Saint Stephen, 2014

RA Collection: Art

Michael Landy’s Diploma Work Saint Stephen (2014) consists of an over life-sized head of a man suspended from the ceiling and made from fibreglass. It is accompanied by three ‘rocks’ made from limewood. The head is modelled after the figure of the Christian martyr Saint Stephen, as depicted by Carlo Crivelli (c.1430 – c.1495) in The Demidoff Altarpiece (1476), now in the collection of the National Gallery, London.

Saint Stephen is venerated as the first Christian martyr, who was stoned to death for defending the Christian faith in the first century AD. He is traditionally depicted as a young, beardless man with a tonsure (the practice of cutting or shaving the hair at the scalp as a sign of religious devotion), and three stones symbolising his cause of death. Crivelli’s Saint Stephen shows the martyr with three large rocks gently resting on his head and shoulders, at odds with the violent means of his death. Landy’s work adapts Crivelli’s image of Saint Stephen into a three-dimensional sculpture, enlarging the head to become a floating target for the three sculpted rocks.

In 2010, Michael Landy undertook a three-year residency at the National Gallery, where he drew from the figures of Christian saints and martyrs in the collection as inspiration for his own work. His artistic process began with drawings and collage, focusing on the ways that saints have been identified through objects and symbols. Collages of disembodied saints and their identifying symbols became a key theme of Landy’s residency, re-interpreting Renaissance paintings in the collection as themselves fragments of religious works that had been separated. These works deconstructed the body of the saint, turning them into abandoned machines, which Landy linked to the idea of modern culture’s abandonment of Christian stories.

Landy’s residency culminated in the National Gallery exhibition Saints Alive (2013). In this exhibition, visitors could interact with the sculptures, using pedals and levers which activated mechanisms, so that the saints appeared to come alive. This interactive concept was unprecedented within the usually quiet spaces of the National Gallery.

Landy’s Diploma Work Saint Stephen was created for a touring exhibition, also entitled Saints Alive, and it was first exhibited at Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso in Mexico City in 2015. For this work, visitors are invited to throw the limewood rocks at the huge hanging head of Saint Stephen, slowly destroying the sculpture over time. The level of destruction of the head depended entirely on the level of participation from the audience. After each exhibition, the head and rocks were restored, thereby restarting the participatory process again.

Michael Landy emerged in the late 1980s as part of the Young British Artist movement. In the 1990s and early 2000s he became known for his large-scale installation pieces which deal with themes of disposal, destruction, and value, such as Scrapheap Services (1995) and Break Down (2001), the latter of which involved the cataloguing and destruction of every item Landy owned. Many of Landy’s works involve the participation of audiences as actors, such as Art Bin (2010), which invited artists to throw away artworks for disposal at the South London Gallery. Linking to his previous work, Saint Stephen explores many similar themes of fragmentation and destruction, identifying Christian saints and martyrdom as ascetism and the destruction of the body.

Discussing the reccuring theme of destruction in his works, Landy explained: ‘Destruction can also be a creative act. When I did Break Down I talked about it as an examination of consumerism. I literally want to take things apart to have a greater understanding about the way they work. In the National Gallery collection quite a number of things I'm working with are fragments of other things anyway, and I've kind of fragmented the collection for my own ends, really.’

Further reading:

Colin Wiggins, Michael Landy: Saints Alive (London, National Gallery & Yale University Press, 2013)

https://www.britishcouncil.org/arts/michael-landy-saints-alive/

https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/carlo-crivelli-the- demidoff-altarpiece