Saints Alive Michael Landy in the National Gallery
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NATG010_P0014EDml:Layout 1 22/4/13 17:00 Page 14 NATG010_P0015EDml:Layout 1 18/4/13 15:03 Page 15 SAINTS ALIVE MICHAEL LANDY IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY When Michael Landy was announced as the eighth Associate Artist at the National Gallery, it was seen by many as something of a surprise. Landy’s background, as one of the YBAs, or Young British Artists, who emerged in the late 1980s and who were considered as broadly Conceptual artists, made him seem a very unlikely candidate, not least by the artist himself. Indeed, when he was initially invited to the Gallery to discuss the idea, the first thing he said was: ‘Before we go any further, can I just make sure that you actually know who I am and that you know what I do?’ In 1988 Landy was one of the exhibitors in the now almost legendary Freeze exhibition that has since become seen as the moment when the YBAs arrived. Twenty-two years later, in March 2010, he took up residence in the National Gallery’s studio. Te result is this spectacular and startling exhibition, Saints Alive. Visitors are confronted with a group of large kinetic sculptures which they are expected to operate themselves, representing that most traditional of subjects, the Christian saints. Landy had been brought up in a traditional Catholic family of Irish descent, and when he saw the National Gallery’s myriad depictions of virgins and martyrs he was intrigued – and surprised – at his lack of familiarity with their stories. Jerome, for example, is one of the most frequently represented saints in the history of art and a hugely important figure in the early Church, but Landy was quite unaware of him. As Christianity loses its hold in an increasingly secular modern culture, so its stories are being forgotten outside of a small circle of art historians and theologians. Even those who still follow traditional religion seem to have lost touch with some of the core figures from its early history. When Landy was a student at Goldsmiths College, art and religion seemed to belong to two completely different worlds. But in the National Gallery’s collection, art and religion simply cannot be separated. WHY MICHAEL LANDY? All of Landy’s predecessors were figurative painters or sculptors, whose chosen mediums made direct connections with the Gallery’s collection, but the Gallery felt it was time to take a different approach. Te traditional definitions of art as understood at the end of the nineteenth century, which is when the Gallery’s collection meets its chronological end, no longer hold good. Since Dada in the early twentieth century and its successor, Conceptual art, a few decades later, the story of art has taken a widely divergent path. Audiences no longer necessarily expect art to be static. Film and video, installation and performance are now vital components of contemporary art. Consequently, the Gallery felt that it should MICHAEL LANDY IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY 15 NATG010_P0022EDml:Layout 1 18/4/13 15:06 Page 22 NATG010_P0014EDml:Layout 1 5/4/13 15:33 Page 23 FIG. 22 Dosso Dossi Lamentation over the Body of Christ, perhaps about 1510Ð20 Oil on wood, 36.5 × 30.5 cm The National Gallery, London Ten he alighted upon a fourth and final painting from which to work, Dosso Dossi’s Lamentation over the Body of Christ (fig. 22). Tis is a tiny painting, its composition tightly enclosed within its almost square format. He drew this work only once, but on a vastly increased scale (fig. 23). Dossi’s original painting is 36.5 cm high, but Landy’s drawing is nearly two metres high. He was drawn to this relatively obscure painting because of the very oddness of its appearance and he compares the grieving women, with their weirdly inflated arms, to the muscle- bound shot-putter Geoff Capes. He was also impressed at the concentrated passion of the painting that seems to result from Dosso’s anatomical distortions. As with the previous drawings, Landy did not transcribe the whole painting but just selected the figures. He had a reproduction made on a much larger scale than the original painting and copied it as accurately as he could, even including details of the craquelure – those cracks in the surface of the paint layer caused by the passage of time – as he wished to record evidence of the slow decay of the painting, as well as the subject of the Tree Marys grieving. FIG. 23 Lamentation over the Body of Christ Tese drawings were never intended for the exhibition that Landy was working (after Dosso Dossi), 2011 towards, but they were an important part of his residency as they gave him time Watercolour pencil on paper, 194 × 155 cm Duerckheim Collection to familiarise himself with his new surroundings. 22 MICHAEL LANDY: SAINTS ALIVE MICHAEL LANDY IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY 23 NATG010_P0032EDml:Layout 1 18/4/13 16:58 Page 32 NATG010_P0033EDml:Layout 1 18/4/13 15:14 Page 33 FIG. 30 Saint Catherine Wheel Dump, 2012 Photographic paper on card, 59.6 × 82.4 cm FIG. 31 Saint Catherine Wheels found dumped outside The National Gallery, 2012 Pencil on paper, 150.5 × 292.7 cm Using his drawings and collages as a guide (fig. 34, p. 35), Landy then worked with MDM, a company that specialises in manufacturing finished pieces for artists. He acquired the mechanical elements from various flea markets and junk sales. Ancient and battered prams were cannibalised for their wheels, other pieces of defunct machines were broken down, and any suitable-looking machinery that could be incorporated into the workings of the sculptures was salvaged and recycled. A NEW TAKE ON THE PAST A comparison between the appearance of Landy’s pristine studio during March 2010, when he moved in, and how it appeared towards the end of his residence some three years later, is telling. Landy’s studio habits are normally extremely ordered, with tidiness his priority and any extraneous clutter strictly banned. His own studio in east London is memorable for its white emptiness. Visitors look in vain for a chair. When he moved into the National Gallery’s studio, he initially wanted to replicate the feel of his ‘home’ studio and furnished it solely with one chair and a small table. However, as he began to develop his ideas he asked for more tables, and as he cut out the details of paintings that he needed for his collages he simply dropped the discarded sections onto the floor. Day by day, fragments of National Gallery paintings for which he had no further use accumulated, forming a carpet of cut-out scraps that took on an identity of its own (fig. 33, p. 34). Of course, they were not real fragments of real paintings, just reproductions, but the symbolism was clear: the creator of Break Down had arrived at the National Gallery and destroyed countless paintings, slicing through centuries’ worth of imagery with a sharp-edged scalpel. Reduced to fragments and abandoned on the floor, the paintings were then walked over by the artist and visitors to the studio alike. Tey became crumpled and creased, covered in dust and generally unwanted and unloved. Landy was literally trampling the past underfoot. However, some of these fragments, which were incorporated into the finished sculptures, now have a new life. Given that the National Gallery is itself a collection of fragments of broken-up paintings that have been rearranged to function as works of art, rather than being allowed to fulfil their original purpose as aids to religious contemplation, it might be thought that Landy’s apparently whimsical use of the old paintings is a critique of the culture of Old Master galleries. Similarly, it can be seen as having a direct connection with the young artist’s experience at the 1982 Tinguely exhibition at the Tate Gallery, where he first encountered the idea of audience participation. But the subject matter of the Christian saints is, of course, dark and violent. Murder, torment, mutilation and self-flagellation run through the history of the early church. And Landy, with his own fixation on the idea of destruction, is also keen to point out that many of the 32 MICHAEL LANDY: SAINTS ALIVE MICHAEL LANDY IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY 33 NATG010_P0041EDml:Layout 1 18/4/13 15:29 Page 44 NATG010_P0045EDml:Layout 1 22/4/13 13:12 Page 45 ML Yes, my saints do particularly dumb things – they beat their chests, they beat their heads, they stab with their fingers. My Saint Jerome is a headless kinetic sculpture that’s about three metres high (fig. 37). I was drawn to the idea of him beating his chest, so I took his arm from a Cosimo Tura painting, his chest from a painting by Ercole de’ Roberti and his legs and his robes from a Cima da Conegliano (see fig. 51, p. 64; figs 52 and 53, p. 67). But obviously I’m making two- dimensional things into three-dimensional sculptures. I’m having model makers recreate these body parts from the paintings and then we scale them up. Tey are made in clay and then cast in fibreglass and painted. Cima’s Saint Jerome rests on one leg, but if you literally tried to make that into a three-dimensional sculpture it would fall over, so you have to modify it. It looks OK from the front but when you walk round it, the proportions look completely wrong, so you have to alter that. I recreate the saints like Frankenstein's monster. I take an arm from one painting, a chest from somewhere else – all in different proportions.