20 oktober 2014

Michael Landy









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In October 2013, Landy moved in to a new studio in trendy Shoreditch. Just around the corner from Spitalfields fruit and vegetable market, the building is one of a whole line that used to be used as warehouse storage space. “You could actually walk between all of the buildings,” Landy explains, “but, at some point, someone decided to turn them into homes.” When he and his partner, fellow artist Gillian Wearing, bought the space, they had it gutted and built on a new top floor in which they now live. Landy describes it as a “live-work space”, although the studio remains very much just that, and is separate from their private quarters.
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Landy’s studio is starkly empty, apart from a bookshelf, a desk, and a couple of tables with scale models of the museum in Mexico where his exhibition, Saints Alive, which was the culmination of his residency at London’s National Gallery last year, is soon to be restaged. Landy is extremely apologetic, almost ashamedly so, for the lack of typical artist’s mess. “I am an artist though!” he hastens to add, as if a messy studio were somehow a compulsory identifier.

Landy likes to visit other artists’ studios, in fact. “Seeing other artists’ studios interests me because it’s an insight into the way they work, and some of it is quite intuitive and spontaneous. They’re really messy, though,” he adds, quite matter of factly. Take, for example, Ian Davenport. “We went to college together and we used to live together. He’s a painter, so he used to have paint on him everywhere. He’d come in from the studio and he’d have got it in the car somehow and so it would transfer into the flat.” Then there’s Gary Hume, another YBA, who has his studio just up the road. “He’s another painter, so it’s much more hands on, making things, which obviously intrigues me, but I don’t do that myself. I’m sure they get some kind of satisfaction out of it, though. Maybe I should try!”

For Landy, the emptiness in his studio is, he suggests, symbolic of the emptiness in his head. At the moment, at least. “One minute it’s full of stuff and the next minute I’m wandering around thinking ‘What am I going to do next?’ And this is the moment you’ve found me in, the moment where I’m not sure what I’m doing. Hence the emptiness. It’s not fun being me at the moment, but if I think about it a lot, I panic.” His work goes through cycles. Currently he is looking back on old pieces he might rekindle. As well as Saints Alive in Mexico, he is also recreating Art Bin for the Yokohama Triennale and is hoping to stage an Acts of Kindness project in Athens.

“I always start with an empty space,” he explains. “I like that. It partly dates back to when I destroyed all of my worldly belongings. Once you do that, you become very aware of what you have in a space and what you don’t. Before, when I had studios, I just had junk and all sorts of stuff in there and I didn’t really think about it too much. But once I got rid of all of that, ever since, it’s always been like this, where I don’t really like having lots of things around me.”
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Landy’s studio is a very private space. He doesn’t have assistants either. “I once interviewed someone to be my assistant and then I thought ‘What am I going to do with them?’ Do you know what I mean? If they were here now, I’d be thinking ‘Oh my god’ and I think I’d actually end up working for them. I’d become their slaves.”
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Landy does try to visit his studio daily, largely enabled by living upstairs, but this is, admittedly, “only unless I can find something else to do!” He has no specific routine to speak of. “That’s the terrible thing, in a way, because then I have to create my own routine, I have to create myself, basically. Every day, when I come here, I have to think about what I’m going to do. And the worst bit, actually, is just sitting down and forcing myself to do it, because I get really distracted. But that’s it, isn’t it? It’s just me and it in the end and no one else cares. It’s always been a struggle. This is very typical for me. I go through cycles of being very productive and then not being very productive. That’s how it’s always been. And this is the worst bit, when you don’t quite know what you’re doing.
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Landy’s studio space really is more of an office space, a drawing board space, a space for birthing ideas. “It’s probably a place to go. I wouldn’t want to go to a coffee shop,” he admits. “I’m often sat there scribbling away about ideas, reading a bit, and writing things down.” Landy’s actual works are generally produced off site by artisans whom he commissions for their specific skills. “I don’t make things by hand, on the whole. My drawings I do, but not my sculptures. I normally have the idea first and then think about it a lot and find people to go and execute it. I’m quite happy on a kitchen table, most of the time. I don’t need a lot of space. I just have space, but I don’t actually need it. I think the studio is a millstone around my neck, really. It is a paradox.”

Given his destructive bent, and his lack of studio requirements, I wonder why Landy has never considered destroying his studio. “I never got as far as to destroy the studio itself,” he says, “because I never owned the studio.” Well, he does own it now, so who knows what might happen? It seems as though there’s no need to anticipate further destruction, however. “I always say to Gillian that we should rent it out.” I remind him that he has two spaces. Will he maybe let one go? “No, no. I’ll keep both. I like buying empty spaces. That’s what people are complaining about in London, aren’t they? That lots of foreigners are coming over and buying flats and just leaving them empty. And I’m just doing the same.” Not quite, Michael, not quite. Your studio spaces may be physically empty, but, like your head, they are, I am sure, full of ideas; ideas which we look forward to seeing come to fruition." (bron: ART.ZIP)

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