Social satire or an expression of the art-ist's terror of beingirrelevant and disposable? Andrew Graham-Dixon views Michael Landy's latest work
The picture on the television screen shows a young man donning a red nylon suit, red rubber gloves and a mask, while a mellifluous disembodied voice announces "Scrapheap Services - the cleaning company that cares because you don't". Further explanation unctuously follows: "A prosperous society depends on a mi-nority of people being discarded. . . Scrapheap Services consider it important that any people who are dis-carded are swiftly and efficiently cleared away. Why put up with unsightly people who are such a burden on your resources when you can turn to the Scrapheap Services people-control range of products?"
The mock-promotional video forms part of a mise-en-scene brought into being by the artist Michael Landy. Its theme would seem to be redundancy, although redundancy in what sense remains moot.
In a large, bright, white room (the Chisenhale Gallery, in East London, specially anaesthetised for the event) we encounter several identical mannequins wearing the red livery of the imaginary Scrapheap Services Inc. Each one is armed with park-keeper's litterspike, dustman's cart, shovel or broom, and frozen in a gesture of stiff and solemnly inexpressive waste disposal. The floor of the room being thus patrolled is littered with hundreds and hundreds of tiny figures, snipped out from beer can or burger-box. These shoals of diagrammatic men, crunchy underfoot, strewn like confetti or gathered thickly in drifts, are the objects of the mannequins' routine attentions. It is the destiny of these myriad homunculi, Landy's tableau makes clear, to be swept up, bagged and fed into The Vulture, a pillbox-red "purpose-built people shredder" that squats like a big malign insect to one side of the room.
Elements of socio-political satire may readily be...
