Michael Landy

Accompanying the 2001 exhibition that made its debut at a shop in Oxford Street, London, this title is in effect an inventory of the possessions that were broken down into their component parts during the installation.

Marking the return of the artist to the large-scale installation expression, this book highlights the work, to date, of Michael Landy. It includes working drawings, installation shots and contextual texts to give an insight into the work of the artist.

British artist Michael Landy (b. 1963) is known primarily as an installation artist. His work, along with others associated with the Young British Artists (YBAs), was first catapulted to the world spotlight when it was featured in the notorious Sensation exhibition (1997). His sculptural installations and performances explore political and social themes, such as the nature of consumerism and commodity. In 2009, Landy began a three-year artist residency at the National Gallery, London. He chose to focus his project on representations of saints and their accompanying stories, often gruesome, which were once part of common culture but are now largely unknown. Landy's preoccupation with recycling narratives and repurposing imagery results in Saints Alive, the subject of this book, conceived to include drawings, collages, and a series of kinetic, interactive sculptures with moving parts and sounds. Published by National Gallery Company/Distributed by Yale University Press Exhibition Schedule: The National Gallery, London(05/23/13-11/24/13)

Marking the return of the artist to the large-scale installation expression, this book highlights the work, to date, of Michael Landy. It includes working drawings, installation shots and contextual texts to give an insight into the work of the artist.

The Contemporary Museum issues a challenge to those who view the museum as an artefact of history, constrained in its outlook as much by professional, institutional and disciplinary creed, as by the collections it accumulated in the distant past. Denying that the museum can locate its purpose in the pursuit of tradition or in idealistic speculation about the future, the book asserts that this can only be found through an ongoing and proactive negotiation with the present: the contemporary. This volume is not concerned with any present, but with the peculiar circumstances of what it refers to as the ‘global contemporary’ – the sense of living in a globally connected world that is preoccupied with the contemporary. To situate the museum in this world of real and immediate need and action, beyond the reach of history, the book argues, is to empower it to challenge existing dogmas and inequalities and sweep aside old hierarchies. As a result, fundamental questions need to be asked about such things as the museum’s relationship to global time and space, to systems and technologies of knowing, to ‘the life well lived’, to the movement and rights of people, and to the psychology, permanence and organisation of culture. Incorporating diverse viewpoints from around the world, The Contemporary Museum is a follow-up volume to Museum Revolutions and, as such, should be essential reading for students in the fields of museum and heritage studies, cultural studies, communication and media studies, art history and social policy. Academics and museum professionals will also find this book a source of inspiration.

This publication presents a comprehensive overview of Michael Landy's complete works. Michael Landy (b. 1963) belongs to the group of Young British Artists, who, beginning in 1988, caused an international sensation. He created installations, in which real life and fiction entered into an unsettling liaison. With his works, he raises essential (unspoken) questions: How does the ownership of material objects affect us? What do we need to live? But also: How creative is destruction?

Everything Must Go! is the first major monograph of Michael Landy's work, spanning 20 years of his career. Richly illustrated in full colour, this book surveys his earliest work including lesser-known sculptures such as Sovereign shown at Freeze in 1988, to large scale installations Market at Building One in London, Closing Down Sale at Karsten Schubert Ltd., and Scrapheap Services first shown as part of the exhibition Brilliant! New Art from London in Minneapolis. Other works discussed in detail include the infamous Break Down, where Landy destroyed all 7,227 of his possessions in a department store on Oxford Street, Semi-detached at Tate Britain, where Landy constructed a full-scale model of his family home, and the project H2NY where Landy made 168 drawings based on a Tinguely sculpture and performance Homage to New York. With over 800 colour images, this 432-page book features essays by Richard Flood, Rochelle Steiner and Richard Shone, and an interview with James Lingwood.

In 1941 the Swiss art critic Pierre Courthion interviewed Henri Matisse while the artist was in bed recovering from a serious operation. It was an extensive interview, seen at the time as a vital assessment of Matisse's career and set to be published by Albert Skira's then newly established Swiss press. After months of complicated discussions between Courthion and Matisse, and just weeks before the book was to come out--the artist even had approved the cover design--Matisse suddenly refused its publication. A typescript of the interview now resides in Courthion's papers at the Getty Research Institute. This rich conversation, conducted during the Nazi occupation of France, is published for the first time in this volume, where it appears both in English translation and in the original French version. Matisse unravels memories of his youth and his life as a bohemian student in Gustave Moreau's atelier. He recounts his experience with collectors, including Albert C. Barnes. He discusses fame, writers, musicians, politicians, and, most fascinatingly, his travels. Chatting with Henri Matisse, introduced by Serge Guilbaut, contains a preface by Claude Duthuit, Matisse's grandson, and essays by Yve-Alain Bois and Laurence Bertrand Dorleac. The book includes unpublished correspondence and other original documents related to Courthion's interview and abounds with details about avant-garde life, tactics, and artistic creativity in the first half of the twentieth century.