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Search - Art, Life and God

Art Life and God
Author: Sean Landers

This artists' book has been published in conjunction with an exhibition at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller in East Hampton, NY. It is 11 x 8.5 inches; 160 pages with 155 full-page, full-color facsimile reproductions of Landers' performance-writings. The title page of each book has been hand-written and signed by the artist. It is an edition of 250 num... more »bered copies.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. 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 ridiculous, 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.

ISBN-13: 9780982074749
ISBN-10: 0982074743
Publication Date: 10/24/2009
Pages: 160
Edition: First edition.
Rating:

0 stars, based on 0 rating

Publisher: Glenn Horowitz Bookseller
Book Type: Perfect Paperback
Members Wishing: 0
Reviews: Amazon | Write a Review

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