Wednesday 11 September 2013

The Devil In All Of Us: Michael Landy’s Saints Alive

On a visit to the National Gallery, Garageland reviewer Bethany Pope notices a peculiar change befall the viewers of Michael Landy's self-flagellating saints.

Saints Alive by Michael Landy is an astonishing mixture of the new and the old. The theme is startlingly appropriate for an artist who made his first mark with a work centered around a saint-like rejection of material goods, his startling performance piece Breakdown (2001). Michael Landy gathered all of his belongings together, from furniture and books to birth certificate, piled them into a pyre, and set them alight – a visible rejection of the consumerist world. One could view this accessible National Gallery piece as a natural continuance of that theme.

Saint Apollonia, 2013