Sean Landers/ Internal an External Self

gracecupperundergrad
Jan 30, 2021
2 min read

Sean Landers: American artists that uses himself as the topic - self-doubt, insecurities, successes and failures, but also comments on the everyday, even the artwork itself. He used his own views on himself as an artist as his inspiration. ‘Whenever my love life is imperilled, I become…well, basically the truth comes out. […] I was heartsick and needed to vent.’

His written pieces take a diaristic approach to making, displaying the deeply personal as well as the every day reflection in one place.

Landers presents himself as two characters; the written self and the fictive self (named Chris Hamson, his alter-eg. The fictional self makes it 'interesting' but also gives him a 'fig leaf to hide behind', however he is often 'leafless' and exposed.

Main themes:

The artist as an object to study within art practice.
Language is the medium and the message
Stream of consciousness + everyday reflection

From Border Crossing's 2019 Interview: 'Writing the Song of Myself' with Robert Enright and Meeka Walsh

"His early videos and language paintings are delightfully outrageous acts of exposure. Were he to make one, his philosophical declaration would be Discoperio ergo sum. The translation goes something like, “I uncover and lay bare; therefore I am.”'

For the Love of Nothing

1994

Oil on linen

'After last summer I don't know if i'll ever love again'

'I fear so much, I fear your judgment'

'It's easier to like someone who doesn't threaten you'

Fart

1993

Oil on linen.

This piece is an accumulation of diary entry style commissions of thought or feeling which seems created over a large period of time with statements added in increments, some phrases even communication his lack of interest in finishing it as it progressed.