Michael Landy: H.2.N.Y.

Following intensive studies of Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York, Michael Landy is able to realise a re-enactment of the auto destructive machine sculpture after a long period of conception and planning.

A graduate from Goldsmiths College and a key member of the Young British Artists (YBAs) generation that emerged in London in the 1990s and shaped artistic development with a simultaneously oppositional and entrepreneurial attitude, Michael Landy has garnered international recognition for his versatile practice, which explores notions of value, creation and destruction.

Jean Tinguely has been a guiding artistic figure for Landy ever since he saw the 1982 Tate exhibition of the Swiss sculptor as a 19-year-old student. Years later, Landy was to create kinetic sculptures such as the Credit card destroying machine (2010) or the Saints Alive (2012) at the National Gallery, London.

In 2001, Landy created a major installation Break Down, staged in a former C&A store on Oxford Street. There Landy, alongside a team of workers called Operatives, systematically destroyed his 7,227 worldly belongings including his SAAB 900, birth certificate and works of art. Each item was placed on a mechanical conveyor belt, dismantled and shredded, and after 14 days of this production line in reverse, the artist was left with nothing.

After Break Down Landy saw an image of Tinguely’s Homage to New York in Rosalind E Krauss’ Passages in Modern Sculpture. Reading about the 23-foot-long and 27-foot-high “self-constructing and self-destroying” sculpture-machine that self combusted over 27 minutes in the MoMA Sculpture Garden in front of a live audience on the evening of March 17, 1960, Landy began a long fascination with the work.

In 2006, Landy became intensely involved with Homage to New York, producing a series of drawings and paintings from photographs of the performance. He began to research a possible re-enactment of the action, re-constructed some parts of the machine-sculpture and researched by interviewing contemporary witnesses and making a documentary about the work.

Landy was denied a re-enactment at the time, as well as in 2016, when Museum Tinguely hosted a solo exhibition of his work, and only now, on the occasion of the Museum Tinguely’s 25th birthday, can this take place, in a completely different form, with dancers and a choreography developed by Michael Landy in collaboration with Tabea Martin.

The weekend of September 25–26, 2021 will mark the culmination of the silver jubilee activities of Museum Tinguely in Basel. Solitude Park, the museum itself and the MT AHOY! barge form the backdrop for the 25th anniversary party. Workshops, exhibitions, performances, DJ sets, concerts and varied culinary offerings are ready to be explored during the weekend. The programme presents a “Best of” the museum’s many different activities of the past years.

Tickets: Free admission
Reservation via buero@kaserne-basel.ch