Welcome to Essex
Firstsite Gallery, Colchester

ALTHOUGH associated with the emergence of the Young British Artists in the 1990s, best-known by the work of Tracy Emin or Damien Hirst, Michael Landy has always, much like Rachel Whiteread, ploughed a lonely furrow.

Perhaps of all his contemporaries he is the closest to a definition of a modern political artist who explores social issues, consumerism and the commodification of human beings in a world dictated to by capitalist corporations and their interests.

In Closing Down Sale (1992) Landy chillingly foresaw, 30 years ahead of his time, the haplessness of declining high streets while in Scrapheap Services (1995) he went a step further by drawing attention to the waste of human capital in a cost-cutting drive to maximise profit. That sounds all too familiar, with zero-hours contracts the new norm.

In 2001 came Break Down, a happening organised in a shut-down C&A store on Oxford Street in London, where Landy brought all of his 7,227 catalogued worldly possessions, from a postage stamp to a car and, in a cathartic act, shredded them over two weeks.

The vicious cycle of over-production, avaricious ownership and voracious consumption was exorcised as each item was pulverised.

Landy grew up in Ilford during the 1960s and 1970s, at a time when the town transitioned from being in Essex to Greater London, and it is an important component of his new free exhibition Welcome to Essex, a dissection of how modern-day Essex was shaped by Thatcherism, at the Firstsite Gallery in Colchester.

Margaret Thatcher lived in Colchester from 1947-49, where she first joined the Conservative Party and, says Landy, he left school in 1979 when Thatcher had come to power “and we witnessed a sea-change in Britain at that time and even more so in Essex, where entrepreneurialism and free-market economics were embraced with gusto.”

A pivotal section of Welcome to Essex is Essexism, an archive which traces the stereotyping of the county’s inhabitants via a variety of mass-media stigmatisation of the county on TV — Birds of a Feather, Spitting Image, Harry Enfield’s spiv “Loadsamoney” or The Only Way Is Essex (TOWIE)— portraying Essex inhabitants as being materialistic and uncultured.

Landy’s response is to question the influence of the media, hand-in-glove with political agendas, in concocting regional and national identities and harmful stereotypes that wilfully distort reality.

He has been exploring Essex on foot, taking a series of walks around the county while conversing with notable local cultural figures and the information gleaned from those travels is represented in the show.

Foremost among them are the recollections inspired by the “Plotlanders,” who came to Essex from London’s polluted East End between the wars to create better lives for their families. They were maverick DIY-ers who built homes from scratch from whatever materials they found on unwanted farm land, near motorways, in woodlands or on cliff edges in places such as Dunton, near Basildon.

Landy’s project has much to do with restoring local pride through the recuperation of the rich millennial past, in an attempt to reassess and rearticulate community values today and look forward to the future. 

A notable inspiration is the Dagenham Idol, a wooden figurine of a naked human, discovered in Dagenham in 1922 and carbon-dated to around 2,250 BC, making it one of the oldest human representations ever found in Europe. At the time, settled communities in Essex cultivated cereals, reared domesticated livestock and produced pottery.

“Essex is a complex melting pot of influences from recent and ancient history — a microcosm of British culture,” says Sally Shaw director of Firstsite gallery.

“The county has been the gateway into Britain and outwards to Europe for tens of thousands of years, making it a vibrant and culturally rich area of the country where national politics are often writ large.”

Landy, she believes, “has brought this complexity into focus with his typical wit and visual delicacy.” Quite.

Welcome to Essex runs until September 5, opening times: firstsite.uk