Indeed, Lingwood believes that Break Down wasn’t “simply a frontal attack on consumerism, but something a bit more complex – about the relationship between who we are and what we possess and desire. Of course, Break Down was about Western society’s obsession with stuff and ownership. But it was also about a more existential question, which was: who am I?”

Landy, himself, says that Break Down was partly a self-portrait: the title even played on the idea of the artist experiencing a midlife crisis. The inventory that he prepared for it, which assigned catalogue numbers to each of his possessions, and took more than a year to compile, is currently on display in the form of a gigantic list on a wall in the Museum Tinguely. Landy was adamant that he had to include “everything I owned – even bits of mouldy plastic that had fallen off the VCR”. Accordingly, his index includes tedious tallies of mundane objects including matchboxes, wire wool, toilet roll, and plastic bags.

But, here and there, intimate, and sometimes tongue-in-cheek, allusions to Landy’s relationships with lovers and friends can be found. Item R3356, for instance, was a “handwritten note” to his partner, the artist Gillian Wearing, “asking her not to leave towels on [the] bathroom floor”. R3409, meanwhile, was his fine-art degree thesis that the artist Abigail Lane, an ex-girlfriend, and fellow student at Goldsmiths art school in east London, “was paid £100.00 to write on his behalf”.