THE ART BIN IS RUBBISH!

Michael Landy’s ’Breakdown’ (2001) was my favourite work of art made in Britain in the first ten years of the 21st century. Conversely, ”Art Bin” is already a strong contender for my most detested work of the 2010s.

’Breakdown’ had most of the qualities that matter in contemporary art today. It was personal and political – a gesture linked to a state of mind and to consumerism. It was real, and involved an element of masochism on the part of the artist. This is something I like – not because I am a voyeur or embittered critic - but because in today’s world of calculated commercially-orientated provocations, I am always looking out for the watermark of authenticity on a work of art. One of these watermarks is the suffering of the author. Also, ’Breakdown’ was original. It was performative. It was oh-so-familiar with the tropes of monumental post-war modernism: it relied on one simple repeated – serial – action that made you think, like most of the best art, about Richard Serra’s list of verbs. It had a great double entendre of a title.

 

Landy has a habit of popping up once every ten years with a great headline-grabbing work of art, that brings in a bit of the collective British psyche. In the 1990 he made ”Market”, an arrangement of the triangles and oblong boxes covered in fake plastic grass with which market traders build their fruti and veg stalls. These objects concisely satirised the recession by riffing on Donald Judd’s sculpture and the geometric linga franca of minimalism. Since ’Breakdown’, he’s been making low-key drawings of weeds and Wiener-esque text-based works, so it was about time he came up with another major public work.

But ’Art Bin’ isn’t it.  For the ’Art Bin’ Landy has invited members of the public and his famous artist mates to contribute bad works of art (ones which they have rejected as failures) to a ginormous container in the South London Gallery. Here they are being gathered together, later to be dumped in a landfill site. It has been given a euphoric reception by the world’s newspapers. Headlines have been endless – ”Scrapheap Challenge” ran the Guardian; ”Bin There, done that” said the Sydney Morning Herald. Journalists have enjoyed writing about the taboo of destruction which Landy is apparently breaking – one mustn’t destroy works of art, apparently.

But unlike ’Market’ and ’Breakdown’ ’Art Bin’ repulses me. There’s something about it that I find morally offensive.

I HATE THE ART BIN.

I WANT TO WRITE IT IN CAPITALS.

But why??

 

One problem with the work is its genealogy. In 1989, Kippenberger made his own art bin – a skip filled with the destroyed paintings he’d commissioned from an assistant, Merlin Carpenter. Kippenberger disliked the finished results, ripped them up and threw them in a skip, but not before photographing the works and then exhibiting those images around the skip. In 2003 Rob and Roberta Smith deployed another skip in ”Throw Away Art.”  Thomas Dane recently engaged me in conversation about the differences between Kippenberger’s and Landy’s art-trash receptacles. Kippenberger’s skip was about something completely different, he argued. Since he was destroying work he’d commissioned it was about an artist’s relationship to his assistant, or employer to employee. Since he’d preserved the work as photographs, it was about the capriciousness of destruction. Landy’s on the other hand was about the nobility of failure. It was the proverbial ’if at first you don’t succeed…”, in Landy’s words ”a monument to creative failure”. Perhaps Dane was right that I had been rather simplistic lumping bins and skips together – although way to much plagiarism is concealed today by a difference in detail or intention. The problem was that although Dane was right about Kippenberger’s work, he’s wrong about Landy’s.

Firstly, the ’Art Bin’ does not function as intended. It is meant to be a warm-hearted celebration of the hit-and-miss ordinariness of being an artist, and beyond that the disappointments that every individual faces – in Land’s words ’a monument to failure’. Artists are like the rest of us, it says, they don’t always get it right. They aren’t geniuses. They have bad days too, and some of their work, even from the famous ones, should go in the bin.

But the reception of the work operates within the very different emotional register of schadenfreude. The Art Bin has attracted articles and headlines in newspapers across the world and it’s not because of its  soul. There’s only two types of stories that tempt the media to cover art – one is about the price-tag, and the other is something that casts aspersions on art itself. The Art Bin is part of a long line of recent works of art, which attract headlines because a story can be told – ”reported” - that criticises, satirises and undermines the value of contemporary art. Some of the works that generate these popular media stories do it unintentionally – like Tracey Emin’s bed. Other examples deliberately mock the art experience themselves – Hirst’s diamond skull and Golden Calf, or Banksy’s recent interventions in the Bristol Museum. The venerable tradition goes back to Duchamp’s urinal via Piero Manzoni’s canned ’Merda d’Artista.’ So this is a work of art which pretends to be about empathy, but is in fact about contempt. The Times headline spelled it out: ”It’s official. Modern Art is Rubbish.”

 

In theory, that’s not quite a big enough reason to hate the art bin. An artist cannot be held entirely responsible for the misinterpretation of his work by the media. But there’s a bigger problem – Landy’s ambivalent view of the contents of his bin.

 I came to a deeper understanding of why one should detest the Art Bin, when I saw a report on the Culture Show about it . There was Andrew Graham Dixon asking Landy a number of questions in his toe-curlingly sycophantic ’sympathetic’ style. Landy took us on a visit to his mate Gary Hume, who welcomed us into his studio and then showed us a work of art he’d been trying to ’get right’ for many years. It consisted of a tower of plastic cups, each one spattered with different paint – the sort of artwork which Dieter Roth might have got away with once. It should have gone in the bin years ago – and was surely only kept alive by Hume’s vanity. Yet – and here was the epiphany for me - Landy expressed enormour gratitude for being given this work. In other words, Landy was not receiving this work of art as if it was rubbish, but as if it was something valuable which he would now destroy. He shouldn’t be thanking, Gary, I thought, he should have been asking him why he kept that piece of crap so long. Yet in a newspaper interview, Landy expressed a similar obsequious gratitude to Damien Hirst for giving him one of his works. Why? Hirst should be handing over everything he’s done in the last ten years. My third and last piece of evidence:  it turns out that some of the art submitted for destruction through the art-bin.co.uk Web site, comes from editions in which others works of art are for sale.  And they are submitted by the artists who made those editions.

 

So the Art Bin, far from being an exercise in the demythologisation of the artist or a tribute to the basic human virtues of self-effacement, is a giant self-congratulatory publicity stunt. This is not a monument to failure but a shrine of false modesty. Unknown artists are using it to try to get a bit of extra publicity. While the more established ones are pursing a more sophisticated PR strategy and taking he opportunity to build some coyness into their brand perception. Far from questioning the quality of art that is produced today, the ’Art Bin’ sanctions it, by offering the illusion that there is some kind of quality control. The fundamental crims of this work of art is that it is disingenuous.

 

MICHAEL LANDY - ART BIN

The Art Bin is Rubbish

by Ben Lewis

www.proof-magazine.com