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The Idea Man |
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by Sean Landers
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2:18 |
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I am the idea man. Every good idea Sean ever had came from me. Hell, I’m the guy who made him go to art school. I even made him write all of those masturbatory and suicidal poems when he was just fourteen years old. I was the one who made him write poetry when his life depended upon it. That’s how he learned to vent. Which in turn gave birth to the creature we now know as Mr. Sean Landers idiot savant minus the savant. I first came to Sean when he was just eight years old. I found him on his paper route crawling up to houses on his hands and knees pretending that delivering the newspaper was his last dying act, all while imagining his obituary. “Small town paper boy dies on route. His last dying paper.” I thought, this is a kid I can work with. And that’s how it works. There are very few of us idea men around anymore. We were a dime a dozen back in the Renaissance when art was the true embodiment of human genius. Nowadays you find more idea men in the sciences, physics, computers and medicine. That’s where the human animal is really progressing. Idea men visited people like Jefferson, Franklin and Adams. Newton, Galileo, Einstein, Da Vinci and Michelangelo. You get the idea. Well with less and less use for art I decided to visit Mr. Landers. I must admit that at times I’ve felt like I was beating a dead horse but now that he’s writing again he may surprise us yet. Still, talk about a lame assignment. At idea man conventions you meet idea men for people like Steven Hawking. He asks me who I have and I have to say Sean Landers, okay so I’m a frustrated idea man but I’m going to look on the bright side because it is my job to “illuminate” if you will. Anyway I got this bozo an international audience that’s not chopped liver, I also think Mr. Landers is a hundred year client. That’s a trade term for a genius who is not appreciated fully in his own lifetime, poor bastard, he can’t help himself. I really like him. I just wish he were a bit smarter and that I were a better idea man. You know what the wildest thing about this painting is? I had to conceive of myself, give me a voice, a face and a name, otherwise I wouldn’t exist at all. What do you call a being that conceives of and gives birth to itself? God.
Sean Landers is an artist living in New York, whose paintings frequently combine text and image. His book [sic] (1993) ‘…shows readers the world through his eyes, all misspellings intact.’ His work is the focus of a 2004 solo exhibition, Kunsthalle Zurich, and a forthcoming exhibition, CAM St. Louis.
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