Art and Craft Review

Mark Landis is not a striking figure.  He's a diminutive man, thin and frail-looking, with features akin to a cartoon hobo's.  He doesn't carry himself with particular vigor or good posture, and his reedy voice would be easily lost in the most minor commotion.  However unremarkable his stature and restrained his demeanor, Landis is not an easy character to forget.

Sam Cullman and Jennifer Grausman's Art and Craft is as entertaining as documentaries get.  It's a cat-and-mouse caper, a meditation on the importance of museums and fine art, and a beguiling character study.  And at the center of it all (the mouse, as it were) is Landis, who forges historical documents as easily as he mimics the work of Dr. Seuss and Charles Schultz, who makes an impressive Picasso forgery starting with a copy of the painting he printed from the internet and pasted to a board, who dispassionately reads out old medical records cataloguing his slew of mental ailments and comments on which he thinks actually plague him.  Truth is stranger than fiction, they say, and perhaps never more so than here.

Art and Craft delves into Landis's psyche without finding any easy answers.  He isn't committing any crime, and there's no viciousness in his constant duping.  He doesn't showboat like Exit Through the Gift Shop's Mr. X, and there's no intellectual exploration a la Tim of Tim's Vermeer.  Landis, it seems, commits his forgery as a misguided act of philanthropy, believing himself to be doing good while passing copies of paintings to unknowing museum curators, most of whom fall for his (made-up) tragic backstory and gladly accept the "priceless" gifts.

Landis seems cut form the same cloth as Norman Bates, so unassuming in appearance and with a fixation on his mother (whom he always refers to as "Mother").  But he lacks the facade of charm and good nature.  He carries himself with a disinterested, ambling authenticity, even when donning his false personas and passing off lies about his work.  He's the same person whether he's lounging in his cluttered house or crossing a museum employee whilst wearing a priest's garb; the lies he tells are so ingrained in him.  The fiction somehow becomes the truth of his life.  The lines between reality and fiction - fabrication, really - are blurred.

The cat in this chase is Matthew Leininger, a museum registrar whose fixation on stopping Landis costs him his job, and consumes his life.  When he shows a photo of Landis to his young daughter and asks who it is, she responds in the rushed compound speech of a child who repeats what she hears over and over: "Marklandis!"  Leininger is almost as compelling a character as Landis; does his obsession stem from a sense of duty, a noble quest to protect the integrity of artistic institutions?  Or is it born of the desire to be a gumshoe, the thrill of the chase?  Possibly, there's a sense of quite literally being the only man for the job, as the FBI's art crimes devision cannot intervene, as no money is changing hands, and thus, no crime is being committed.

As entertaining and strange as the film is, it also will likely inspire some debate among and within viewers about the value of art.  I found myself wondering if the authenticity of the works on a museum's walls actually matters.  Landis's copies are impressive in their attention to detail; even the keen eyes of art experts are easily fooled, as his paintings adorn the walls of dozens of museums.  If the visitors are none the wiser, does it matter that they're seeing a replica, and not the actual piece?  My gut says that it does, but it's hard to articulate why.  Perhaps it comes down to the artist's intent in creating the work, some deep well of emotion or thought that comes to fruition in the final painting.  But following that line of thought makes the forgeries just as compelling, as Landis "wastes" his talent on making copies rather than making his own art (save one drawing in his eventual exhibit, and a telling one at that).

Perhaps it's out of some indecipherable quirk of Landis's unknowable mind, or perhaps the joy of knowing that his work is being seen and appreciated that the artist finds his motivation.  There's the suggestion, too, in his made-up family affairs, that by becoming the charitable patron to these museums, Landis gets to live out a fantasy of normalcy touched by some extravagance.  He follows in the brushstrokes of masterful artists, briefly inhabiting the lives of men who might have known his loneliness, if not his anonymity.  In his deceit, Landis experiences brief moments of human connection, and even if they aren't true, they're beautiful all the same.