I am thinking of British artist Michael Landy, who did the unthinkable - he destroyed everything he owned.

In what became the installation artwork Breakdown, Landy submitted all of his belongings to giant shredders. By 'belongings', I mean ALL belongings - his Saab car, David Bowie vinyls, passport, letters and correspondences, even artwork given by friends valued by the thousands of pounds.

Even belongings from his childhood weren't spared. All he was left with were his overdraft and a cat. I suppose it would have been ugly and messy at the installation had the cat found its way through the shredder.

I sat in front of the tube, cringing, as each piece of artwork, each part of his already dismantled Saab, his childhood parka, and countless, countless items make their way to the giant shredders, nestled in yellow crates, transported through a conveyor belt.

Eventually, I asked the fundamental question - will I be able to destroy everything I owned? Wait, let me refine the question - will I be able to arrive at the point when I'll even CONSIDER destroying everything I owned?

I am reminded of such questions as 'If you were stranded on a desert island, which five CDs will you bring?' or 'If your house is on fire, which five items will you bring with you?' or 'If you had to let go of your books, which five books will you hold on to?'

Even thinking of such questions gives me a headache. It's like doing a Meryl Streep in Sophie's Choice.

Can you really let go of your possessions?

This would have been an old-hat question for any garden-variety Buddhist. But Landy responds as a person caught in the insinkerator that is consumerism.

Michael Landy has made the excesses of Western consumerism the primary subject of his art - replicating the physical space of the marketplace in Market while subjecting paper cut-outs of humans into a shredder in Scrapheap Services.

It seemed that nothing was sacred to Landy. One of the items brought up for shredding was, curiously, a book on recycling.

An installation such as Breakdown goes against recycling for the monumental shredding managed to produce bags upon bags of garbage, all of which eventually went to the landfills. How odd: all of his possessions, dispossessed of their market value - practically reduced to garbage - are physically reduced to garbage.

The question remains - did Breakdown truly achieve its aim of being Landy's most pointed attack against consumerism?