Rooting under my bed, through years of built-up clutter, I retrieve a clump of my GCSE and A-Level art pieces: scrappy life drawings, uninspired landscapes, malformed portraits and a rather hideous garden scene painted on polystyrene. There is only one conclusion to be drawn: artistic failures.

Pondering my selection, I imagine myself in the role of an Olympic shot putter, flinging my polystyrene landscape into Landy’s rubbish pit of art. But in planning my dump extraordinaire, I am informed by the gallery’s website that there is a process one must undergo in order to dispose of one’s artistic failures. These sad pieces of old coursework, which had once stood up in front of that ultimate judge of aesthetics, the board of A-level examiners, must now stand and defend themselves before Landy and a panel of his representatives, to be judged on the merit of failure. I look at my works critically, trying to work out whether I had managed successfully to create a failure, or whether I have instead failed to make a creation, becoming frustrated at my attempt to navigate the fine line between the two.

The 600m cubed Art Bin stands as a monument to this notion of creative ‘failure’, or the failure of creation. It is reminiscent (maybe too much so) of Landy’s 2001 Break Down, an installation housed in the C&A department store on Oxford Street, in which Landy catalogued and then destroyed all of his possessions including his birth certificate, works by other artists, and even his car. Like Break Down, Art Bin raises issues surrounding disposal, destruction, the role of the institution in making and breaking careers and the attribution of value as well as the importance of sentimental attachment to belongings.

Surveying the ‘artistic garbage’ accumulating in the South London Gallery, one can see pieces by the most recognisable figures in British art - Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Gary Hume, Rebecca Warren and Gillian Wearing, to name the pick of the bunch - floating amongst the rubbish of unknown artists (and I suspect many old GCSE pieces). The works are spread surprisingly evenly, considering that they have been thrown into the bin from a raised platform situated at one end. I can see that gravity has been working hard, carrying a rather heavy metal artwork all the way to the far side of the bin.

Though I try, empty-handed to mount the pedestal of destruction from which the works are thrown, I am told by the guard that I must observe the scene from the ground. Only those who have passed the test of aesthetic failure can survey the rubbish kingdom from above, while the other mere mortals must stand below, left to identify the work of artistic giants. Perhaps if this platform were open to all without involving a process of validation, this glorious rubbish dump would be all the more glorious. If the rubbish dump did not smell so badly of the institution of British art, with iconic works constantly catching your eye (as would the label of a Coke bottle in a trash can) this work may have been able to handle the concept of successful failure and the failure of success more effectively. Instead, it remains a gaudy display of Britain’s top artists’ apparently selfless willingness to destroy their art.

Until Mar 14

REBECCA WRIGHT