迈克尔·兰迪
מייקל לנדי
Майкл Лэнд

Saint Apollonia

source: nationalgalleryorguk

A series of large-scale kinetic sculptures bring a contemporary twist to the lives of the saints.

Saints are more often associated with traditional sacred art than with contemporary work, but Michael Landy, current Rootstein Hopkins Associate Artist in residence at the National Gallery, has been inspired to revisit the subject for this exhibition.

Landy’s large-scale sculptures consist of fragments of National Gallery paintings cast in three dimensions and assembled with one of his artistic hallmarks – refuse. He has scoured car boot sales and flea markets accumulating old machinery, cogs and wheels to construct the works. Visitors can crank the works into life with a foot pedal mechanism.

Towering over you, the seven sculptures swivel and turn, in movements that evoke the drama of each saint’s life. Saints Apollonia, Catherine, Francis, Jerome, Thomas – and an additional sculpture that takes a number of saints as its inspiration – fill the Sunley Room alongside paper collages.
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source: theguardian

Michael Landy’s new show at the National Gallery is a huge surprise – startling in every respect, not least that it is happening at all. Landy must be the most unexpected choice of associate artist ever for Trafalgar Square. In his YBA days, he claimed never to have visited the gallery and to know almost nothing about the art of the past. He is not a painter, does not sculpt and only came round to the idea of drawing in his 30s (he is now 50). Indeed he is more famous for making nothing than something – for systematically destroying all his worldly possessions, apart from the clothes he stood up in, by sending them along a conveyor belt to be crushed to dust in 2001.

Michael Landy
Saints Alive
London
Starts 23 May
Until 24 November
Details:
020-7747 2885
Venue website
Break Down as it was called, appeared to have no spiritual or moral purpose. Landy did not give everything (or indeed anything) to charity. He did not seem to be in the business of cleansing his soul so much as his material world; indeed the act was patently self-destructive. But this desire to free himself from the physical encumbrances of daily existence has flowered into something far more significant at the National Gallery, where Landy has spent the past two years looking hard at paintings of saints and thinking about the complete self-abnegation of their lives.

The result is an extraordinary group of figures, some of them 10 or 12ft tall and all of them with peculiar powers of kinesis. These are the saints, their appearance based upon paintings in the gallery – Crivelli’s Saint Peter, say, or Cranach’s St Apollonia – meticulously recreated in plaster, fibreglass and paint. You look up to them, they tower distantly above you, powerfully real and yet blatantly artificial, which is the first jolt. And then, quite suddenly, they move.

landy george
Multi-Saint, 2013, by Michael Landy: ‘The noise is appalling.’ Photograph: courtesy the Thomas Dane Gallery/National Gallery
Rumbling and juddering, springing and banging, they clatter into action for a few brief seconds. The noise is alarming, even frightening, and the motion is shockingly abrupt. All the working parts are exposed – rusty cogs, bicycle wheels, coils, springs and old sewing machine parts, connected together like some quivering Jean Tinguely contraption. The look is antique, somewhere between Victorian automata and Heath Robinson. They move at the touch of an iron pedal.

But, being sculptures (exquisitely made for Landy by MDM Ltd) rather than fairground attractions, they are neither comic nor predictable. You might think that St George would slash away at that dragon – a stupendous red and green creation, more demon than critter – but he doesn’t. Instead a scimitar comes down upon the saint’s own vulnerably tonsured head. The noise is appalling: a cranium smashed in. Sound and vision precisely invoke the horror of martyrdom.

St Apollonia raises the heavy pliers that became her attribute – she was tortured by having her teeth pulled out one by one – to her lovely face, gradually chipping away at the plaster each time, so that one is made to think of the brittle frangibility of teeth. But Apollonia is self-effacing, one might say, destroying a little more of herself each time and this puts the emphasis on the astonishing nature of martyrdom – endured with superhuman fortitude, but also anticipated, faced and embraced, certainly never avoided.

landy spin
Spin the Saint Catherine Wheel and Win the Crown of Martyrdom, 2013, by Michael Landy. Photograph: courtesy Thomas Dane/National Gallery
Read the words engraved in gold on the edge of St Catherine’s enormous wheel – you have to wrench hard at the handle to make the wheel turn, fortune and fate irresistibly brought to mind – and all the unimaginable strangeness of her life revolves before you, from the conversion of Roman empresses to the multiple tortures and the mystic marriage to Christ. It is a perfect metaphor for the circularity of choice, faith and fate.

What would it be like if a figure emerged from a painting into three dimensions? And then swelled to superhuman proportions? And then started into motion? Landy’s figures are about the limits of human imagination.

Michael Landy Penitence Machine (Saint Jerome), 2012
Penitence Machine (Saint Jerome), 2012 (photographic paper and watercolour pencil on paper). Photograph: courtesy of the Thomas Dane Gallery, London
But they are also concerned with the art of painting itself. The artist is struck by the way that saints are represented in parts, assembled out of emblematic hands, limbs and heads. His sculptures are put together this way too, Frankenstein-style, and he is also showing many excellent collages at the National Gallery that isolate the elements – a votive limb, a disembodied yet ever-beating heart.

He sees that it is more shattering to depict St Jerome beating his own chest with a rock than poring over his books in the library (as usual) accompanied by that dozing lion. But he also sees the limits, for the painter, of immobility. Jerome needs to repeat his action over and again, as he does in this show. In that repetition one senses both the futility and the terrible discipline of the self-punishment.

It is Landy’s sense of wonder that makes this show so powerful. He is amazed by those stiff legs – like pull-on boots – painters gave to Roman saints, and by the gridirons glowing like electric fires upon which saints were depicted being burned. He notices anew what others more familiar with the paintings might not any more: stigmata like miniature sunbursts, open wounds like eyes, fingers pointing like weapons.

The most shattering work here, Doubting Thomas, positions the wounded torso of Christ about a metre from the hand of St Thomas. It bodies forth, so to speak, the exact test of Thomas’s doubt. Imagine a finger entering a wound, imagine the involuntary recoil: these are wildly exaggerated in the moving sculpture – a sharp jab, a violent springing away – to remind one of the shock of a digit probing the quick of the wound. It makes visceral, in its shockingly theatrical way, what painting often cannot depict or imagine.

It is remarkable that the National Gallery had such faith in Landy, never mind reinforcing the floors for his giants. But the result is a tremendous event that seizes the viewer, involving us in a spectacle of passion, conviction, suffering and belief driven both literally and mechanically by violence. Their true subject, in this respect, is awe. These sculptures take you into the paintings, but above all into the lives of the saints, in the most eye-popping, nerve-touching, heart-wrenching way.
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source: interviewrussia

Как и большинство «молодых британских художников» (YBA) Майкл Лэнди давно не молод, хотя и в свои 50 умеет веселиться. В одном из своих перформансов Лэнди собрал все накопленное за жизнь имущество (всего 7006 предметов: от дискографии Дэвида Боуи до автомобиля Saab 900), выложил на огромный конвейер и, не моргнув, разбил все вдребезги. Сегодня же в Национальной галерее художник создал «католический Диснейлэнд», заполнив его кинетическими скульптурами святых. Все фигуры, созданные по образу и подобию картин старых мастеров, приводятся в движение самими зрителями. Так, например, если наступить на рычаг скульптуры св. Аполлонии, созданной Лэнди по мотивам шедевра Лукаса Кранаха «Святые Женевьева и Аполлония», двухметровая мученица яростно взмахивает рукой с клещами, в которых зажат ее зуб, а мы сразу вспоминаем легенду о святой, в честь которой ежегодно отмечают Международный день стоматолога. Представить такую выставку в России трудно, поэтому слетать в Лондон одним поводом больше.