Crisis: This is your life
An interview with British artist Michael Landy on his first exhibition in Greece entitled “BREAKING NEWS — ATHENS.”
Michael Landy is one of the Young British Artists. He is best known for the performance piece installation Break Down (2001), in which he destroyed all his possessions, and for the Art Bin project at the South London Gallery. For “BREAKING NEWS — ATHENS,” he invites the Greek public to express what Athens means to them, by portraying the life of the city as seen by its inhabitants and visitors. The exhibition opens on Thursday 30 March, at the Diplarios School in Athens.
Full interview transcript:
The idea behind the exhibition
The exhibition is called “BREAKING NEWS — ATHENS” and it’s commissioned by NEON. I am asking the Greek public to send in stories about Athens, how they feel, whether they feel happy, sad, angry. I am just asking people to send in submissions, like visual submissions, whether it’s text or images onto our website. From that work, if they are accepted, we create drawings for them.
This is our drawing workshop. I have eight people making drawings like I’d made drawings and we began about five weeks ago when I talked to my assistants about how I wanted them to draw. I wanted them to draw like me, so when I looked at the drawing, the drawing had to look like how I would make the drawing. I have never worked with so many people, I normally make all the drawings myself. The whole idea is to ask the Greek public how they feel about living in this city at this moment and time and it’s to do with the present because obviously breaking news is about now, but also I’d like people to send in stories over the last twenty-thirty years, because I like to see how the past also informs the present.
I don’t understand obviously all the all the nuances, all the references that people send in, so my assistants tell me what they mean, the word play. We get quite a lot of graffiti people send in, because obviously there’s a lot of graffiti. I don’t necessarily use it all, but I am trying to create a story. I don’t know what the story is, because obviously the work is also in progress and it’s going to carry on until the end of June.
It’s about people’s everyday lives, so it could be that their love life is not going so well, I mean it could be anything. When I first arrived it was all about the Greek crisis and I am kind of over that now, because I want to kind of talk about other things, because I don’t want the exhibition just to be defined by that. That’s the beginning of the exhibition, but hopefully it doesn’t define the whole exhibition, but yeah, like I said you, coming from Britain, what we’re given, what we’re said is about the Greek crisis and we see images of people holding up placards and shouting and screaming, and it is kind of an ongoing situation now, it is in its sixth or seventh year now.
I am the filter, there isn’t any rules or there’s no terms and conditions as far as I am concerned, it’s party just what I like or what respond to. Less pictures of Athens, because it’s partly the medium, the medium doesn’t lend itself to just photographs of plant pots or rooftops. It’s partly just me seeing it and then my assistants tell me what the word play is, what it means, because without them I am to an extent a bit helpless, so I kind of have to rely on other people, I am looking basically for everybody’s, that’s what I hope, that is open for everybody. It’s open for everyone, it’s not just for people of the left. Well, that’s why I hope it is also people from the right wing and from the middle that also send in pictures, I don’t want it just to be from the left.
I have done an exhibition called “BREAKING NEWS” in London where I actually put on my exhibition in my own studio in London in the East End and I generated all the content. I found all the content and it was about a story, about my life over the last thirty years since leaving school. That’s what that was about.
It changes throughout the whole exhibition, so as we’re kind of making it, because people can also come in here and see people make the drawings, so this is also open to the public. We’ll also be pinning up the works in the space when the public are going around, so it’s on until early June. Also, if the works are submitted and they are accepted people get to keep the drawing. I am hoping of getting more once the exhibition opens and people can also see what it is as well, I think that it would also help people send in the submissions as well.
Blue and white because of your sea and your sky, because I have done a red and white one, so I thought that I change colors. Also it unifies all the content if it is just one or two colours, and yeah, because you have blue skies, because we don’t get that in England, we got grayness.
This is a former school and the interior is kind of dilapidated and I like the idea of things falling apart. I mean I don’t know about the actual school itself. So I don’t know exactly what the context is within this area.
This is the only time I am going to do something like this, where I am asking people to provide me, because artists don’t normally ask people to send them the content of the work, so this is like the one time, because I guess wanted to know what people really thought as opposed to just reading about it on a British newspaper. It is a collage, a collage of different thoughts and feelings of people, so yeah, that’s what I want, I don’t want just one story, I want lots of different stories.
The Greek crisis and signs of gentrification
I read a lot about the Greek crisis and, you know, that’s what the British media normally concentrates on. I partly want to know about that, but also beyond that, because that’s obviously what one reads about from Britain. I’d like to know more about Athens and Greece and so that’s what we are trying to do right now. So apart from hearing what politicians and the media have to say about it, I like to have a bridge, a kind of communication bridge between us and the Greek public.
Artists themselves always go to places that are cheap and they are the first people to go to places. Then gradually the places become gentrified and suddenly, you know, you have coffee shops, you have art galleries, and then you have all those kind of signs of gentrification and things change and the local people get kicked out. It’s a sign, isn’t it? I mean, I think when you call it a crisis, it’s a crisis that’s being, I don’t know if you can even call it a crisis anymore, because it’s been going on for six or seven years. I mean this is your life, isn’t it? I mean, I am just, you know, I am here for like three or four weeks, but I mean you are living it, so it’s beyond that, isn’t it? And I am sure you get sick of talking about it, but I guess it just affects your everyday lives.
Brexit and Grexit
We are leaving Europe anyway. We are on the way out, you can join us if you want, you could have the pound, you could come with us, you get a queen as well, we can make a deal. Well, yeah, Grexit, we had Brexit, so we got there before you. We have decided to leave, we are not getting kicked out. Well, I feel sad, because I voted to stay, so yeah, I feel sad it, I feel angry the more because it goes on. It happened about a year ago and we still talking about it now so, you know, for me it feels like a backward step for my country, because obviously at the moment everyone’s looking in on themselves, everything’s becoming much more introverted and people are scared of outsiders, foreigners, you know, that’s the world is going in a direction that I am not very happy about. We are here, and that’s part of what, hopefully, this exhibition will reveal as well, that’s what I hope.
“BREAKING NEWS”
News is always, I mean it’s 24-hour news, so it’s constant, but now we have fake news, I mean is in the news. It’s hard to know what to believe anymore of anything really, and I think that’s just how we digest the news now.
As a human being you are filtering that news as well, don’t you? You are taking bits of whatever, wherever you are coming from, aren’t you? So you are taking those bits and you are creating your own narrative as you will create your own story from that partly through your own personal experiences. And that’s you just taken the bits like I read the Guardian newspaper that comes from kind of left, middle-left kind of construct and that’s kind of where I derive all my information from.
I look how the market in a sense affects you as a human being, what value we give to things whether it’s to people or objects. So“BREAKING NEWS — ATHENS” it’s kind of a lot of different references to other things I have created before.
Some things are much more specific about how we create our lives through the market and what we have to offer as human beings and how we are also affected by the market and I guess what happens in Greece is much more extreme kind of version of that.
When I destroyed all my worthy belongings then I had absolutely nothing, there’s no other way around it really, so it’s hard to escape, because you end up coming through your letterbox. It’s inescapable, is like breathing in a sense, because over the last twenty — thirty years we have constructed our lives so much around it. I thought about a desert island so that’s all I could think of as a way to escape. I think is inescapable I am afraid.
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