FROM THE BOOK

"The kind of banal prattle that infuses Landers' brilliant early videos—their disclosure of inverted aspirations—is to millennial self-consciousness what the 19th century novel was to the bourgeois subject. Landers' onanism, both literal and literary, was partly a response to the analytical and propositional use of language in the work of artists such as Lawrence Weiner and On Kawara. Yet 'Sean's' soto voce critique of this emphasis of conceptual practice, by restoring 'emotionality,' hints at something further: a 'dramaturgical consciousness' that suffuses self-expression in a social space increasingly defined by the 'intimacy-at-a-distance' of parasocial relationships. If privacy was coveted in a bourgeois society overrun with the sphere of private life, it is a similar theatrical self that acts in the public-private sphere of social media. Already in Landers' voice we can detect this abiding injunction to lay bare, the distant echo of the vulgarization of intimacy afforded by the technologies of the self in the 'social network.' The combined effect is to sublate the 'distance from the self' that is implied in the very notion of a 'public.' For Landers, that is, before it was transformed into the typology of the simpering monologues of the online self, this was never feigned intimacy or puerile sentiment alone. After all, as he points out, 'you can't fake an erection.' But there are now millions of Seans out there, for whom the antinomies of earnest self-baring and narcissistic aggrandizement are the stuff of everyday. The assumption is rather that personal life is somehow 'meaningful enough to warrant widespread public attention and scrutiny,' as Jeremy Rifkin writes. If the singularly modern fear was that of being watched—an omnipresent electronic surveillance—that pathology has shifted to a dread 'that no one may be watching,' a condition Landers never seemed to take for granted."
—João Ribas, excerpted from the chapter Sean Landers Has 171 Friends published in Sean Landers: 1990-1995, Improbable History.