"Downsizing", "purging", "editing" are all buzzword cures for getting rid of material excess. These practices are often central to the ethos of advocates of the simple life and minimalists, variously conceived along a spectrum from those who do a regular spring-clean to those who opt for a scorched-earth destruction of everything they own. The performance of British artist Michael Landy falls at the latter end of the spectrum. He, quite literally, made a radical break with all he owned.
Landy's purge was not in the pursuit of a simpler, less materialistic life for himself. It was for art. He called his 2001 art performance Break Down an "examination of consumerism". It entailed first cataloguing the 7227 objects he owned, then destroying them. He fed them along a conveyor belt, where workers specifically employed for the task smashed, cut up, shredded and in other ways pulled apart every object. From Landy's own art to a Savile Row jacket, from his father's coat to personal notebooks and letters, everything was pulped. Break Down was a brutal separation of an owner from his things in the most transparent and visceral of ways. There was no concealing what was being done. No slow drip-feed of unwanted clothes to the op shop. No passing on of toys to younger relatives. Nothing but patient, methodical destruction. The image that remains in my mind from watching the performance on YouTube is of stuffing being pulled from a teddy bear.
Landy saw his project as a questioning of…