January 22 – April 11, 2010 January 22 – April 11, 2010

Sean Landers Cover image: Improbable History (still), 1992 (Born in 1962 in Palmer, Video with sound, 1 hour 1 minute 23 seconds . Lives and works Courtesy of Sean Landers, New York in .)

Landers has exhibited widely in the US and internationally. In addition to his 2004 solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Zürich, Landers has been included in shows at Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Kunstverein, Hamburg; the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans; Bard College, Annandale- on-Hudson, New York; Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco; the ; and White Columns, New York; among others. His work is included in numerous museums and public collections including the Tate Museum of Art, London; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Seattle Museum of Art, Seattle; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Denver Art Museum; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

Special thanks to Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York; greengrassi, London; and Taka Ishii Gallery, To Whom it May Concern (page 2), 1991 Tokyo. General support for the Contemporary’s exhibitions program is generously provided by the Ink on paper, 5 pages, each: 11 x 8 1/2 inches, overall: 11 1/2 x 48 1/2 inches Whitaker Foundation; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; William E. Weiss Foundation; Courtesy of Sean Landers, New York Nancy Reynolds and Dwyer Brown; Missouri Arts Council, a state agency; Regional Arts Commission; Arts and Education Council; and members of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. January 22 – April 11, 2010 January 22 – April 11, 2010

1 Main Galleries works included in this exhibition. a holistic set of themes and characters within Lander’s epic Greeting visitors in the museum methodologies, key among them monologue. Sitting on a humble lobby is the triptych Tricast (Funeral an unflinching presentation of the tabletop, a sculpted bronze Sean for a Friend by Elton John) (1991), artist’s consciousness. This effort chimp, Ich Mach Mich (1994), guards featuring Landers, long-haired and is acutely felt in his text paintings, Landers’ Homeric epic [sic] (1993). close up, wailing at the camera’s evidencing a spectrum of emotion Shown in its original hand-written Landers lens. In fact, we find Landers’ from ignoble to its most exultant. form, mounted along the museum’s 1991-1994, Improbable History framed face in each gallery of the Designed to be read piecemeal, curved wall, Landers’ novel, written exhibition. Witness to his singing, rather than as cohesive texts, large over the course of a year, tells Expressive and literary, pacing, confessionals, storytelling, scale works like Dingleberry Sean the story of the artist’s losses and Landers quixotic and elusive and even self-flagellation, visitors (1993) and Thought Bubble (1994) triumphs in art, love, and life. practice has since the early become voyeurs, as Landers become immersive giants, while Weaving stream-of-thought 1990s defied contemporary art reveals the personal cosmos, others like Fart (1993) present more text or soliloquizing on lo-fi video, world trends. For the artist’s first private life, anxieties and antics legible, if still demanding, reads. Landers presents the artist as an large-scale survey in an American of a self-conscious artist and soul. Throughout each is Landers’ voice, object of study, from the earliest museum, this exhibition takes as From Anyone’s Orgasm (1992) to Italian with all of its love, lust, greed, yellow legal pads featuring as its subject these early years in the High Renaissance and Baroque envy, joy, humility, pride and autobiographer the fictional artist studio. Presenting an overview of (1993) and Improbable History (1992), fear—at once dramatic, imagined, Chris Hamson, to the reclaiming Landers oeuvre from 1991-1994, his videos remind us of the legacy and utterly genuine. In the final of the persona by Landers’ own the show includes text works on of Vito Acconci’s endurance large gallery are three years of voice. Here he casts himself as paper, photographs, paintings, performances and Bruce Nauman’s Landers’ Calendar Pages (1991-1993), subject, proposing the mastery of , and diaristic calendars, tragic-comic studio films from for which the artist chronicled each the artwork is the mastery of the with a focus on video. Restaging the 1970s. Yet in its deep and passing day, drawing a three-year artist. In a relentless articulation this critical moment in the artist’s ostensibly sincere expression of landscape of personal and cultural of emotion, at its most base and its career, Improbable History proposes artistic and emotional process, histories. most noble—from envy and self- that Landers’ formative body Landers disrupts video art’s Populating the galleries and doubt, to humility, empathy, and of work was one that defined authenticity and fractures our joining us as fellow onlookers in the true love—Landers explores the the artist, the persona, and the expectations. exhibition is a small community of process of artistic creation through conceits that he has cultivated Responsive to his conceptual terra cotta heads and leprechauns, the invention, and simultaneous and enriched over the course of his predecessors, but also deeply which were until now rarely revelation, of the self. twenty-year career. connected to classic literature and exhibited publicly. These tragic- Key to Landers’ practice its flawed heroes (from Samuel comic figures—The Unfortunate Son of in this period were his videos, Beckett, James Joyce, Fyodor an Irish Drunk (1991), for one—stand often shot alone in his New York Dostoyefsky, Knut Hamson, to John as dwarf beacons in the space and studio, and often backdropped by Kennedy Toole), Landers presents constitute rich supporting cast of

To Whom it May Concern (page 1), 1991 Ink on paper, 5 pages, each: 11 x 8 1/2 inches, overall: 11 1/2 x 48 1/2 inches Courtesy of Sean Landers, New York

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