At the end of this week, London will witness the opening of a peculiar new exhibition. Art Bin, at the South London Gallery - the brainchild of the artist Michael Landy - will showcase works that artists and members of the public can submit via a website. The items will not, however, be hung on the gallery's walls. Instead, they will be placed in a large bin, and, after the exhibition, destroyed. Filling an enormous 600m³ bin with discarded artworks isn't most people's idea of a great exhibition, but Landy sees significance in what he describes as "a monument to creative failure".
"Artists sometimes make works that they aren't proud of," he says. "Some people choose to exhibit them. Some people make a career out of them. It's interesting to see what artists do with them. Whether they hide them or show them, some people are intrigued by things that don't quite work in the way they had imagined. You can start out disliking something but see it differently over time." The project, then, is about more than just throwing stuff away. Art Bin will raise questions about our increasingly ephemeral lifestyles. It will question our values, the importance of emotional attachment, how we define rubbish and what constitutes art. In a market saturated by inflated prices, audiences will be forced to reflect on the influence of value, whether real or suggested, on how we perceive works. They will also be confronted by Landy's refreshingly detached attitude to the material stuff of everyday life. Unlike many of the other Young British Artists with whom he trained at Goldsmiths college, including Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, Landy is seemingly dismissive of translating concept into cash.
Art Bin is an extension of ideas that Landy explored in his earlier work. In Scrapheap Services (1995), the artist created a fictional cleaning company to clear thousands of cut-out figures from the floor of a London gallery. Most famously, he destroyed all of his possessions in Break Down (2001), an installation in a former department store on London's Oxford Street. Landy used a factory production line to obliterate everything from his car and his passport to several of his works and those by other artists. Visitors came out in force to witness the staging of a political rally against consumerism in the heart of the city's shopping district.
"Break Down was more about consumerism and the self and about how much one's identity is about things that we possess," says Landy. For him, disposal is less about throwing things away and more about relocating them to a new space in a different form. "We don't really think about where our rubbish goes", he adds, although when something with monetary value is binned, many of us start to wonder. Art Bin also encourages audiences to deal with the notion of ownership and authorship. When a work of art is sold, does the artist lose his rights to it? Landy believes not. While anyone can apply to dispose of artworks in Art Bin, members of the public submitting artists' work must first speak to the creator and get written permission to destroy it.
Landy will ultimately decide which items get binned, building up his subjective art collection and becoming both artist and collector. "I've got no criteria for selection," he says. "There are no procedures or guidelines. I'll just judge the works on the day. We'll see all sorts of different things in there. It's like curating a group show, but I've just come up with a slightly unconventional way of showing it. They are all going to be thrown on top of each other. No one will really be able to see the individual works. They will be obscured."
Both the project and the artist are disconcertingly vague, somehow adding to the excitement of an installation that at first sounds like a rubbish concept. We don't know what to expect from this strange new addition to the London art scene, but Landy is adamant that what goes into the bin is art, rather than old junk. Although fascinated by failure, Landy only wishes to incarcerate good work. "One day it dawned on me," he says. "I suddenly didn't want just anything going into the bin. I became weirdly protective over it."
Perhaps surprisingly, given Landy's lack of curatorial direction, the installation has already received 87 official online applications and several promises of work. Artists including Gary Hume, Peter Blake and Michael Craig-Martin, the former head of art at Goldsmiths and YBA mentor, have all pledged pieces, with Hume opting to donate a sculpture made of coloured paper cups that has sat idly in his studio for many years. Craig-Martin will submit a brightly coloured painting, while Landy will also bin a selection of his own works, with a value of around £10,000 (Dh59,200) per piece. All will be dumped in the galvanised steel and polycarbonate skip.
"Some binned works will be perfectly good; others will have failed in some respect," says Landy. "It's just really an artistic monument to failure. At the moment, we're leading up to the exhibition and it's quite a weird feeling. I have a huge bin and lots of space in it and I'm not sure how the art is going to work. Do I have to fill the whole bin in order for it to be a success? I've got no idea. There isn't a plan at this point in time."
"I have a few artworks in storage that I'm thinking of submitting," says the events assistant Maya Davies. "I wasn't initially sure about having them destroyed - it seemed a bit wasteful - but in joining the Art Bin, they will be becoming part of a new artwork and embarking on a journey that could take them anywhere." The installation was inspired by the artists around the UK who produce work outside of the gallery system. Landy was interested in those artists who create work that is never seen. "People make work but it isn't always shown," he says. "It becomes this big boulder in their heads. They can't shift it or get past it. It just hangs there. If the work is visual and it isn't seen, does it exist? Does it need a viewer to be art? I wanted to address that."
The idea ties in with a larger issue at the heart of the art market: the role of art institutions in promoting and neglecting talent. "We've had submissions from art students, as well as professional artists and people that have just got tired of seeing artworks at home. Who knows what we will uncover? And, if the work isn't good enough for my bin, who knows where it will go?"