Logorrhea: Sean Landers Is [sic]

Supervert's review of [sic], the brilliant first book by artist Sean Landers. Originally published in Paper Magazine (November 1995).

Sean Landers once liked to torment his parents by telling them he was going to go to art school and then become a writer. Although the transition wasn't quite that quick — it's been nearly a decade since he received his MFA from Yale — the 33-year-old Landers has described a very successful trajectory through the art world by transferring his latent writerly impulses to art-making. And if shrinks of the future hope to illustrate logorrhea (think logo + diarrhea) with his wordy painting, now they can also cite his arty literature: not only does Landers' first book, [sic], hit the stands this month, but the budding littérateur has already signed a deal for his second.

The Latin title of Landers' book, as well as being homologous to "sick," implies that it's genuine but not quite right somehow. "I think of every time my writing is quoted in magazines and is followed by [sic.] a real writers way of reminding me I'm an idiot." The veneer of veracity it certainly has: "stream of consciousness" would be an understated way of describing Landers' writing technique, a brilliant real-time gush of idiocy, comedy, megalomania, neediness, and boredom — a veritable Niagara River of consciousness hurtling toward the Falls. There's no level of humiliating personal detail not swept up by [sic], to the point where it forms a feedback loop between art and life: when Landers can't refrain from discussing his love life, textual revelations spark real events which are written about in turn. "How can I tell you that I hate my own book? It's a stinking open wound that mercylessly exposes people whom I love and care about."

Of course [sic] can be added to the shelves alongside Delacroix's diaries and Van Gogh's letters as a self-vivisection of the artistic mind. "When lay people ask me what I do for a living and I reply 'artist' it feels like I'm responding 'mime...' At least when a mime declairs that he's a mime he knows for sure whether or not he is. I don't know if I'm an artist or a misdiagnosed mental patient." "My fear of course tells me that I haven't nearly enough art juice for all these shows. What is art juice anyway?" But does [sic] have literary juice? Landers disregards narrative conventions — "What I'm trying to say is that I could write more tradditionally, more poetically, I could follow a plot and invent charectors but why should I? I'd only be shitty in comparison to geniouses." — but precisely this enables him to display more trenchant ingenuity than any formulaic grad-school-like hack à la Douglas Coupland. In the end, Landers' m.o. evokes as great a writer as Samuel Beckett, whose Molloy is uncannily reminiscent of [sic] — especially insofar as both are plotless meditations on what a bitch it is to write. And if Beckett ultimately found his solution to the problem of writing in a literary "dialogue with the void," Landers offers up another in the form of a monologue literally void of sense: "Writing," he declares, "is a lot easier without thinking."

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