Editing Michael Landy (section)

==''Break Down''==

''[[Break Down (Landy artwork)|Break Down]]'', the work which put him in the public eye, was held in February 2001 at an old branch of the clothes store [[C&A]] on [[Oxford Street]] in London (C&A had recently ceased trading, and the shop had been emptied). Landy gathered together all his possessions, ranging from postage stamps to his [[automobile|car]], and including all his clothes and works of art by himself and others, painstakingly catalogued all 7,227 of them in detail, and then destroyed all in public. The process of destruction was done on something resembling an [[assembly line]] in a [[mass production]] factory, with ten workers reducing each item to its basic materials and then shredding them.

The exhibition was a joint commission from ''[[The Times]]'' newspaper and [[Artangel]], and attracted around 45,000 visitors. At the end of the process all that was left was bags of rubbish, none of which was sold or exhibited in any form. An edition of inventory books listing all destroyed items was available to buy when exiting through the gift shop.

Landy made no money as a direct result of ''Break Down'', and following it had no possessions at all.