Early Work
Landers’s formative body of work, produced from 1991-1994, is one that defined the artist, the persona, and the conceptual constructs that he has cultivated and enriched over the course of his career.
Beginning in 1990, Landers began to use writing as a visual media and exhibited a body of hand-written work titled Art, Life and God, featuring an alter-ego named Chris Hamson, an amalgam of Landers and his artist friends. Written on yellow legal pads of paper, partly in screenplay format and partly as exemplar writing in which Hamson is the “author/artist”, the work gives voice to the inside of the artist’s head as it takes the viewer into the world of a young struggling artist in New York City. With each scene Landers weaves a tightly knit world where fact and fiction are blurred, and the intensely personal is obscured by the persona of Chris Hamson. Landers has said, “When I saw the magnetism of the writing, it became the material with which I could work.” With its roots planted firmly in the performative, which has remained at the core of his artistic practice ever since, Landers chose to make his life, and the actual act of making the work, the subject of his work. Much of this body of work is compiled in an artist book titled Art, Life and God, published in 2009 by Glenn Horowitz Bookseller.
Landers considers these early writings, and subsequent writings, to be drawings for which the text is the image. This early work is considered by the artist to be the backbone of his entire oeuvre and throughout his career he has consistently mined this trove in his re-examination of the art-making practice.
Landers views an entire installation of his work as the greater artwork, composed of individual works that are meant to stand alone but conceived of as part of the whole. This concept adds another layer of meaning to the idea of multi-media. The written drawings were always taped to the exhibition walls and shown with sculptures installed in the center of the room. Made out of wet terracotta clay, with each show, the sculptures progressed from “Hamson’s” which were “shamefully” shown and obscured with black trash bags over them to ones made by Landers as “Landers”. These wet sculptures needed to be sprayed to be kept alive during the exhibition and at show’s end only those that sold would be cast into bronze; a metaphor for art that survives is art that is loved and cared for.
For Landers, video was an integral part of these multi-media installations and provided another performative basis from which to view the show as a whole. He used video to reinforce a fundamental component of the unspoken communication between art and the viewer, and equally, artist and the viewer. Shot in the studio, in which the artist takes a central role, intimate revelations on the part of the artist make the viewer implicit in the action, and a defacto voyeur-accomplice, leading to the viewer’s own self-recognition and subsequent evaluation. As Landers said, “The idea was to let viewers into my studio, as an extension of my head, to be with me as I was making stuff. In this process, even dancing with an umbrella became ‘making stuff’.” The video itself becomes self-referential, and records the time spent making its existence a reality. Landers’s videos anticipated reality television, as well as YouTube.
Read more about this topic: Sean Landers
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