement. It offers a reminder that art itself has no divine right to survival, to any more attention and respect than any of the rest of the manufactured junk that clogs up the world. This is art that almost pleads for its own abolition (who, after all, is going to fork out pounds 1,200 for one of these trolleys piled with rubbish?), that wants to be remembered as a piece of temporary theatre rather than as a collection of treasurable objects. Maybe responsible artists should consider not making art any more, not contributing further to the world's vast stock of objects, unless they are damn sure of the worth of what they are doing. Landy's crazed, garish installation could be said, paradoxically, to be preaching the virtues of abstinence. This is art destined to endure in the mind rather than in physical space. There's only so much room in the world, after all.