Diogenes was born around 412BC, and travelled from what is now Turkey to Athens, and, deciding he didn’t need a house, lived in a felled rainwater pipe. All he possessed was a cloak, a walking stick and a leather pouch (nobody knows what he kept in it, given he had no money). Having “discovered happiness through self-mastery and self-sufficiency”, Stephens says, Diogenes refused to conform to society’s values of “accumulating possessions, and social status… so he was the original minimalist”.”

“Have we got minimalism all wrong?” from The BBC on Diogenes.

During the course of two weeks, every single one – clothes, love letters, artworks, his Saab 900 Turbo car, even his father’s sheepskin coat – was stripped, shredded, crushed, dismantled, or otherwise destroyed by Landy and his team of 12 assistants, while listening to David Bowie and Joy Division. When they had finished, the artist owned nothing at all, apart from the blue boiler suit he had been wearing throughout. He called the project Break Down.

The British artist Michael Landy one day in the 90s, according to BBC.