Banksy and Landy: On artists and the market

Michael Landy, Saints Alive 2011-2013, Scaled Down 2018 © The Artist

The art market has been much in the news of late, thanks to a Banksy painting sold at Sotheby’s on 5 October. After an intense bidding battle, just after the hammer fell on Girl with a Balloon, at the price of £1,042,000, the painting began to self-destruct, shredding the canvas through a machine hidden in the frame. Films circulated with amused comments at the aghast faces of staff and audience watching the painting’s destruction, and speculation was soon rife as to how this had happened: had the artist, or the auction house, been in on it?

Banksy subsequently announced that this had been an intentional stunt on his part that had, in fact, not gone to plan, with the painting planned to become a pile of strips on the floor. He defended this action with a quote from Picasso: “The urge to destroy is also a creative urge”, but it was also clearly a statement on the art market, and all of the institutions of the mainstream artworld against which Banksy’s entire career has been a protest. 

Yet, the painting has promptly been re-titled Love is in the Bin, and the successful bidder has paid up, little surprise as the piece is now said to have doubled in value. Sotheby’s have also reconceptualised the whole event as a work ‘created live at auction’. These responses have not been Banksy’s, but I can’t help feeling cynical at what this ‘statement’ actually achieves for Banksy: huge press coverage and the doubling in value of his work.

To my mind, a much subtler commentary on the same themes, which also has significant impact on the artist’s legacy, has been made by Michael Landy in his recent show at Thomas Dane. Echoing his famous piece Break Down from 2001, where he destroyed every single one of his belongings in a performance in the old C&A building on Oxford Street, Landy has this time focused on destroying his recent artworks. In Scaled Down, he used industrial waste compaction to turn different periods of his work into differently-sized cubes. 

At Thomas Dane, these cubes were simply displayed in a diagonal grid on the gallery floor, from the tiny Acts of Kindness from his 2010 Art on the Underground commission at the front, to two weighty cubes at the back produced from parts of his National Gallery residency in 2011-2013 Saint Francis Lucky Dip and Spin the Saint Catherine Wheel and Win the Crown of Martyrdom. The gallery is filled with the eerie sound of the salesman’s voice emanating from the compacted shopping trolley of Closing Down Sale (1992-2018) shown most recently in this year’s RA Summer Show. 

Recognisable parts of the artworks are visible at the edges of the cubes and the papers are touchingly fragile in their new compacted forms. An accompanying catalogue carefully records every work that has been destroyed. Talking with the staff-member at the desk, I discovered that most works were photographed and documented before compaction, but there are no immediate plans for the cubes after the show closes. 

Landy therefore receives his own work back, made more vulnerable but with a new layer of meaning. He puts years of his own recent production back to zero, and thus makes a quiet but powerful statement on the relationship of artists, their works, their dealers, their publics, and their values.