SAINTSALIVE MICHAEL LANDY IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY

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M I C H A E L L A N DY I N T H E N AT I O N A L G A L L E R Y 1 5

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

SA INTS AL IVE

M I C H A E L L A N D Y I N T H E N AT I O N A L G A L L E R Y


22 M I C H A E L L A N DY: S A I N T S A L I V E

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.

Tese drawings were never intended for the exhibition that Landy was working

towards, but they were an important part of his residency as they gave him time

to familiarise himself with his new surroundings.

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

FIG. 23

Lamentation over the Body of Christ

(after Dosso Dossi), 2011

Watercolour pencil on paper, 194 × 155 cm

Duerckheim Collection







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

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


4 4 M I C H A E L L A N DY: S A I N T S A L I V E

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. And then

with the help of Tinguely, with the wheels and the motors, I make them into a

kind of kinetic Renaissance sculpture.

RC Tinguely was crazily kinetic. He made these things which cranked into

motion, but they were very dysfunctional, defiant and disturbing. His big

retrospective exhibition at the Tate in 1982 was something of an epiphany for you,

wasn’t it?

ML It was, yes, because I was studying textiles at the time. I liked ready-made

pattern, like industrial pattern and found objects, but I didn’t like fabric. When I

saw the Tinguely exhibition at the Tate, I’d never seen people smile and look

happy in an art gallery before. You could ride the sculptures, and you could

activate them by pressing your foot on a pedal and they would do a pogo. Tey

were made out of junk, and the way Tinguely made things was so ugly that I was

kind of intrigued. It was like a welder making art, not an artist making art.

Sometimes his sculptures didn’t actually do anything because they were so badly

made they wouldn’t work at all! He was quite brutal. I became obsessed with a

work he made called Homage To New York, a 23 × 27 foot kinetic sculpture made

out of junk that he’d painted white. It lasted for 27 minutes on 17 March 1960. And

he put this sculpture in the grounds of the Museum of Modern Art along with all

the other bronze sculptures, and it was one of the first ‘happening’ artworks. I

really liked it because it was made from junk and it ended up back in a New Jersey

junkyard. I also like ephemeral things that exist for a short amount of time and

then disappear and get mythologised. I made lots of drawings about this piece,

and really wanted to recreate it because I like the idea of making something only

for it to destroy itself all over again. But I couldn’t get copyright clearance.


FIG. 37

Saint Jerome, 2012

Mixed media, 310 × 245 × 106 cm

Duerckheim Collection M I C H A E L L A N DY I N C O N V E R S AT I O N W I T H R I C H A R D C O R K 4 5



FIG. 55

Carlo Crivelli

Saint Lucy, about 1476

Tempera on lime, 91 × 26.5 cm


FIG. 56

Carlo Crivelli

Saint Michael, about 1476

Tempera on poplar, 90.5 × 26.5 cm


FIG. 57

Carlo Crivelli

Saint Peter Martyr, about 1476

Tempera on poplar, 90.5 × 26.5 cm



S A I N T S R E C YC L E D 7 1

S A I N T L U C Y

( D I E D 3 0 4 O R 3 1 0 )

Lucy was the daughter of a noble family of Syracuse, Sicily. As a young woman, she accompanied

her ailing mother to the tomb of Saint Agatha, to whom they prayed for a cure. While there, Lucy

dreamed that Agatha greeted her as a sister who, like herself, was a virgin consecrated to God.

Agatha told Lucy that she could heal her mother herself, and in thanks for her cure Lucy’s mother

agreed to distribute all their worldly possessions, including her daughter’s dowry, to the poor.

Infuriated, Lucy’s betrothed accused her of being a Christian and acting contrary to the laws of

the emperors. She was arrested by the consul who threatened to take her to a brothel, but was

found miraculously unmovable. Her throat was cut with a dagger and yet she continued to speak,

dying only after priests administered the final rites. Te Golden Legend makes no mention of

Lucy’s best known attributes, her eyes, but the Acts of Lucy recount that she impatiently plucked

them out and sent them to her lover because he would not cease from praising their beauty. Her

eyes were then miraculously restored.

Lucy is most often represented as a beautiful young woman either standing alone or in the

company of other saints, holding an oil lamp (in reference to her name which derives from the

Latin word lux or light) or a pair of eyes (on occasion multiple sets of eyes) on a dish (see fig. 55),

or sprouting, flowerlike, from a stalk. In early Renaissance paintings, she is sometimes shown

visiting the shrine of Agatha with her mother. She often holds a martyr’s palm and may also have

a dagger either in her hands or protruding from her neck. Alternatively, only her neck wound is

represented in reference to her martyrdom. Because of the miraculous regrowth of her eyes, Lucy

is invoked against eye disease and is patron saint of the blind.

S A I N T M I C H A E L T H E A R C H A N G E L

Archangel Michael is described as one of the ‘chief princes’ of the army of good angels and as the

special protector of Israel in the Old Testament. He was adopted by Christianity as a saint, and

appears in the Book of Revelation as the leader of the army of God in the combat against the devil

(sometimes described as a serpent or dragon) and the rebel angels. Te Golden Legend indicates

that the archangel will call the dead to rise on the Day of Judgement, and in the Testament of

Abraham Michael is described as a powerful intercessor who can rescue souls from hell. Te cult

of Archangel Michael appears to have begun in the East, where he was invoked for the care of the

sick. His purported appearance on Mount Gargano in Italy in the late fifth century helped spread

his cult to the West.


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SAINTSALIVE MICHAEL LANDY IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY