Michael Landy: Saints Alive, National Gallery - exhibition review

London has many dedicated homes for the grotesqueries of contemporary art — why then should Michael Landy’s clattering sculptures take up space at our National Gallery?
Michael Landy, courtesy of the Thomas Dane Gallery, London/Photo:The National Gallery London
13 June 2013

With five million visitors a year the National Gallery is very rarely a place of aesthetic or intellectual contemplation, and there are days when it is as thronged and turbulent as a railway terminus, echoing with clamour. I rejoice that so many now crowd to see masterpieces by great painters, but deeply regret — as must those who run the gallery — that the chatter and clatter of the visitors themselves inevitably reduces the quality of the experience. Such circumstances are now, however, and for almost the rest of the year, worsened by its authorities themselves, for their latest exhibition in the heart of the old building is one that involves the whir and clank of machinery and the strike of stone and metal on hollow torsos of stout fibreglass.

The exhibition is called Saints Alive. They are not. Nor are they dead. They are some half-dozen simple electric machines embellished with superfluous conrods, wheels and pulleys that add decorative (and fraudulent) complexity, combined with what are best described as waxwork body parts (in fibreglass), to re-enact the self-torment and martyrdom of saints and other episodes from the Golden Legend and the Bible, so often the subjects of paintings in the gallery. Press a button and a butcher’s cleaver strikes the head of St Peter Martyr (a tiresome Dominican inquisitor), St Jerome beats his breast with a stone to banish sexual fantasies, and the finger of St Thomas, seeking proof of the Resurrection, pokes Christ’s ribs; St Catherine’s wheel the visitor must turn by hand. All these are by the gallery’s current artist in residence, Michael Landy, and they are therefore works of art.

Landy, born in 1963, is 50. Trained — if that is the word for it — at Goldsmiths College, 1985-88, not once in his three years there did he pick up a pencil and draw, and as the past was irrelevant in the culture and teaching of the college, the National Gallery was of no interest to him. With Hirst, Hume, Collishaw and Sarah Lucas he was among the founders of the YBAs. As a graduate his work was entirely in installation — a market hall empty of produce and stallholders, a closing-down sale of which only the detritus remained, an imaginary cleaning service (bought by the Tate), the public destruction of all his possessions (even his car) over 14 days, and the reconstruction in Tate Britain of the house in which he spent his childhood, his most notable achievements. For all these he was elected a Royal Academician in 2008, and two years later rewarded by the National Gallery with the post of artist in residence. Why? Because, as the writer of the exhibition catalogue informs us, “The traditional definitions of art … no longer hold good.” Is this really so?

I am uncertain of these traditional definitions. Most of us know from informed instinct what is art and what is not, and have not needed to define it — indeed, most attempted definitions have seemed inadequate and silly. Looking back in awe to ancient Greece we recognise that it existed there and then, and the sculptors of Great Alexander’s day might well look in equal awe at the passionate realism of Rodin, but to deny that in the mid-20th century there was a break between the past and present, and that that break has since become unbridgeable, is blind and foolish. There are still working painters and sculptors who cling to the ancestral traditions, but they are denied the state patronage that is now the key to visibility; these are they whom the National Gallery might reasonably foster, but instead the gallery prefers to become an outstation of the Tates.

The Tates and the Arts and British Councils pour public money into the work of the pampered few, Landy one of their number — he has no need of the publicity offered him by the National Gallery. If his presence there was planned to attract a younger audience, then the authorities should look again at those who flood through the doors — they are young, and if many of them have not the slightest notion of how to look at pictures, diverting them with Landy’s lunatic contraptions will not solve the problem, for these are far better suited to the far end of Brighton Pier than to Trafalgar Square. The catalogue unwittingly touches on the problem in that it includes brief lives of the saints without which many visitors will be none the wiser. It is a matter of education.

In the later 20th century educationalists destroyed our cultural background, denied children the Old and New Testaments that over so many generations framed our laws, politics and social attitudes, abandoned the Greek and Roman heritage that informed our drama, literature and music, and discarded history. Of all these the visual arts are a reflection, but without some knowledge of such sources we cannot even recognise the subjects or share the empathy of the artists so passionately involved in their depiction.

Landy does not solve the problem — which is how to tell the essential story. He offers noisy machines that will undoubtedly amuse, much as Madame Tussauds’ Chamber of Horrors once did. He offers macabre collages of deconstructed coloured reproductions, in common with ten thousand amateurs who cannot paint and the Victorian screen-makers who anticipated the technique, but the effect is more Monty Python than Michelangelo; and he offers large drawings of a kind not uncommon among lunatics and, particularly, autistic boys. No one, as a consequence of seeing these piecemeal reconstructions of a past deliberately shattered and misunderstood, will be the wiser when, elsewhere in the gallery, he contemplates the spiritual quality of Velázquez’s Christ after the Flagellation, or the lust and greed that brought about the calamity of Rubens’ Samson and Delilah. The gallery would have done better had it commissioned a vade mecum of subjects biblical and legendary illustrated by its paintings.

This is an exhibition that should not have happened and the hapless Landy should not have been persuaded against his honest initial scepticism — “Before we go any further,” he said when interviewed by the panjandrums of the gallery, “can I just make sure that … you know what I do?”

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