SEAN LANDERS — [sic] — Riverhead Books, 1995 — Second Edition

Before downtown New York turned artistic dysfunction into mythology, Sean Landers had already written the manual.

[sic] begins in 1993 as 454 handwritten pages: Landers recording, almost in real time, the unstable machinery of becoming an artist. Sex, money, jealousy, ambition, humiliation, friends, dealers, imagined success, fear of failure and the exhausting performance of being "Sean Landers" all enter the work without much separation between life and art.

The original [sic] appeared through Publicsfear Press, the short-lived New York publishing project founded by Tod Lippy and Pamela A. Ivinski. Only 250 signed and numbered copies were produced. Publicsfear itself occupied an unusually fertile early-1990s network, publishing or working with figures including Rirkrit Tiravanija, Elizabeth Peyton, Richard Phillips, Meg Cranston and Todd Haynes. Landers was simultaneously entering the international gallery system: Andrea Rosen in New York, Jennifer Flay in Paris, Esther Schipper in Cologne, the Aperto section of the 1993 Venice Biennale, then White Cube in London.

The supposed failure was already succeeding.

That contradiction is central to the work.

1994. Lorraine O'Grady writes about Landers in Artforum and proposes "slack art" as a more useful description than the increasingly fashionable "abject." The 1980s boom had collapsed; heroic confidence had become difficult to sustain. What replaced it was uncertainty, deliberate inadequacy, confession, irony and the peculiar spectacle of artists publicly performing failure while beginning to occupy increasingly privileged positions within the art world.

Landers did not illustrate that condition. He wrote from inside it.

Then comes 1995. The artwork gets a barcode.

Riverhead Books takes a limited artist publication built from handwritten pages and republishes it as a commercial paperback: 454 pages, ART / MEMOIR, $15.00 U.S. Even the publishing apparatus gets absorbed into Landers' performance. The back cover promises "Hard-won Critical Acclaim for [sic]," followed by a series of savage assessments — every one attributed to: —Sean Landers. Author, reviewer, publicist, critic and saboteur become the same person.

Inside, the preface pushes the contradiction further. Landers admits embarrassment at having exposed people close to him, questions why he ever wrote the thing and describes regretting the original printing — before acknowledging that a real publisher now wants to distribute it much more widely. Private humiliation becomes public circulation. Bohemia gets a barcode.

From the distance of thirty years, [sic] also looks remarkably early. A decade later, another downtown New York generation begins forming around Dash Snow, Dan Colen, Nate Lowman, Ryan McGinley, Agathe Snow, Adam McEwen, Aaron Young and their wider orbit. What Landers establishes is a permission structure: the artist can be protagonist, material, embarrassment, brand, joke and commodity simultaneously. By the post-9/11 downtown period, much of that territory already feels strangely familiar.

By 2007, Snow, Colen and McGinley are being packaged by New York magazine as "Warhol's Children." Landers had recorded the psychological version fourteen years earlier.

2010. Art Production Fund and White Columns organise the first complete public reading of [sic]. Among those reading are 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 young artist who filled hundreds of pages worrying about whether he would ever properly enter the art world eventually has those pages read aloud by the network that now constitutes it.

This 1995 Riverhead edition occupies the most curious point in that trajectory. The 1993 Publicsfear edition is the scarce, signed artist book. This is the version in which [sic] escapes that protected category and enters ordinary commercial circulation.

Its condition makes the point unusually well. The wrappers are heavily rubbed, the edges worn, corners softened and chipped, with visible creasing, scratches and handling. It does not present itself as an untouched edition preserved for the market. It looks like what Riverhead allowed the artwork to become: a book somebody actually carried around and read.

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

Condition: Good, with pronounced rubbing and handling wear to wrappers, chipped and softened corners, edge wear, creasing and surface marks consistent with age and use.

Riverhead Books, New York, 1995. Second edition / first commercial trade edition. 454 pages, 14 × 19 cm. Softcover; reproductions of Landers' handwritten manuscript throughout. ISBN 1-57322-507-X.