How do you cope after a complete breakdown? Michael Landy should know. He,
after all, is the artist who seven years ago decided to demolish his life.
Taking over the Oxford Street premises of an old C&A store, he sorted
his 7,000-odd possessions into categories and placed them, piece by
dismantled piece, on to a conveyor belt which carried them to their final
destruction. They were pulverized and bagged up for burial in a landfill
site.
The performance was a closing-down spectacular. Everything had to go, from his
Saab to his socks, from the artworks of his Turner Prize-winning girlfriend
Gillian Wearing to his birth certificate.
“Imagine no possessions,” trilled John Lennon as he sat in his empty white
room. But you don't have to imagine much when you visit Landy's East End
studio. There may not be a big white piano, but apart from that it's pretty
much like the video: a solitary man amid a sea of empty space.
So what is Landy doing after his mid-life crisis? He has gone right back to
basics. He is drawing. I find him sitting at an easel with the artist Rachel
Whiteread, perched so close that their knees interlock. Landy stares like a
doctor preparing for some medical procedure. Whiteread locks her gaze ahead.
And in the silence you hear nothing but the scratch of an HB pencil on paper
as he follows the twine of her Medusa-locks with his lead. I peep closer.
The image glares back like a Gorgon head. Whiteread is so still that she
could almost have turned herself to stone.
Whiteread's is just one of several dozen portraits that Landy will be showing
at Thomas Dane Gallery in London next week. The rooms will be hung with row
after row of meticulous drawings, faces floating like disembodied bubbles,
every freckle, eyelash, and wrinkle recorded; every blemish, mole and
fissure obsessively rendered. Why?
Landy is diffident, quirky, evasive. He deflects awkward questions with jokes.
But he prefers to “fiddle at the edge of things”, he tells me. After Break
Down he felt an initial elation. But that was “the simple bit: the problems
came afterwards - and they were nothing to do with which brand of toothpaste
to buy. I had to work out how to reconstruct a whole life.”
“How does one go about making something after this huge full stop?” Landy
goggles as he imagines it, his eyes like a rabbit's in the headlights of a
juggernaut. “I didn't want to work at first because I didn't want to make
any more objects. I have gone through several moments like that in my
career. Sometimes I don't even know what to do with my time, and weeks and
months will go by and nothing will be done.”
Then, a few years ago, he started working on drawings of weeds. “I had done
this huge public performance in front of 50,000 people and now I just wanted
to simplify my practice. There is nothing simpler than drawing.” Not that he
was taught to do so at Goldsmith's College, where he first met Wearing, he
adds.
He chose weeds “because they were survivors, because they were symbols of
optimism and very resourceful” - or at least he thought they were
resourceful until he tried to nurture them in the studio, when he discovered
that they were as temperamental as any artist's model. Landy drew the frail
plants until his eyes began to lose focus and the tendons in his hand
tightened, curling his fingers into claws. They still haven't quite
recovered. After that, he says, he decided to draw himself. “I didn't know
what else to do with myself,” he explains. Then he began drawing his family.
In 2004 Landy had created SemiDetached for Tate Britain: a life-sized
facsimile of his family house with every detail, from the peeling paint to
the Blu-Tack on the door bell. It was his way of dealing with his feelings
about his father, a tunnel miner who in 1977 was buried alive, fracturing
his spine, in a work accident from which he never really recovered. Hours of
video footage recorded him sleeping, smoking, reading and taking his pills,
“but mainly sleeping,” Landy says. “I ask my mum how he is and she says:
‘Oh, he goes from the chair to the bed.' He's been doing that for 25 years.”
Making this piece helped Landy to come to terms with what happened, he says,
which may be why he continued his drawing project, now making his family his
subject; his sisters - “it's the first time I've really looked at my sisters
in years” - his nephews and nieces, his girlfriend Wearing, with whom he has
lived for 12 years. She bought him a pair of calipers to measure people's
faces and sometimes she will bring him lunch.
As if discovering his whole world anew, Landy began drawing friends and fellow
artists, dealers and more distant acquaintances, all uniformly treated. He
begins with the left eye and from there works outwards, literally drawing
people to him. The artist Ian Davenport and he were inseparable friends at
college, but this is the first time in 20 years that they have looked at
each properly. “I am gathering people in,” Landy says. “This isn't a casual
encounter. It's not like going for a drink. It's very intense. Uncomfortable
even. People can feel they have nowhere to hide. And I feel that too when I
sit in front of them.”
Some sitters - the printmaker Charles Booth-Clibborn, Charles Asprey, the
jeweller - sat so still, Landy says, “that I almost had to check for their
pulse. That probably says a lot about the English upper classes. Others
zoned out. Mark Hix [the chef] fell asleep and I had to hold his head up by
the peak of his baseball hat. Anya Gallaccio [the artist] talked full blast
or else went completely silent,” he recalls.
“Some people don't ever want to see their portrait, others check every few
minutes and [the gallerist] Karsten Schubert demanded a mirror to make sure
I was getting it right. Sometimes I don't. Sometimes I lose the face early
on and never regain it. I lost Richard Flood - but then he thought that I
looked like a bat. But in the end I often think that the drawing looks more
like the person than the person does.”
Drawing obsessively seven days a week has taken its toll on Landy. But you
have to work hard to build a life back up. As you step into this new show
you will see his reconstructed world. It is not like the one he destroyed:
an assemblage of possessions. It is a place constructed of people. It is
probably the therapy he needed.
Michael Landy, Thomas Dane Gallery, London SW1 (020-7925 2505;
www.thomasdane.com), Oct 13-Nov 15
IN THE PICTURE
The Turner prizewinner Rachel Whiteread on sitting for Michael Landy
Sitting for Michael is very like going to therapy. Years ago I did life
modelling. But it's not like that. I'm not lounging around at the far end of
the studio. And at first I found it very difficult, not just because the
light was too bright but because no one looks at me like that any more - not
my husband - we have two small children - he never looks at me any more!
But it has been nice sitting, too. Michael and I have known each other for
years; we were part of the old YBA group, though we are not Young British
Artists any more, as these drawings attest: we are more like old wrinkly
BAs. But actually we haven't seen each other that much for a long time.
We've been going over a lot of old ground and after Angus [Fairhurst] died
this has been a good way of getting back in touch.
It makes you look inward when someone else stares at you. You are under
scrutiny so you have to scrutinise yourself. At first I brought a notebook
along with me, thinking I could get on. But I couldn't. It made me panic.
I'm busy! Why did I promise to do this? I haven't sat and done nothing for
ages - as my backache proves. But then I don't feel as if I'm doing nothing.
I feel as if I'm working too.
It's a bit like meditation - especially trying to focus on Michael's face
while he's drawing. He turns into a Cyclops with one eye. But coming here is
fascinating too because I am coming into someone else's world. You don't
often get to go into someone else's studio - people get very private about
where they work. It's a great privilege. Even when it's as blank as this,
you learn something. Look at him, he has methodically got rid of everything
in his life while I have methodically collected stuff.
He had nothing? Really?
No home, not a crumb of bread available to him, not a single penny in the world?
Are you sure? Absolutely nothing?
Or, in weeks where people who lose a few million and might have to sell their yacht are moaning "I've got nothing now", you mean that kind of "nothing"??
Laura Roberts, London, UK