THE ARTWORK ENTERS THE BOOKSTORE

Pick up this copy and you can feel immediately that it has been read.

The wrappers are rubbed and softened. The corners have given way. The surface carries the particular texture of handling — not damage exactly, but evidence. Someone carried this book. Someone treated it like a book.

That is, in fact, the whole story.

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1993 — CONFESSION BECOMES ARTWORK

[sic] begins not as a publication but as an object: 454 individual sheets of yellow lined paper, covered in Sean Landers' handwriting.

The text is an extended stream of consciousness — ambition, sex, insecurity, envy, money, artistic failure, imagined success, and the increasingly unstable character called "Sean Landers." It was first published in 1993 in a small edition by Publicsfear, a specialist press, circulating within the narrow economy of the artist book.

The timing is worth holding.

In 1993, Landers is already moving through the emerging international infrastructure of contemporary art. He exhibits at Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York while also showing with Jennifer Flay in Paris and Esther Schipper in Cologne; White Cube follows in London in 1994. The institutional scaffolding of a serious career is assembling itself around him.

[sic] performs almost the opposite condition.

Instead of authority: doubt. Instead of polish: handwriting. Instead of professional distance: confession. Instead of constructing the successful artist from the outside, Landers lets us watch him desperately trying to become one from the inside.

Lorraine O'Grady recognised the condition early. Writing on Landers in Artforum in 1994, she rejected the increasingly fashionable label "abject" and proposed something more precise: "slack art" — art produced after the momentum of the 1980s had collapsed, where confidence, ambition and failure coexist uneasily. Landers becomes one of its clearest examples because he gives that deflation a voice.

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1995 — BOHEMIA GETS A BARCODE

Then something stranger happens.

Riverhead Books — a mainstream New York trade publisher — takes this vast handwritten work and turns it into a $15 paperback.

The gallery object enters commercial publishing. The handwritten page becomes mechanically reproduced image. The artist becomes author. The artwork becomes memoir. The memoir remains an artwork.

Even the conventional machinery of publishing becomes unstable. The back cover announces "Hard-won Critical Acclaim for [sic]," only for the supposed critical quotations to be attributed back to Sean Landers himself. Author, critic, publicist and saboteur collapse into the same name.

The scarce Publicsfear edition preserves [sic] within the specialist category of the artist book. The Riverhead edition does something riskier: it allows the work to circulate as an ordinary commercial paperback without fully surrendering its status as art.

Bohemia gets a barcode.

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2000–07 — DOWNTOWN REGENERATES

A decade later, downtown New York regenerates around another loose community of artists.

Dash Snow sits at the centre of what the Brant Foundation later described as the post-9/11 downtown New York art scene, alongside Dan Colen, Nate Lowman, Ryan McGinley, Hanna Liden, Agathe Snow, Adam McEwen, Emily Sundblad and Aaron Young. Josh Smith occupies the wider downtown ecology around them.

The work looks different. But much of the territory mapped by [sic] already feels strangely familiar.

Friends enter the work. Apartments enter the work. Nightlife enters the work. Embarrassment enters the work. Printed matter, photographs, graffiti, newspapers, private jokes and personal mythology all become available as artistic material.

With Snow in particular, the separation between lived experience and artistic production becomes almost impossible to maintain: Polaroids of friends, homemade zines, found print, graffiti, collage and the debris of social life move directly into the work.

This is not a lineage. Landers does not produce this later scene. But he catches one of its central conditions unusually early: the artist's life can become material before anyone has decided where the biography ends and the artwork begins. The artist may simultaneously appear as protagonist, embarrassment, brand, failure, joke and commodity.

Landers simply puts all of that into print in 1993.

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2007 — THE MARGIN BECOMES THE MYTH

By 2007, Snow, Colen and Ryan McGinley had been packaged by New York magazine as "Warhol's Children" — a media-made shorthand for a downtown culture of partying, rebellion and artistic production that had suddenly become internationally marketable.

The label was reductive, but the transformation was real. What had presented itself as peripheral downtown life was now moving rapidly through museums, biennials and major galleries. Downtown nonchalance was being packaged and sold back as cultural identity.

Read backwards from that moment, [sic] begins to look prophetic — not because Landers anticipates the scene, but because he records, in real time, a change in what an artist is allowed to use as material. Ten years later, another downtown New York generation makes that condition culturally visible.

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2010 — THE ART WORLD READS IT BACK

Art Production Fund and White Columns stage the first complete public reading of [sic].

The readers include Cecily Brown, Gavin Brown, John Currin, Liam Gillick, Matthew Higgs, Adam McEwen, Friedrich Petzel, Richard Phillips, Andrea Rosen, Linda Yablonsky, Lisa Yuskavage and Landers himself. The organisers describe the once-obscure publication as a cult object and "the stuff of legend."

A book documenting one young artist's fear that he might never properly enter the art world is eventually read aloud by the very network he had been struggling to enter.

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Pick up this copy again.

The rubbed wrappers, softened corners and handling are not incidental to the story. This is not the 250-copy Publicsfear edition, preserved within the specialist economy of the artist book. This is the 1995 Riverhead paperback: the moment the artwork left that economy and entered ordinary circulation.

Its condition is therefore evidence of the conceptual event.

The artwork entered the bookstore. Somebody treated it like a book.

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SOURCE OBJECT
Sean Landers
[sic]
Riverhead Books, New York, 1995
454 pages, 14 × 19 cm
Second edition