Opening reception and book release October 24th from 6-8 pm. Exhibition continues through January 10, 2010.

Sean Landers: Art, Life and God.

Exhibition Info and Images PDF (9 pages, 2.2mb)
Publication Prospectus PDF (4 pages, 700kb)

I am, in a way, still Chris Hamson –Sean Landers

Since the early 90s, Sean Landers has built up a puzzling and elusive body of work, one that is at once visual and writerly, expressive and performative, one which has consistently defied prevailing art world trends and confounded critical exegesis.  Art, Life and God, made in 1990, was his first mature body of work and the first to draw serious critical attention—it has set the tone and laid the conceptual framework for much of what has followed. Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is pleased to present the first full exhibition of this body of work since 1991 and to be publishing Art, Life and God, making it available as an artist’s book as Landers originally envisioned it for the first time.

Art, Life and God is a series of text pieces Landers wrote out longhand on sheets of yellow notebook paper. For exhibition they were tacked to the wall unframed and displayed as “paintings.” It was in these works that performance first became a significant element of Lander’s art; it has remained at the core of his artistic practice ever since. Art, Life and God revolves around a character named Chris Hamson (in reference to Knut Hamsun, author of the early 20th century novel Hunger). He is a loser-everyman-artist and a quasi-autobiographical stand-in whose persona Landers would adopt in the studio. He inhabited the character and the work he produced was ostensibly Chris Hamson’s own, though it was, simultaneously, a record of Landers’ performance and his development of the Chris Hamson persona.

By performing as his own doppelganger Landers was riffing on a classic existentialist trope. Though his is an outrageous, parody version of “the double,” the device is the same that many, Dostoyevsky notable among them, have used as a means of delving into the identity of the self. Throughout Art, Life and God, Landers’s double pursues art world success and carnal satisfaction but remains desperate, poor, alienated and alone. Hamson moves from delusions of personal magnificence to bouts of crippling insecurity and the writing shifts abruptly in tone to match—whether awash in sentimentality, inflamed by passion, or gripped by fantasy, it is emotionally fervent, and completely idiotic, throughout. That the soaring grandiloquence of the title, Art, Life and God (!), should be undermined by crudely scrawled, misspelled, and ungrammatical pages is emblematic. The work addresses genuine aesthetic and philosophical issues, but it does so by way of farce and slapstick. Landers, by drawing a line between the self and the creative persona (and then thoroughly blurring this line), effectively made his work into a platform from which to stage an ongoing existential drama (or, better, an existential comedy.)

With Art, Life and God, Landers created a genuinely innovative way of working. It is the founding document of his career, but more than that, it has an undeniable place among the key works of the past few decades. After its first exhibition (at Postmasters, in 1990) Landers was tagged as a neo-Conceptualist, a term that is often applied imprecisely, but Landers was undoubtedly pivotal to the revival of Conceptual experimentation that occurred in the 90s and he was especially crucial in demonstrating how a Conceptual framework might invigorate painting, drawing and other traditional media to which Conceptualism had previously been thought antithetical. Having studied under him at Yale, Landers was especially cognizant of Vito Acconci’s movement from writing into performance and one way to read Art, Life and God is as a performance that extends the legacy of Acconci’s notorious “Seedbed” show by giving voice to the most base part of the self. Landers, like Acconci, has since moved out into other media and forms, but the methodology he developed in these early experiments remains the core of his work.
Sean Landers was born in Palmer, Massachusetts, in 1962. He received a BFA from the Philadelphia College of Art in 1984 and an MFA from Yale in 1986. His work is included in numerous museums and public collections. He is represented by Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York. A retrospective of his work will open at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis in January, 2010. For information about the exhibition or publication, contact Glenn Horowitz Bookseller at info@GHbookseller.com.