February 27, 2010

New edition of Sean Landers' [sic] to be published in conjunction with a reading

Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is pleased to announce its latest publication: a new edition of Sean Landers’ [sic] will be released on the evening of Saturday, February 27th in conjunction with a public reading of the complete text. Landers will read the beginning and with nineteen others, including Michelle Reyes, John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage, Richard Phillips, Rob Pruitt, Clarissa Dalrymple, Gavin Brown, and David Rimanelli, each taking an intervening section, until Landers reads again at the end. The event is a presentation of the Art Production Fund and Matthew Higgs of White Columns is coordinating the reading. It will take place at 375 Hudson Street on the ground floor of the Saatchi Building.

Those familiar with Landers’ notorious book will know that such a reading promises to be an extraordinary event. In writing [sic], Landers took a widely held notion—that personal expression and self revelation are at the core of artistic endeavor—and pressed the concept to its logical conclusion. The resulting book is both a parody of artistic expression and a kind of performance, one so self-revealing and masochistic that it has drawn comparison to the work of Vito Acconci or Chris Burden. Landers lays out his methodology in the first sentence: Say for instence that I thought my life was worth describing every ugly detail of and that I was deluded enough to think my jerking off in my studio was something higher than what it is… The title is a notation used by editors to indicate that a text has been printed “as it was written.” [sic] reproduces 454 handwritten pages of notebook paper just as it was written. Every misspelled word and grammatical error is left uncorrected; all of Landers’ agonizing insecurities, delusions of grandeur, sexual fantasies, pointless ramblings, and trivial banalities are retained unedited with no embarrassing detail omitted or name changed to protect the innocent. Writing in Artforum after its initial publication, Jan Agvikos called it “humorous, prattling, seriously insincere, self-deprecating nihilism.” The first edition of [sic] was published in 1993 by Publicsfear in an edition of just 250 copies, but the book struck a nerve and soon became the rarest of publishing phenomena: an artists’ book picked up by a mainstream publisher and released as a mass market paperback.  Now Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is bringing out a new edition of this contemporary classic which will be available beginning February 27th at the reading. For more information about this book, or about Art, Life and God, our recent exhibition and publication of Landers’ early work, please contact us at