About the work

Lansing-Dreiden
10/18/2001 - 17/11/2001 at LFL Gallery
531 West 26th Street, 4th Floor, New York, NY, 10001

Lansing-Dreiden is the collective name of a group of young artists who work with drawing, digital animation and music. Their collaborative work is based on , or inspired by, elements from the fragmentary output of two earlier artist-writers, Friedrich Lansing and Caspar Dreiden, who lived in South America in the 1950's. The group, however is less interested in homage than in salvage, in the idea of picking up where someone else left off and, exquisite-corpse fashion, adding something that both preserves and transforms the original.
Although the nature of that original material isn't made clear in this case, it has led to engaging results in the show's main piece, a black-and-white animated film titled "Quiet Earth". An episodic adventure narrative, it follows two women as they trek through snow, encounter strange creatures and end up in an ominously labyrinthine building, from which they finally emerge only to find themselves disintegrating.
The film has a trippy continuous rhythm, with imaginative dissolves and transitions and a gently propulsive score by a band called the Lines. If, in the end, the show, which includes drawings, feels somewhat opaque and open-end, that seems to be the point. in an incremental aesthetic, the sketsch rules supreme.

Text by Holladn Cotter, "The New York Times, 11/2/01, pg. e40


QUESTIONS CONCERNING LANSING-DREIDEN
Q: What is Lansing-Dreiden?
A: Today, Lansing-Dreiden is an organization of like-minded people and computers established to generate motivation within and beyond the context of our life-narrative.

Q: Who are "Lansing" and "Dreiden?"
A: We, the persons assigned to represent Lansing-Dreiden do not even know. That said, their true identity may be revealed to us as additional evidence is gathered. Up to the present, all we have is their names, Friedrich Lansing & Caspar Dreiden, and a few remaining fragments of their work. Our work is, in part,  motivated by this ongoing exploration.

Q: What is/are your respective positions within Lansing-Dreiden, and how were they assigned?
A: The link to Lansing-Dreiden is familial, stretching back a few generations to one of our relatives in South America. We can be described as "producers" for the outfit, which would include all areas of production.

Q: Please explain the significance of the Lansing-Dreiden logo.
A: The budding branches that frame the Lansing-Dreiden logo are to symbolize perpetual growth, embracing the ermine and crow. The ermine stands for purity, the crow, a symbol for opposition. The "MM," a recent addition to the crest, marks Lansing-Dreiden's renewal, and passage into the new millennium.

Q: Is Lansing-Dreiden a conceptual art project?
A: A common question. No. Lansing-Dreiden does not acknowledge a distinction between art and commerceóor anything else.

Q: What does Lansing-Dreiden currently produce?
A: Ideas manifesting themselves in the form of plans/drawings, fully operational objects/devices, saleable images and objects,  musical compositions & computer-generated works. All of these designed and fabricated in order to generate motivation for both Lansing-Dreiden and our patrons.

by LFL Gallery and Lansing-Dreiden