The exhibition ‘Joyous Machines’ at the Tate Liverpool focused on the connection between the work of Jean Tinguely (1925-1991), and British artist Michael Landy, who has been significantly influenced by Tinguely and his constructive and destructive tendencies.
Tinguely is perhaps most famous for the ambitious and influential ‘Homage to New York’, an auto-destructive work that failed spectacularly to destroy itself in 1960.
In 2001 Michael Landy successfully destroyed all of his worldly possessions for Break Down, a project he presented in an abandoned department store in London’s Oxford Street. For this film, we took Michael, accompanied by Tate Liverpool’s Laurence Sillars, to a waste recycling depot in Camden. Here they talked about the exhibition, the artists’ shared interest in scrap materials, and Landy’s ambition to one day recreate ‘Homage to New York’.
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