Just pathetic: Michael Wilson on sore winners

ArtForum, Oct, 2004 by Michael Wilson

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"How can I tell you that I hate my own book?" writes Landers, in the poorly spelled, handwritten tirade that covers [sic]'s 454 pages. "It's a stinking open wound that mercylessly exposes people whom I love and care about." Nevertheless, Artforum saw fit to devote three articles in its April 1994 issue to the artist and his will-fully half-baked conclusion, cited by critic Jan Avgikos: "I'm banal. We're all banal, that's the point right? Yup, I think that's it." Avgikos justifies her attentions by pointing out Landers's superiority as an idiot, his masterful unreliability. A testament to this unique status, [sic] is not even true to its purportedly confessional mode. Like reality television (a decidedly abject entertainment), it plays fast and loose with the distinction between the staged and the accidental. Landers's continual obsessing over the possibility of his "genious" ever being recognized (or, for that matter, achieved) surpasses even Warhol's celebrated insecurity.

"Stuttering" revolved around a similar conceit, a self-doubt that precludes efficient communication. Presented as a collection of works arrested between conception and execution, it argued for the virtues of garbled speech and blurred vision. Adding insult to injury, David Rimanelli, in his contribution to The Mourning Stutterer--the mock newspaper that accompanied the show--proposes Tourette's syndrome as an alternative model for this "stumbling, shuffling, fractured" art, characterized as it is by "histrionic perorations of hatred, disgust, nausea." Reviewing "Stuttering" (Flash Art, Apr./May 1991), Rhonda Lieberman joined a number of other critics in aligning abject art with arte povera as much as with Pop, endorsing Cezanne (Maurice Merleau-Ponty has described the painter's self-doubt) as the tendency's forefather. "Without romanticizing the unconscious as the privileged realm of libido and liberation," she writes, "'Stuttering' is about its truth as the lapsed act, not the act of control, misfiring rather than mastery, nonencounter rather than misrecognition."

At Stux, Cary Leibowitz deliberately forced this issue, not only through a mass of collages and paintings cataloguing his comprehensive self-loathing (loser line forms here, reads the text of one floor piece), but also by placing himself physically in the center of the whole morass. Seated at a table in the gallery, Leibowitz handed out warm cookies as a last-ditch gambit for appreciation--an entirely appropriate gesture for an artist whose resume included his weight. ("The truly abject part," Leibowitz says today, "was that artists would come in and ask if I was Mr. Stux and if I could look at their slides. Even after they learned that I wasn't the gallery owner they wanted to know if I would do a studio visit. It definitely put me in my place. I was trying to be so funny and unimportant, and here were these sad sacks making me feel like Prince Albert of Monaco--or at least Desi Arnaz Jr.") Leibowitz's Kick Me (Green Pants), 1990, an XXL pair of pale green polyester trousers featuring the words of the title spelled out in multicolored applique across the XXL ass is further testament to its creator's generous but lamented proportions, though it never became a must-have item. As Lieberman points out, Leibowitz is as much in thrall to the market as Koons is (he proves it with a line of cheap multiples that includes a please don't steal my radio, i'm queer! windshield visor), but rather than represent himself as another perfect product, he fixates on the unlikelihood of his ever measuring up.