For over twenty years, Mark Landis spent his days making copies of pictures he found in auction house journals. When he was happy with the results he would get in touch with various museums, primarily in the southern states of the USA, to arrange a meeting. On his arrival, he adopted an alter-ego – most commonly a Jesuit Priest called Father Scott – and attempted to donate his work to the museum’s collection, claiming that the object was part of his mother’s estate. It is not clear how often his gifts were accepted, and – on the occasions they were – how long each museum took to recognise the object as inauthentic. In 2010, following a failed attempt to gift a painting to Hillard University Art Museum in Lafayette, a number of articles were published in national newspapers that exposed Landis’ activities. Since the pictures he was gifting were copies, and since he pretended they were authored by well-known artists, it seemed like a straightforward case of forgery, and this was the story that was spun.
The objects were often described as being "masterful" or "brilliant", but it should be immediately clear to any reasonably experienced curator or registrar that there are problems with the works’ claims to authenticity, no matter what supporting evidence Landis supplied. They are generally made with the "wrong" materials, such as acrylic paint or marker pen, and with embellishments that "compensate" for seemingly poor reproductions in catalogues, such as making a dark sky bluer. As a result, when one sees Landis’ objects for the first time, especially in full knowledge of the dominant narrative surrounding him, it is not uncommon to feel a sense of disappointment that they aren’t "better".
This starting point for this exhibition was a reinterpretation of Landis’ objects. Rather than viewing them as forgeries, they should instead be seen as props that enabled Landis to generate a kind of short-lived social hit, which developed into a full-blown addiction. He wanted to be a philanthropist, but had neither the financial nor social means, so he made his objects in order to facilitate an encounter that enabled him to play at philanthropy. When Landis sat in a curator’s office, he could not, for obvious reasons, claim any authorship of the object itself, nor of the mechanisms that brought it into his possession. If the object is a hopeless forgery, then that’s the fault of either his mother or the auction house that sold it to her, rather than his. So in that sense, it didn’t matter whether the curator believed the work was genuine or not, as long as the meeting was enacted cordially and professionally; and it also didn’t matter whether the object was accepted, directly declined, or even disposed of after he left. It was at the point of the encounter, which took place at the institutional border, and in which the structures of patronage exploded into view, that the work was truly operational.
'The Landis Museum' was a site that pointed to other such moments, which brought works by multiple artists together in the spirit of the encounter. The works contained within it were not about Mark Landis, nor any other wider social, political or aesthetic concerns connected to him. Rather, they existed in their own social, political and aesthetic realms, and were present as a result of their relationship to the encounter in its widest possible sense. They were arranged on and around a single display object, bringing them into physical and aesthetic contact with each other.
Artists included in the exhibition:
Bianca Baldi, Irina Gheorghe, Alex Impey, Kapwani Kiwanga, Nina Liebenberg, Sarah Pierce and Alexandra Sukhareva. The Derry-Londonderry version also included work by Helena Hamilton, Dorothy Hunter, Katrina Sheena Smyth, and Phillip McCrilly.
