Manual/manual: Working hands and instructional text in Michael Landy’s <i>Break Down</i>

Michael Landy systematically dismantled and granulated everything he owned, a collection of 7227 objects in all, in his 2001 art event <i>Break Down</i>. This process was guided by a purpose-written instruction manual, published as part of the accompanying text <i>Michael Landy/Break Down</i>. This article uses new media theory and assemblage approaches to respond to <i>Break Down</i> through close analysis of three artefacts that have a paratextual relationship with the artwork: the manual, the ink drawing <i>P.D.F (Product, Disposal, Facility)</i>, produced by Landy in 1998, and a handwritten case study in which Landy records the dismantling of a CD/radio/cassette player. It explores how the manual works on and through the working hand and body of the reader and, in conversation with the Fluxus art collective’s practice of using ‘event scores’, investigates how <i>Break Down</i> both reproduces and works against the sequential logic of instructional text.