Michael Landy

Interview by Michael Archer

from Audio Arts Volume 12, Number 1, 1992

Transcript

This interview was conducted during ‘Closing Down Sale’, Michael Landy’s one-person, recession-inspired show at the Karsten Schubert Gallery, London.

Performance/Installation: Now step inside, ladies and gentlemen. Have a look round, please. All you need here today is a great big bag, just a great big bag and not a lot of money. So, step inside and have a look round, please. ’Cause you’re walking in sad, take you out smiling, bow-legged, knock-kneed and knackered with bargains. That’s how cheap we are here today. Yes, we’re mad. No, we’re not joking. So come inside and do yourself a favour. We’re so cheap here today, ladies and gentlemen. We are saving you pounds. We are saving you money. It doesn’t take a lot of working out. Don’t walk by, ladies and gentlemen. Just come inside. Have a look around, please. Bear in mind you’re under no obligation to buy. No obligation to spend money here today. But bear in mind they’re cheap and convenient for you to buy. I expect everybody out here to have a bargain today. But come inside, ladies and gentlemen. Have a look round, please, so cheap here today. Save a few pounds. Saving you money. That’s what it’s all about, ladies and gentlemen. So come inside. Have a look around, please. Crazy, crazy crazy...

Michael Archer: The gallery is crammed full of supermarket trolleys that themselves are crammed full of an extraordinary variety of objects, and these are festooned with the kind of tags written in felt pen on day-glo card that you see in clearance sales. On the gallery windows in whitewash are slogans exhorting people to come in, yet there’s actually nothing for sale. What sort of bargain is it you think people are getting?

ML: Well, there isn’t one. It’s a false sale, though people sift through the stuff and ask, how much for this? But the rubbish is just to fill the trolleys, as I see it.

MA: You mean, people actually think that it is a sale?

ML: Yeah, strangely enough, even though none of the stuff works. All of it’s stuff that people have thrown out: teddy bears reeking of cat’s piss...

MA: This show seems to be a continuation of things you’ve done before, such as your works with bread crates and costermonger’s barrows.

ML: I started work on this about three months ago. The slogans are slogans that I’ve seen in shop-front windows. The more over-the-top ones I’ve made up myself. It reached a stage that they could be, 'Mother of all crazy kamikaze monster price-slasher sales'. I had to draw a line somewhere; it was going completely into the ridiculous. I did want to work with shopping trolleys, because you see vagabonds and tramps just wheeling them around just like mobile homes. This work occurred to me about a year ago, even though I hadn’t done anything about it up until Christmas. And then I started with a friend of mine. The first idea was to go out on to the streets with a trolley and collect rubbish. But it was quite a nerve-wracking experience going through the streets and it was a bit haphazard as well, the sort of stuff you find. We had to drink quite a lot of lager. The work took a year to appear, but once I knew what I wanted to do, it came about really quickly, in a three-month period. I’m not sure how I place that in terms of the market show. I mean, maybe this is an end of something, or a beginning; or just a continuation.

MA: The first work of yours that I saw was plastic tarpaulin covers which were swagged up onto the walls with very large crocodile clips. Your show at Building One was in a very large old factory space which was completely filled with different configurations of simple market-stall constructions covered with fake grass or stacked up along the walls.

ML: I needed somewhere that could be believable as a real market, on the scale of a real market.

MA: And you made some videos, which were fixed-camera shots of different shop-owners setting out their stalls in the morning.

ML: Yeah, I suppose how I got involved in it in the first place was just the shapes and forms people would come up with in putting a market stall out.

MA: Is this work a comment on the way that the art world operates?

ML: Not really. I don’t care that much. I think it’s a more general thing than just the art world. It’s the world that I live in and the art world is only part of that. I imagine it’s just as susceptible as any other sort of business.

MA: People who approach your work from other countries look at it in terms of the kind of commodity-appropriation work from New York of the mid-1980s. Now, it seems to me that it’s specifically to do with this environment here in London: the costermonger barrows are very East End and southeast London sights. And it’s that cultural context that is important to seeing any kind of meaning in the work.

ML: Yeah, I would agree with that. I don’t feel any empathy with that sort of artist, somehow.

MA: Are there artists with whom you do feel an empathy?

ML: I can’t think of any at the moment.

MA: Nevertheless, you have been identified as part of a fairly active and reasonably coherent group of artists in London who are working in the same sorts of environments and who are constantly meeting and discussing things in general. Has being part of that sort of sub-culture been an important factor for you?

ML: I suppose you’re talking about some sort of support system. It probably was, at the start, but as things go on, differences between people become illuminated. It was a help in leaving college because so many people just sort of drop out or go off to do other things. I suppose it worked at that point. And I suppose there was some sort of encouragement, as well. But I feel that less and less now. Getting back to your original question, they are incredibly localised things, especially the first set of stalls that I made. To most people they were just like minimal sculptures. They had no sense of being what they were.

MA: But it’s surely important that you can read them as minimal sculptures as well?

ML: Yeah.

MA: Are they a group of separate discrete sculptural objects or one installation?

ML: They’re all separate pieces of work but at the same time they’re one whole piece of work

MA: Would that apply in this installation, too? An element like the tape playing in the background of you in a cut-price stall on Oxford Street, is that a separate work in itself or is that something that you’ve done to provide an ambience for the display of all of these trolleys?

ML: The recording came first. It’s definitely part of this work.

MA: And you say that people do actually come in and say they want to buy something. Is that something that you just accept as inevitable if you make something that successfully suggests the ambience of selling bargain objects? Or are you consciously trying to get those kinds of people in? Because that’s a different constituency from people who would come to this gallery because they knew that there was a Michael Landy show on.

ML: I wasn’t really quite sure what sort of people would come in. But they seem to be bargain-hunters. I was quite interested in Karsten's because it has that big front glass window and it used to be a shoe shop or something, so it was like completely taking it over and transforming it. I quite like the idea of people walking by actually thinking that the art gallery has closed down and some people moved in selling rubbish.

MA: Is there some element of you wanting to take this stuff which has been discarded as entirely useless and investing it with some other status by saying now it’s part of the work of art in an art gallery?

ML: In the end I wanted to make it as ridiculous as it possibly could be and as over the top as it possibly could be. I think I’ve managed.

MA: Certainly over the top, yes, there’s no doubt about that.