Portrait of the artist as a young artist - artist Sean Landers - Sean Sucks … Not

ArtForum, April, 1994 by Jan Avgikos

I'm banal. We're all banal, that's the point right? Yup, I think that's it.

Sean Landers, [sic], 1993

Sean Landers, the artist-cum-writer-cum-artist, is always crying about wanting to be a "genious" and questioning whether everything he does has to "mean something." On the merits of his handwritten book [sic] (hey-Sean, I read every word, on all 454 pages), and also of his shorter epistolary works, numerous self-indulgent and narcissistic video performances, and bronze sculptures caricaturing average working-class schmoes and other "loser" types culled from the novels of his arch rivals in the literary field, I would say there's plenty of "meaning" in his work. For openers, let's call it humorous, prattling, seriously insincere, self-deprecating nihilism. As Landers writes, "No wonder Duchamp gave up and just played chess. The more you think the more you realize how pointless everything is. To enjoy anything you have to delude yourself."

By his own admission, Landers is a member of a new "lost generation"--the white middle-class offspring of baby-boomer America, lacking the exigencies of an unjust war to oppose, a countercultural revolution to fight, or even a strong intellectual left to join. This generation's art is steeped in ambivalence, always at odds with its own worth. When Nirvana sets its mental machinery at figuring out happiness, the formula that songwriter Kurt Cobain comes up with--"I'm having fun/I think I'm dumb/Or maybe just happy"--is strikingly like the "Leonard Cohen afterworld" that Landers shows us when he videotapes himself jerking off in the studio, or pens his affable but interminable "streams of nothing" and "chronicles of idleness." If misery loves company, Landers might be consoled by his art's part in a larger esthetic and cultural tendency that wears its asocial attitudes and nonintellectual dispositions, its paranoia and its delusions of grandeur, its adolescent tendencies and its obsessional leanings, on its sleeve. He deserves to be singled out, though, for taking it over the top: his efforts to show that the inner idiot is in control are totally convincing. The work gives us little opportunity, perhaps little inclination, to identify with an expressive "consciousness," to appreciate esthetic accomplishment, to enjoy the irony of institutional critique. What's left?

Either the subject who seems to speak in this work is entirely the product of social and unconscious processes that it will never much know, or it does not fully mean what it says. Or maybe both. Not that this genious necessarily deserves a MacArthur, but the work is hardly uninformed. Its aggressive lack of panache notwithstanding, it clearly depends on ideological models in place since the '60s: buried in its prehistory are both Conceptual art, grounded in a philosophical inquiry into art as a self-defined, self-referential practice, and Minimalism, with its exploration of how repetition can both embody and dissolve content. Landers' texts repeatedly reference themselves, self-consciously and tautologically. Pages torn from a yellow legal pad fill a wall, pushpinned edge to edge; dizzying compilations of writings spill over a canvas. Reading becomes a physical and visual endurance test, defying completion. To the extent that it divests itself of theoretical models once seen as fundamental to progressive 20th-century art, we might even consider Landers' language a form of radically innovative, quasi-heroic abstraction--even as it paraphrases an alternative model in which art's duty is seen as the reproduction of the social world. Thus we are constantly brought back to the form itself: is it novelistic, diaristic, parody, critique? Is it literary at all? Is it art?

Does it matter? Landers' comic language of mundanity divorces his Conceptual and Minimal frameworks from their earlier functions, substituting solipsism for self-reference, routine for serial repetition. His gestures of self-abasement and his loud show of bad faith subverting any philosophical seriousness, he wreaks havoc with prevailing catechisms. The texts lampoon artistic practice, the figure of the artist, and the artist's relation to the market. They also take on the viewer--questioning our desire for art, and the means by which that desire is piqued, or frustrated.

Art has long been charged with the responsibility of upsetting the status quo, challenging convention, and injecting youth and vitality--indeed, life itself--into a system fraught with anxiety over its depleted social function and ever pending obsolescence. Younger artists particularly are often expected to turn this trick through some form of insult to the audience--as long, that is, as the "shocks" aren't too disruptive. Many card-carrying members of the art world retain a skeptical conscience concerning this contradiction between negation and affirmation. Biting the hand that feeds you may be cathartic, but once built into the system, it is a compromised form of confrontation. And its familiarity as a strategy can, and has, produced a secondary symptom: a pervasive feeling of contemporary art's impotence and ineffectiveness.