Michael Landy: Art Bin, South London Gallery

Michael Landy, the artist who destroyed literally everything he owned in his 2001 Artangel project Break Down - birth certificate, Saab, treasured family photos, shirt off his back - finally followed that project up with another exercise in destruction, this time resulting in headlines too tempting, and way too satisfying, to resist: Modern Art is Rubbish.

The Art Bin itself is a huge, see-through Perspex and steel container which takes up most of the space in the South London Gallery. At the far end there’s a staircase leading to a platform from which artists - or those who legally own an artwork they want to get rid of - can ceremoniously despatch their failed work. The crash must be a resounding one, especially if, like Damien Hirst, you’ve chucked in one of your extremely large skull canvases. Being thrown from a height is obviously part of the intended catharsis.

But before anything goes in, the works have to be approved for disposal by Landy or an assistant. And they won’t accept just any old rubbish - anything too obviously spurious, for instance, or that might be seen to be taking the piss.There have already been a few contributions that have, somewhat delicately, I imagine, been rejected. But as Landy is a fairly diffident, fairly modest kind of guy, one who admits to feeling uncomfortable passing judgement on what does and does not constitute a genuine artwork, perhaps the project might be a little more invigorating if the selection process was more, well, selective.

Landy is, of course, aware that part of Art Bin's message may well be interpreted as a concession to the “contemporary art is tat“ sentiment, but his “monument to creative failure” acknowledges an important part of the creative process: both the inevitability and necessity of failure. If artists don’t risk failure than they would never take risks at all, and what, after all, would be the point in that? So much, so obvious.

But some artists choose to keep their failed and aborted projects in the back of a studio cupboard, while others have a need to destroy before they can creatively move on. John Baldessari, Jasper Johns and Francis Bacon are just three artists who famously destroyed all their early canvases before going on to produce the works that they are now best known for (and no doubt they continued to regularly throw away a fair amount of unsatisfactory work). But like the creative process itself, these acts of destruction normally occur as wholly private rituals.Rarely do these self-declared failures cross into the public realm, and if they do it's usually only within the context of a personalised mythology, one suggesting epiphany and transformation in the narrative of the artist’s life.

But few would see the attractions of dumping an artwork, however much of a failure it was perceived to be, into a public bin as part of another artist’s work. Are these artists being especially brave for electing to do so?

On the Saturday I visited one could already see quite a pile-up of discarded artworks. There are works by some of Landy’s well-known friends - apart from Hirst, Tracey Emin, Peter Blake, Mark Titchner and Gary Hume have all contributed. There are also contributions from complete unknowns, so Sunday painters and amateur practioners of every ilk can now jostle with a few Turner Prize winners. Like death, it’s a wholly democratic process, and the artworks will all end up in the same landfill.

There were also plenty of visitors on the day I was there; press views apart, I’d never seen the gallery so full. So though it hasn’t exactly fired the public’s imagination in quite the same way as Break Down, it’s a project that has certainly engaged. Art Bin is showing every sign that it won’t be seen as a failed artwork.

But what set Break Down apart was the fact that it was for Landy a genuinely cathartic and liberating experience, bracing as well as essentially life-changing. And one could experience all that second hand, for it proved a powerfully audacious exploration of selfhood and identity. Surveying some of the failed bits and bobs on view in the see-through container - including Hume’s really quite rubbishy paper cones piece (surely there has to be some notion of a struggle with a failed work, so really, Landy is right, it can't be just any old, knocked together rubbish, of which Hume's piece seems a model example) - one hardly leaves with the impression that the contributors here are investing in Art Bin in quite the same way as Landy so boldly, so courageously, in fact, invested in Break Down.

Michael Landy: Art Bin is at the South London Gallery until 14 March.