Photo: Semi-detached Photo: M. Heathcote & J. Fernandes © the artist
The 24 Hour Museum's Kristen Bailey feels homesick at Michael Landy’s installation at Tate Britain, on until 12 December 2004.
The first thing you notice is the whistling. Danny Boy, slow and steady. You can hear it as soon as you step into the entrance of the gallery, and it follows you round the building – a puzzling but strangely comforting presence. Then you realise where it’s coming from.
Squeezed into the long, narrow Duveen Galleries, almost scraping the grand, vaulted ceiling, is an exact to-scale replica of 62, Kingswood Road, Ilford – a pebbledashed Victorian semi with UPVC windows, a brass door knocker in the shape of a lion’s head, peeling exterior paint and a Neighbourhood Watch sticker in the front window.
Wander round the back and you’ll see the satellite dish, and the butcher’s curtain at the back door.
Because you’re in an art gallery, and programmed to observe, you notice the little things which would normally pass you by - the odd rusty nail poking out of the brickwork, bits of wire, the broken-off washing line (which leads nowhere, just as the little black connecter up by the roof is not attached to a telephone wire).
Peek through the nets and there’s a Guinness Extra Cold biro on the back windowsill.
Photo: 'Wander round the back and you'll see the satellite dish...' Photo: M. Heathcote & J. Fernandes © the artist
This is the house where Michael Landy grew up.
Landy is best known for his work Break Down, in which he destroyed every single thing he owned, 7,000 items in a old branch of C&A, watched by Oxford Street shoppers, art fans and news cameras. The last thing he destroyed was his father’s sheepskin coat.
Now he’s turned his focus to the house where his father, John, has been confined since suffering a fractured spine in an industrial accident 26 years ago, aged 37. It’s John Landy doing the whistling.
The replica is split into front and back halves, installed yards apart, backed with huge video walls which play two films. Shelflife uses a series of pictures and diagrams from his dad’s huge collection of DIY manuals, dating from the 1950s.
The other film, Four Walls, took a year to shoot, and follows John Landy’s daily routine of pills and meals, newspapers and television, naps and cigarettes; and the life of the house – the dust and fluff, the ticking of the clocks and the clicking and humming of the appliances.
Photo: Michael Landy. Photo: Johnnie Shand-Kydd.
This house has been both a shelter and a prison for John Landy since his accident left him unable to work for a living, or do his DIY at home. Am I invading his privacy, peering through his net curtains? Has his son already done that, making the minutiae of his life so public?
Perhaps - but I came away with a sense of the injustice of what happened to John Landy. I felt respect for a dignified man cheated out of his livelihood and mobility whilst still young and fit and now trapped in a body which won’t do what he wants it to do, in a house he can’t leave.
It could have happened to my father. It could happen to me. There are hundreds of people across the country who are living this way, and I applaud Michael Landy for telling the story of just one of them.
