Visual voices - the use of writing in the works of artists Sean Landers, Kenneth Goldsmith, Joseph Grigely

Art in America, April, 1996 by Raphael Rubinstein

With characteristic orthography and grammar, on page 38 of his recently published autobiography, [sic], Sean Landers speculates:

There must be something I could write though that won't be difficult yet still meaningfull. I mean the belief or hope in the back of my mind is that even though this writing appears awfull and trashy, trite and meaningless that somhow it possess a deeper more profound meaning.

Landers's title refers to the fact that articles quoting from his atrociously misspelled texts are always studded with the editorial notation "[sic]." And with Landers, critics often have to resort to quotation since there's so little of formal interest in his paintings. In front of his canvases, the viewer is obliged, if he or she wants to "experience" the work, to read row after row of impossibly long lines of handwritten text, tracing the meandering, often banal, thoughts of the artist. The 10 or 15 minutes it takes to read through one of Landers's paintings, multiplied by several works, is a long time to stand immobile in a gallery, and the crudely drawn imagery--chimpanzee heads and female breasts in a recent painting titled Pimple, for instance--Landers occasionally throws into the middle of the text doesn't make things any easier. How does he get away with it? Soul-baring confessions (albeit on the level of a tabloid TV talk show) keep things moving, and as well as enjoying Landers's flashes of satiric humor, viewers with a sense of the absurd can appreciate the discrepancy between the prolonged attention the paintings require and the flimsiness of their visual content. It also may be that, even among Landers's fans, few people actually read his paintings from beginning to end. The paintings additionally benefit from their application of Conceptual-style textuality to very un-Conceptual subjects such as ambition, lust and intoxication.

Extracting passages from [sic], as from Landers's paintings, entails a certain loss, even if you leave the spelling mistakes untouched (as I have done here). Struggling through page after page of Landers's scrawled block lettering is a far different reading experience from that of conventional print. He writes on yellow legal pads, in an endless paragraph broken only with ellipses. Even reproduced in black and white and reduced in size, the Riverhead Books 1995 facsimile edition of Landers's manuscript--the original was shown on the walls of Andrea Rosen Gallery in 1993--gives the reader a sense of being invited into the private life of the author/artist.(3) This intimacy is reinforced by the presence of the crossings-out and crude phonetic misspellings. In conventional print, Landers's mistakes would probably be intolerable to read, whereas in handwritten form they add to the effect of authenticity.

Landers's quest for "more profound meaning" takes him back to his hometown, where he gets drunk with an old friend; to the Venice Biennale ("I was at La Fenice when a beautifull woman came up to me wanting to talk about my art. I was instantly attracted to her."); thence to Greece for an illicit affair and a bout of despair ("And no I'm not saying I'm going to off myself in this godforsaken tourist trap of Mykonos"). In between, he mopes around his studio on the Lower East Side, complaining about women, his lack of talent and the sorry state of American society: "Has our culture really become so thin as to allow someone like me acceptence as one of it's artists?"