Thursday, April 13, 2023

Past: Sean Landers

"A joke can only be told so many time. A joke is spent and exhausted. So an artwork - with its requisite implicit promise of eternalness - can't really make a joke without implying that it too will one day be depleted. ...  And Landers finds a similar interest in defeat, once the comedy is depleted you have reckon with what remains. Which, what remains?"

...commodified and neotenic rodent. ... And Landers' plaid animals, sad clowns, and now a pinocchio "plankboy" are the means of a lesser sort of identification. Landers' characters are not focus-group perfected. And their revulsion is "an effect of anticlimax created by an unintentional lapse in mood from the sublime to the trivial or ridiculous." ... The definition of bathos. Which Landers prances sad clown around. Landers paintings "arousing pity, especially through vulnerability or sadness," pathetic.


Read full: Sean Landers at Le ConsortiumSean Landers at Rodolphe Janssen, Sean Landers at Friedrich Petzel