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• 1 media/IMG_4533.JPG 2016-12-06T10:29:10-08:00 Break Down Inventory, Michael Landy 6 image_header 2016-12-29T17:22:05-08:00 Michael Landy spent three years compiling a detailed inventory of all of his possessions - everything from his car to dead batteries and candy wrappers. These were organized into ten categories: artworks, clothing, equipment, furniture, kitchen, leisure, motor vehicle, perishables, reading material, and studio material. When he was finished, he took over a department store that had gone out of business and, in 2001, systematically and publicly destroyed all of these belongings in a sort of exhibitionist dis-assembly line. The following year, he published the inventory of his belongings as a book.
  
  As with Take Care of Yourself, the most compelling thing about Break Down Inventory is the way it navigates the tensions between book and performance. Would either the book or the performance be as effective without the other? In some ways, the book and performance articulate two different ideas about consumerism - one emphasizing the quantity, the other calling into question the quality, or value. The best way to get to what Landy truly intended may be to take both components together. Furthermore, the inventory itself could be argued to have come before the performance, and even dictated it. However, the book as we now encounter it is decidedly a relic, or even a simulacrum, of this same performance.