Sean Landers - Shedding One Veil For Another: Moving From Alter Ego Into Imagery

Shedding One Veil For Another: Moving From Alter Ego Into Imagery

For his 1992 exhibition at Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York, Landers exhibited a variety of work shedding Chris Hamson and “unveiling” the artist. Ranging from diaristic calendars, and confessional ranting letters to his student loan officer, to stream-of-conscience writing on large-scale paper, and cartoons of art-world stereotypes, all of which exposed his inner-most thoughts, it became apparent that the subject matter of Landers’s work had shifted to Landers, and he himself became the object of study. By peering into his life, or what he chose to present of it, viewers were once again invited to become a voyeur. As Roberta Smith wrote in her New York Times review of the exhibition, “taken as a whole, the current show creates a feeling of voyeuristic intimacy…his work draws a vivid picture…of both the artworld and the psychic process of art-making itself. While highly specialized, it is also widely accessible, in part because Mr. Landers deals with so many basic human emotions.” As Landers said, “I knew that was why people would endure aching feet to read my art, because while staring into my open soul they were actually evaluating themselves. I think this is a fundamental component of the unspoken communication between art and viewer.”

First exhibited as artwork in the Aperto section of the Venice Biennale in 1993, and then published later that year as a limited edition book by Publicsfear Press, was the culmination of the previous written drawings in their entirety. More autobiographical than ever, and at over 400 pages, it blurred fact and fiction, art and life, and invited comparisons with Samuel Beckett and his novel Molloy. Jeffrey Deitch in his 1996 catalogue essay for the Young Americans: New Art at the Saatchi Collection writes, “The reader becomes drawn into Landers’s mind…one has entered into his consciousness and feels as though inside his mind looking out rather than outside his mind looking in.” Feeling completely overexposed by his own hand and needing a place to hide, Landers moved to writing on giant pieces of unstretched linen. So large they were impossible to read in a linear fashion, similar to the experience of viewing his earlier large-scale drawings, of which Roberta Smith wrote in The New York Times, made “reading on foot an essential part of the experience…as one ranges over, reading up and down more often than across, one has the sensation of eavesdropping on Mr Landers’s monologue, and this adds a second layer of stream-of-consciousness to the work.” These first early paintings, much like the work that preceded them, were performative renderings and records of the exact thoughts the artist had at the point of their creation; an immediate narrative produced in real time. The choice of unstretched linen was a conscious one - their physical form referenced the paper of the drawings that preceding them. The medium of oil on linen immediately gave them a link to traditional art-making practices and it guaranteed the immortality of the words and the artist. “..That’s why I stopped writing on paper and started writing on lead primed linen…I wanted it to last. That’s behind my impulse to make art. I wanted it to last, to outlast me.” During this time Landers experimented with patches of writing on paintings, rather than narrative form stream-of-conscience writing. These patches were designed to actively entertain the viewer in order to prevent them from moving on, and gave them the illusion of piecing together the persona of the artist through his snippets of writings, while denying them the full-picture entirely.

With this early body of work, Landers “foretold the mass-market deaccessioning of private moments, a movement that also includes tweeting, status updates and a lengthening index of user names.”

In 1994 Landers moved further into the realm of a more traditional and less overtly conceptual form of picture making by using oblique references to Picabia, an artist who Landers admired for maintaining his creative freedom. Throughout the course of his career, Landers has gone back to Picabia, specifically his spoof of abstraction, the painting “7091”, as a touchstone. Rather than copying Picabia’s look, Landers quotes him obliquely and uses him as a symbol for his own artistic freedom, which he views as essential for his survival. Landers was now using his writing to create forms – large-scale doodles with different colored text. He also started to insert imagery into his paintings among the writing. Most importantly, this is when the chimp and clown first appear in his artwork. These two characters can be considered as surrogates for the aspects of the artist’s personality as they manifest the highs and lows characteristic of his writing; the chimp representing self-aggrandizement and the clown representing self-abasement. During this time Landers started to investigate the use of color while taking a needed break from writing by making colorful stripe paintings which were completely devoid of text.

In 1996 Landers moved completely into the realm of imagery. The painting Alone (1996), depicts a diminutive impasto clown in an insufficient rowboat in a vast seascape, invoking Manet’s Rochefort’s Escape. This clown, by replacing the text-as-imagery in his previous paintings, now embodied the innermost thoughts of the artist. Landers went on to paint a series of purely image paintings - clowns in perilous conditions of nature, meant to be alegorical of his new journey into the uncharted territories of painting.

It was also during this time that Landers began his monthly back-page column, “Genius Lessons”, in Spin Magazine. The column ran from 1996 to 2000.