Robert Seydel, Book of Ruth, Siglio, 2011.
„Robert Seydel's Book of Ruth presents an assemblage of collages, letters, journal entries and other artifacts from the life of Seydel's fictional alter-ego, Ruth Greisman--spinster, Sunday painter and friend to Joseph Cornell. Drawing on the inherent seductiveness and intrigue of archives, the volume is conceived as a gathering of fragmented materials by Greisman unearthed from a storage space in the Smithsonian and a suburban family garage, which are presented as a mosaic portrait of a reclusive artist. The New Yorker described the project thus: "Burrowing into the pop-detritus archive somewhere between Ray Johnson's mail art and Tom Phillips' Humument project, Seydel's serial collage Book of Ruth describes an allusive fantasy about his aunt and alter ego Ruth Greisman, her brother Saul, and their escapades with Joseph Cornell... unfold[ing] in novelistic rhythms." Over the past decade or so, working almost exclusively in notebook form, Seydel has produced hundreds of works in multiple ongoing and interrelated series that move freely between lyric and narrative modes. (Poet Peter Gizzi notes that "so many of his tools are a writer's: whiteout, pencil and pen, erasers, tape, type and newsprint.") Book of Ruth constitutes his masterpiece to date. In Seydel's hands the detritus from which Ruth makes her art and narrates her inner life shines like pages from an illuminated manuscript.“
„Robert Seydel’s Book of Ruth is an alchemical assemblage that composes the life of his alter ego, Ruth Greisman—spinster, Sunday painter, and friend to Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp. Through collages, drawings, and journal entries from Ruth’s imagined life, Seydel invokes her interior world in novelistic rhythms. These seductive, unearthed artifacts, conceived as a gathering of materials from the Smithsonian and a suburban family garage, construct a mosaic portrait of a reclusive, unknown artist for whom the distance between the ordinary and the extraordinary is infra-thin. The fragments and detritus from which Seydel fashions Ruth’s art and narrates her inner life shine like the pages of an illuminated manuscript, revealing as much about the imagination of an artist as well as about the tenuous creation of self.“
„Book of Ruth is the first publication and a rare opening into a richly layered, highly original, and massive body of work that the artist produced before his sudden death at the age of fifty on January 27, 2011. Reclusive and unwavering in his dedication to his work, Seydel worked on multiple ongoing and interrelated series that incorporate collage, drawing, photography, narrative and lyric writing, often using various personas and fictional constructs. His work is deeply embedded with a vast and eclectic body of knowledge as well as with an unrelenting sense of play and wonder. While he rarely exhibited his work—most recently a solo show at the CUE Art Foundation in NYC and “Five Contemporary Visual Poets” at the Wright Exhibition Space in Seattle—Seydel’s projects have generated intense interest through word-of-mouth by other artists and poets.
Seydel was a beloved professor at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachussets for more than a decade. He also served as curator at the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University for a number of years where he organized ambitious exhibitions and programs. Seydel edited Several Gravities (Siglio, 2009), a volume of collages and poems by National Book Award-winning poet Keith Waldrop.“
„The magical qualities of Robert Seydel’s work never cease to astonish me. He conjures something visionary at the edges of language and the fragile material world. Who knew such light could come from torn paper? What joy to finally have this long-awaited book in hand!“ - PETER GIZZI
„A haunting, mesmerizing, and heartbreakingly generous work of art.“ - ROSAMOND PURCELL
"Robert Seydel, who passed away unexpectedly from a heart attack at the early age of 50 in January, leaves behind a rich body of work to be published in Book of Ruth by Siglio Press this spring. As a poet of images and words, Seydel created an enigmatic space between literature and visual art where he could ”write an art, to make of the visual a kind of text.”
Book of Ruth captures a fictional reimagining of correspondence between Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp. Through the narration of Ruth, Seydel drew a constellation between his interpretation of the bride (Ruth) and her bachelors through the frame of his own memories, associations and artistic perception.
Seydel worked as a photography professor at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts and served the photo community as a director of the Boston PRC for 5 years. His work leading up to the book was exhibited in a solo exhibition “Book of Saul” at The CUE Foundation. I never met him, but his dedication to life and art will be greatly missed. In his memory, here is an excerpt from his artist statement:
“Art as creation and as sign of primary Imagination, is not objects but a state, a kind of fluid. It is revelation of a sort that both objects and figures are the excess of. Nor is it happenstance that the face, the portrait, the animal, fantastic or otherwise, is central. Everything starts from there. Children always begin with it: two eyes, a mouth, animal or human – a round, split and trussed and multiplied and confused. The portrait is also artifact, collage of time, a token and remnant. In her work Ruth is always speaking to herself: ‘To collage night, against and for stays.’ The wind is what comes through, barely glued down, sign of what maker here.”
„PREFACE TO BOOK OF RUTH BY ROBERT SEYDEL
As my hair dries my mind goes.—Ruth Greisman
The Book of Ruth is concerned with two main characters, my aunt and uncle, Ruth and Sol Greisman, who were siblings, born in Brooklyn, New York. Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp put in minor appearances as friends to both of them. A fifth character, mostly invisible, is “Robt,” or Robert Cornell, Joseph Cornell’s homebound brother, or myself, nephew, and the “half-wit” of the Book. Neither Ruth nor Sol married; they lived together for the better part of their adult lives in a small apartment in Queens, New York, not far from the Cornell house on Utopia Parkway.
Sol (sometimes Saul) was in real life a veteran of the First World War and suffered, as it was later said, from shell shock. After the War he became a plumber. Ruth was a Sunday painter who worked days in a bank and was active in Hadassah. In the Book the two of them meet Cornell and, through him, Marcel Duchamp. Ruth fell in love with the former, who was, in his own way, as impossible and sealed-off as her brother.
Ruth is the artist in the Book, her work taking the form of mailings to Joseph, various serial and other collages, such as Ten Tiny Collages for Teeny, and journal writings. Her work was first discovered among the boxes of miscellanea in the Joseph Cornell Study Center at The Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Later research by family members turned up a treasure trove of material in a garage in suburban Fort Lee, New Jersey. Ruth’s emblem is the hare, Sol’s the worm, or sometimes a star-nosed mole.“
„Robert Seydel's art has a deep and persistent affinity with Siglio's mission to publish work that lives both at the intersections of the visual and literary arts, and outside the typical categories and genres assigned by the art and publishing worlds. Much of his work rearranges or dissolves boundaries: between legibility and illegibility, sense and nonsense, the lyrical and narrative; between fictional characters and actual personages, the historical past and the notated, recorded present; between the purely visual and its potential dissolution (or constitution) into meaning; and, perhaps most importantly, between the acts of reading and viewing. Like the petroglyphs and pictographs—the origins of human mark and meaning making with which Robert is deeply fascinated—the words and images in Robert's work are often inextricable and mutable; primordial and fantastic but also sophisticated and articulate: what may be enigmatic in one moment may be revelatory the next. Robert's work is a true hybrid, its own species.
While Robert's art may defy traditional paradigms, it does not reject them. His love for and extensive study of literature infuses his work in myriad ways. Both his series and individual works are often driven or ignited by a line from a poem, a philosophical observation or question, a sustained "conversation” with an author or work, or by his admiration for a particular writer as in his Series Homages. Robert's collages often make use of extant text which always has a serendipitous, alchemical quality: he collects innumerable fragments (newspapers, packaging, old cards, scrawled notes, etc.) which, in his hands, accumulate into a poetic and artifactual language, capable of illuminating the ordinary scraps of life, of veiling and unveiling secrets, of recording loss and of magnifying the ephemeral. In his original writings, Robert has an uncanny feel for the multiplicity of meaning and suggestion in a single word. He exploits those tensions between meanings for their queasy emotion, their intellectual resonance, and their sometimes dark, sometimes child-like humor. As with the visual elements in his work, his texts layer, connect, and juxtapose disparate images to construct a complex experience for his readers that, while it may avoid the literal accouterments of daily life, feels true to life—as if truly part of a life. Perhaps that is what makes his characters and personas so compelling: both the poetry itself and those who "voice” it arise out of and capture something essential and ineffable. There is no conceit in Robert's use of literary technique, only necessity.
Perhaps this is why I am most drawn to Book of Ruth. In this series Robert has created a riveting first person narrative with as much emotional depth, exceptional detail, formal complexity, and intellectual provocation as a literary novel, but assembled through visual objects that "read” and—as an assemblage of fragments—beget an awareness of absence, of the unknown and the unknowable. The premise of the work—that these collages, letters, journal entries were discovered in both the Smithsonian and the suburban family garage—is already a story itself, but Robert takes it much further. While the literal details of Ruth's life seep to the surface here and there, it is the intimacy with the details of her thoughts as well as the details in the works made by her own hand that create a stunning portrait of a woman for whom the distance between the ordinary and extraordinary, the ecstatic and the desolate, coherence and inscrutability, loneliness and embrace seems to collapse. She is, in the multiple layers of her construction, absolutely authentic.
As artifacts, the individual collages and the journal entries (typed on small, now brittle and yellowed pieces of paper) exude a power like the relics of saints: something of Ruth's body is there, some physical connection remains. Both serve as "writings”—letters, serials, notations—through which Ruth speaks. Unlike many literary first person narratives, Ruthís does not need the conceit of unreliability nor the detachment of reflection to force a tension between the told and untold, or reality and memory; rather, Robert seems to locate that tension elsewhere: between the magical and the quotidian, the moment accounted for and the moments that will forever remain unrecorded, and between the salvaged and the lost. In both the collages and journal entries, that tension resides in their material and composition, in the "fact” of their authorship and in the phenomenon of its construct. The collages, like pages from an illuminated manuscript, reveal as much in their marginalia, cryptic marks, and small details as they do in the (often startling) central image; however, unlike those gilded pages, these collages are made of detritus, of things that have rusted or faded, things torn, smudged, bent, things that rarely capture our attention but here metamorphose into something alive and deeply connected to a life. Like the collages, the written journal entries are radiant and moving. They evoke Ruth's journey through a day, an hour or a minute by writing it as if the present (in which she is writing) and that past moment (which she is experiencing again through the act of writing) merge. Yet each piece is more than a document of Ruth's life. They are not unlike devotional icons in that they yield much upon every viewing, that they transform with the viewer's awareness, that they are very much a part of the earthly world while calling attention to and invoking its mysteries.
Earlier this year, I had the extraordinary pleasure of experiencing Robert's work in an entirely unfamiliar context. In the many years I've known Robert, I've only seen his work as one might turn the pages of a book (in piles of cut pages, in his notebooks, in stacks of frames leaning against the wall). I've rarely seen more than a dozen works laid out together on his desk or on the floor. There simply hasn't been the room to see a large number of works in spatial relationship to one another. Thus, experiencing his exhibition at the CUE Art Foundation was a thrill. At CUE, I was finally able to glimpse the whole, how the pieces relate in color (the red is like musical notation) and in motif (the hare, Ruth's symbol, travels far), how they accumulate rather than unfold.
Overhearing conversations as well as speaking directly to strangers when I spent time in the gallery, I discovered that people seemed to feel the works spoke directly to them. Not every work, but there always seemed to be pieces with which the viewers felt an immediate and quite visceral intimacy, pieces that both challenged them and seemed familiar. While the art world often scratches its head—regarding the small scale, the prolific, the rough surfaces, the multiple meanings, the playfulness and sadness, the reclusive process—there are other audiences for whom these qualities are truly magnetic.
*
In Memoriam: Robert Seydel (1960-2011)
Robert Seydel, author of the forthcoming Book of Ruth, suffered from a heart attack and died at a far too young fifty years of age on January 27. Book of Ruth is just a sliver of a vast, uncompromising, and visionary body of work that he leaves behind. That he does not have another thirty or forty years to continue his work is an extraordinary loss. It is impossible to imagine what he might have accomplished. My admiration for Robert as an artist is exceeded only by my love for him as a friend. This is a heart-breaking loss that is only slightly assuaged by helping his work to live on. Book of Ruth is that beginning.“ — Lisa Pearson
"ART BEGAN IN A DESIRE for disguise," writes Ruth Greisman, the "Sunday painter" and alter ego of Robert Seydel's brilliant poetry-art creation, Book of Ruth, published last year. A photographer, artist, and professor at Hampshire College, Seydel died of heart attack at the tragically young age of 51, just before the book was published by Los Angeles-based Siglio Press.
Ruth's story is at once the inner life of a lonely woman laid bare, and a wily series of alternate identities. It is not a linear narrative about Ruth's life, but a chronicle of her internal creative process, in which there is no obvious correspondence between the images and words. Ruth's collages often include pieces that recall the wood-engraved illustrations of Max Ernst's surrealistic collage novels, Une Semaine De Bonte and La femme 100 tetes, where sequences of images are arranged by the dream logic of automatic association.
Book of Ruth is presented as a series of art works, journal entries and letters sent to the artist Joseph Cornell. It is also an homage, in the form of an imagined life, to Seydel's real-life Aunt Ruth. I like to think Seydel wished to explore the hidden side of his aunt, to give dignity to her frustrated desires, to know more deeply her secret joys, to inhabit another consciousness in an attempt to leave a nuanced, if largely imagined, record of an ordinary woman's life.
A painter, dreamer, visionary, and lonely bank clerk, Seydel's Ruth is a wonderful hybrid character, who we meet through a series of short texts and her own collages. Many of those are portraits, in which early 20th century photos have the heads replaced by images of melons, rodents and crushed bottle caps, or disfigured and obscured under layers of white and red paint. Acknowledging that these images are self-portraits, portraits of her own multiple identities, she writes to her muse and love object, Joseph Cornell: "I am always a little visible behind my mask." Her creator, Robert Seydel, remains a bit more elusive. In an obvious sense, of course, all of Ruth is Seydel. Seydel's sense of humor appears in the form of curious moles and worms peeking at the oblivious faces in the collages, but as an alter-ego he remains harder to trace. Even the "author photograph" at the end of the book is another collage.
The Book of Ruth, Seydel's final work, hardly feels like an elegy. It is one of those rare events in art and poetry that actually inspires the reader to write, to create, to make something, and to document and even celebrate the many seemingly insignificant things that make up a human life.
In his preface to Ruth's imagined life, Seydel includes real biographical facts. Ruth Greisman, Seydel's Brooklyn-born aunt lived with her brother, Seydel's uncle Sol. Neither Ruth nor Sol ever married and they lived together for most of their adult lives "not far from the Cornell place on Utopia Parkway" in Queens. Seydel suggests, or imagines, that Sol and Ruth met Cornell and through him, Marcel Duchamp (and Duchamp's wife Tiny, to whom Ruth's "Ten Teeny Collages for Tiny" is dedicated).
Ruth fell in love with Cornell, Seydel writes, because he was "in his own way, as impossible and as sealed-off as her brother." Throughout the narrative, Sol's life serves as a kind of cautionary tale about the dangers of isolation and despair. Ruth's mentor and soul mate Cornell is a mirror of her family legacy of creativity and loneliness. Cornell's brother Robert suffered from cerebral palsy, and Cornell took care of him until Robert's death in 1965. Famously shy and reclusive himself, Cornell also achieved transcendence through the practice of making assemblages, collages and experimental films.
To Ruth, Cornell feels as close as his home on Queens' Utopia Parkway, "Flushing is close to heaven, Joseph: Park Way to the star," and as distant as the paint splatter constellations in his famous assemblages such as Hotel De L'Etoile.
For Ruth, "art begins in admiration," and these missives of word and image sometimes feel like wildly creative fan letters — filled with references to the soap bubbles, dovecotes and lobsters of Cornell's exquisite boxes. Ruth also shares Cornell's desire to construct an alternate world: "I have no imagination for what is," she writes.
A veteran of World War I, Seydel's Uncle Sol suffered from shell shock. Ruth reveals to Cornell that Sol "retreated into must and porcelain/The spheres of our losses" — a description that evokes dual realities — Sol's "sealed off" mental spaces and the close quarters of Ruth and Sol's apartment. Ruth admits that she too is also somewhat broken. She claims to be "ruined by beauty — nothing and no one is good enough. Beauty makes a desert of life." By the end of the book Ruth has decided that collage is "the privileged medium of melancholics," but she is ever vigilant — careful not to share Sol's fate. "Failures surround us, Joseph," she writes, "Sol is their sign." Ruth, though no stranger to sadness herself, proclaims:
Ruth's dual realities are made possible by Seydel's considerable powers as both poet and visual artist. But as sad, lyrical, and beautiful as Book of Ruth is, it never takes itself too seriously. Both fleeting and factual, Ruth's fractured poetry feels like direct or "automatic" transcriptions from the unconscious, as if, as she suggests, "Time opens fountains in every thing." Exalted statements are undercut with self-deprecating humor: "Art is mesmerism. / I can only make a word stick with glue."I will invent who I am, against what is.My name & time: a Queens of the mind.
Ruth also outlines the differences between the process of writing and visual art. Language seems to make Ruth feel restless, driven, or perhaps simply uncomfortable, while the making of images provides a sense of richness and completion: "Words make me itch," she writes. "A picture is a ripeness."
Her images, too, range from the hilarious and grotesque collage "Othello," in which the head of a pensive Orson Welles obscures the crotch of a classical nude, to the haunting Magritte-like "Untitled (Woman and Bird)" featuring a woman with a mask of wrinkled, perhaps windblown newsprint molded to the contours of her face.
Via Ruth, Seydel guides us through a world united by blood reds and muddy browns, in which nostalgia, childhood and photographic convention are re-imagined. In the collage entitled "39" a woman stands in a blurred black and white garden. Part photograph, part painting, her real identity is replaced by blazing red cartoon eyes and a brown circle for a head. A child who seems to have wandered in from the pages of an old school primer or a volume of nursery rhymes, bears a bowl of eggs, while a regal, almost man-faced lion crouches at their feet.
Painting over turn-of-the-century photographs, altering postcards or simply assembling ephemera, from comics to ads, Seydel also depicts the hidden selves of Ruth and Sol. The hare represents Ruth, and Sol appears as a worm or star-nosed mole. Seydel also surfaces in the narrative, as does Robert, Cornell's homebound brother, and Seydel himself. "My nephew is a nut," she reveals. More poignantly, the section "Further Journals and Other Ephemera" begins with a fabricated fragment from "an old Elizabethan song or play" and evokes Seydel's desire to know his aunt's inner life, as well as the immortality he has given Ruth through his art: "Who reads me when I am ashes, is my nephew in wishes." The hushed sounds of "ashes" and "wishes" unite the living and the dead, reminding us that reading is always a conversation across time and space, the bridging of an otherwise impossible gap.
In the collage, "Rare/Hare Leap," Ruth appears as a ragged rabbit made of paint and grayish-brown paper scraps leaping toward a painted red and blue comet or falling star. "Rare/Hare" is one of many images of aspiration. The soaring rabbit evokes a longing for unity, both through and beyond the human world. If such cosmic oneness is impossible in life, we can catch some glimpse of its perfection through art — the correspondence of word and image.
In only two lines, Seydel can distill and expand the symbols and reality of Ruth's world in a unique spiritual vision. "A trembling animal at the edge of thought. / We fold up lost men in our wings or arms, robes." On a larger narrative level, this tension between restriction and desire, expansiveness and limitation propels Ruth's story: "Walking to Utopia Parkway," Ruth says, "is like shipping out to sea." A longing for travel — revealed in old prints of exotic sailboats with messages to Duchamp typed across the water's surface — combines with a desire for spiritual transcendence. This yearning is rendered perfectly in the simple, gorgeous piece "Starry Hare." Here the silhouette of a rabbit is pasted in the foreground of a turn of the century postcard depicting a gentle lagoon framed by palm fronds. The hare's role as shadow self is enhanced by its dark body that seems to be composed of a deep, shimmering green, which could be the surface of a distant sea as much as a blurry constellation in a night sky.
On another page, Ruth wryly reflects that "Glue was made from rabbit skin," a glib comment on the nature of her own humble materials, while she simultaneously embraces creativity's transformative power and its frivolity: "Imagination is foolish. Mine hops like a rabbit." A page later, she declares: "Only imagination counts," as if insisting on the arbitrary, contradictory nature of thought.
But Ruth's writing is not simply a flurry of unedited ideas. It is full of incisive observations and plain statements, such as "Unrequited affection is ugly," which bristle with submerged anger and disappointment at her beloved. Cornell, who created homages to dancers and movie stars, certainly understood the desolation of loving from afar, but the artist is more Ruth's imagined confessor than her genuine correspondent. Still, in his preface Seydel tells us that Ruth's work was discovered, among other places "among the boxes of miscellanea at the Joseph Cornell Study Center."
Ruth's book is as much a testament to creative power as a means to discover the deeply strange experience of life itself. No matter how much of Ruth's work is assembled from discarded fragments, she reminds us that art is not a static nostalgia, but an active awareness of the present: "It isn't memory that matters,/ but the instant, a picture so sharp it pierces."
When Ruth recalls her childhood, we see in her awareness of primary color all the simple riches of the sensual world, and the rewards of simply paying attention:
Quotidian, surreal, sublime and revelatory, Seydel's legacy in Book of Ruth is perhaps, most powerfully a record of everyday ecstasies. Ruth reminds us that, "A breeze is more perfect than any thing," and makes refreshingly matter-of-fact assertions: "I like animals and dirt." Perhaps Seydel's enduring accomplishment is the construction of a rich dream world that heightens our perception of ordinary reality. Beyond a story told in poetry and picture, Book of Ruth is itself a way of seeing.Even the spill of children on the pavement,of which I was one, after school at three,o'clock was a kind of moving painting....Red hats & red sneakers,yellow skirts, the sky, the wind & newspapers.
- Jocelyn Heaney
„How did Book of Ruth evolve?
- It was originally called The Book of Saul, which remained the case even after Siglio published the pamphlet 5 Hares & 3 Ruths in 2009 in its Ephemera series. I began working on the book in about 2000, starting in part with a conception out of Duchamp— his Bride and Bachelors. Ruth was the Virgin or Bride, and Sol, Joseph, and Marcel the Bachelors that surrounded her. Central from the start I think was the kernel of two small letters—RS: Rose Selavy, Ruth and Sol, me, my mother Rita Seydel. It was a kind of combinatory thing, based in initials and the shiftiness of gender and identity. Even now the spelling of Sol's name wavers between his given name, Sol, from Soloman, and Saul. And in Ruth's journals her "I" can't seem to focus itself—she wavers, sometimes capitalizing it and sometimes typing it lower-case.
Ruth was always going to be the artist, but Sol was more important at first. There were his notes on the history of plumbing, his invention of a Hall of Scatology—a kind of honor roll of underground men, and a series of writings, recollections of house calls as a plumber for instance. My father, when he was a kid, used to sometimes accompany Sol on his rounds. He's talked about fitting pipes with him and driving around Brooklyn and later around Queens. The idea at first was historical fantasy. I wrote in an early work (in which) Saul's interests were responsible in fact for Duchamp's statement regarding his urinal or Fountain in his unsigned editorial "The Richard Mutt Case," published in the magazine The Blind Man, in which he said, "The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges." Saul's tutelage in the book led, retrospectively, to Duchamp's interest in plumbing and American ingenuity in water fixtures (as well as his invention of a "ministry of gravity").
Remnants of all this remain in the book. There's the collage for example titled "Blind Saul," a reference in part to the magazine The Blind Man. And Sol remains an underground man and blind in a sense, like a mole, which is one of his animal familiars. Did the Great War and what he witnessed in the French forests do that to him, or was it inevitable, his going underground and his quietness? He wasn't demonstrative as a person in any way, but there are stories about how much he came to hate the Red Cross, which made the wounded in hospital, as he was, pay for toothpaste and toothbrushes. It's kind of legendary in our family, his hatred for the Red Cross. To this day certain members of my family refuse to make donations to that outfit as a result. The red cross, which is such a prominent sign in Joseph Beuys's work, plays a role throughout Sol's material… But the point is that Ruth fairly quickly took over, which makes sense. She's an artist, and I still haven't figured out how to make Sol's materials—who's not—into work. I can't find form for them. I'm still planning to do a Saul book, but at present it's stalled, maybe interminably.
But in the end I've come to care more about Ruth—we share more things, and I can speak in her voice and sometimes I don't know whether it's me speaking or if she is. It can get confusing—I'll be looking through my notebooks and have to figure out if something I've written is Ruth's or if it's something else. That happens with the collages too. Things twist up with her, I'm more entangled in her possibilities and dilemmas, I have a harder time distinguishing between us.
What was your work process like? Were certain pieces created before the idea for the book was born?
- It happened and still happens simultaneously. Again, Sol's writings came first, and were really some of the first things I did. Ruth's writings began a little later, and again took over—I think the point is that Ruth, being an artist, is easier for me to access or to submerge myself in, despite the shift in gender. She became closer to me, in attitude, style, her relation to the world. But in terms of priority, collages or journals, there isn't any. And the narrative, such as it is, is a pretty loose construct—it makes itself up as it goes along. It's pretty simple—if I make a trip to New Mexico to visit my sister, for example, that might become something Ruth and Sol do. In part it's a kind of parallel life. I use what I have and do to fashion who Ruth is. As another instance, I'm pretty involved in thinking about and looking at what's referred to as the "Animal Style" in art—from Native American pictographs and the history of Paleolithic stone art to, say, Henri Michaux and Dubuffet and Bill Traylor. So that becomes an aspect of Ruth as well.
How much of your aunt is in the character of Ruth? What motivated the creation?
- Ruth's pretty much a complete fabrication, but she's based on a set of supports that were real in my aunt's life—being a bank teller, volunteering for Hadassah, being an amateur painter. She taught every one of the kids in our extended family, which was pretty small actually, how to paint. For me, that was on Sundays, when we drove in to visit. I was the youngest of that generation and like to say that her lessons never stuck very well. It's true; whereas my cousin Barbara Goldberg, who Ruth also taught, is an accomplished artist, my own skills are pretty rudimentary so far as drawing and painting are concerned. Being the youngest, I imagine now that her patience had worn thin, but more likely I wasn't that interested. What I remember most from those visits was the smell in the apartment, a sense of their age. It's one reason I think the image of dust is so important—Ruth kept their apartment immaculate, but what I recall is a kind of atmosphere. Maybe they meant mortality to me—one of my first experiences of what age was.
On the other hand, sometimes I think my inhabitation of Ruth is based in childhood jealousy, which doesn't seem that far-fetched to me. When my sister was a teenager, she lived with Ruth and Sol in Queens for a few years, or for some time anyway, and slept with Ruth in the one bedroom in the apartment (Sol slept on the roll-out couch in the living room, which in the book also serves as Ruth's studio, such as it is). My sister had been accepted to the High School for Performing Arts in New York—she was a dancer, but you had to live in one of the five boroughs and we didn't, we lived out on Long Island. So she claimed residency with Ruth and Sol and for a while only came home on weekends. I guess I would have been about six, seven, eight years old at the time. Anyway, she lived with my aunt and uncle and studied art in their proximity, and now in turn I live with them, by proxy—that's one way, it's occurred to me, if perhaps a fantastic one, to think about what motivates the book.
Did Ruth's original piece (Untitled [Doe]) serve as inspiration?
- No, I love that piece, and along with the frontispiece photograph, it's the only authentic thing in the book, but it's just one of the two or three paintings by Ruth still in my possession. My sister also has a few of Ruth's paintings, as do my cousins. At one point I thought, like Asger Jorn, that I would use what I do have of her paintings as material for her work, collage into them, over-paint and add objects to them. But I haven't been able to bring myself to do that, at least not yet.
But the Doe just happens to be one of my favorite paintings by Ruth, and it's odd, it isn't really very characteristic—most of her pictures were made by copying photographs of flower arrangements or street scenes in Paris, there's very few animals. But that's not strictly true, there are some pictures of cats, and she always owned a cat, which she also does in the book. And she also made scrapbooks for the kids, full of funky collages and really terribly saccharine and sentimental pictures, among which cats figured prominently. But while the Doe is an anomaly, I share with it a certain sensibility, so I put it in the book.
What role did Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp play in your development as an artist?
- Both of them are important to me. Cornell was crucial in fact, opening me to possibilities that I didn't altogether realize until I came to him and looked at him seriously—the idea of collage as a total way of working, and of magic and combinatory art. But in terms of Ruth, both Cornell and Duchamp are really just ciphers—they don't exist except as functions of a sort in Ruth's mind. They're a fantasy, or a space for loneliness and the unrequited to reside in or focus upon. Cornell is for Ruth what Bacall or Toumarova were for Cornell—desired distances. So maybe in that sense he's an even bigger influence than I realize or would like to admit. Ruth sends objects and missals and valentines of sorts to Cornell just as he sent his to Dietrich or his ballerinas.
But a number of other artists have been as important to me as Cornell and Duchamp. Wallace Berman and Ray Johnson and Tom Phillips come first to mind. And above all William Blake. I can remember saying to myself, in the way one does when one's trying to figure out what you want or need to be doing, that my goal was to found a way to make visual art into a form of literature, with the kind of density I associated with my favorite writers.
I think both Cornell and Duchamp are situated within that kind of territory. Duchamp's notes for "The Bride Stripped Bare" is a great long poem, opaque and strange but wild and rich in its language and playful. I wouldn't know how else to describe it but as a long poem including pictures, in the way that Pound said an epic is a long poem including history. Ruth is, I hope, in that kind of space, somewhere between the literary and visual arts. When I was about fourteen or maybe fifteen, Kenneth Patchen was the first artist-writer I came to, and for me he remains a beautiful figure.
But, like Cornell again, writers have been more important to me than artists; Emily Dickinson and Gertrude Stein are preeminent, both for Ruth and for myself. In a sense, Ruth has been a way to back into writing, a way to enter into writing from the outside. That one does that through the voice of an unknown woman may have some meaning larger than I'm prepared to acknowledge. Cornell is Ruth's Master in the book, and sometimes I think of Dickinson's so-called "Master Letters" in relation to Ruth and her relation to the world.
Where does the impetus to access and speak through a persona come from?
- Speaking through another's voice is hardly an original tactic, though I suppose to some degree it is in the visual arts. "I is another," Rimbaud said, lodging uncanniness at the heart of what we are. From Browning to Pound to Pessoa, speaking in voices was a way to carry history and multiplicity into the poem. Armand Schwerner asked, as a poet, "Why leave fictive experiments to the prose writers?" I guess I've asked that myself, but as an artist. To attempt to make the hand obey another's psychology, at least so far as you imagine it, doesn't seem that different to me than fashioning the voice of a literary character.
And art has always seemed to me a kind of exit out of the self, a way to get beyond the self. I don't think I've ever really understood why "self-expression" is an attractive motivation for making art, which is how students so often speak about what they're doing. Who cares really? But to fashion a self, that seems to me another thing. Walt Whitman isn't only that boy "starting out from Paumonak," but "Walt Whitman, a kosmos"—that is, an invention. The artist's job, according to both Robert Henri and Jasper Johns, is to invent himself. So that's made explicit here, as a kind of a primary endeavor. The point is revelation and an opening outwards, an expansion into the air of art itself. I think Ruth is a kind of vehicle for that. And Ruth herself often feels a voice entering her from the outside, as if she was a conduit for something other than herself. "My name is Ruth?" she asks at one point, surprised by her own pronoun.
Where does she take you that you wouldn't be able to go on your own?
- I remember that in a college writing class I wrote a journal that was full of lies and exaggerations—I thought then, my life's boring; I was depressed, so I made up a life full of incidents, a life that was more interesting than the one I was leading, or at least one that I thought was more interesting. Acting was never an option for me, but I became in that journal a dramatist. It was a kind of myth-making endeavor, founding a larger possibility of self. Sleight of hand, sidestepping and indirection are important strategies for me. It's related to Dickinson's thing: "Tell all the Truth, but tell it slant." Ruth's a way to open art to something else, and to tell the mind's contents as if they were coming from a long way off. She allows me to access states otherwise inaccessible to me. Her mind and hand are my own, but amplified. And "slanted." Her history, the time in which she lived, my imagination of Queens—these things open my work to other contents, and hopefully as well to an instance of fuller life.
The odd thing is that nothing ever really happens in Ruth's life either. She goes from the bank to the butcher to her apartment; otherwise, she lives wholly in her imagination. The only events that matter for her are the signs and messages coming from the Imagination, which she generally capitalizes—seeing horses, for instance, emerge in the steam escaping from manhole covers. I've come full circle in that sense, inventing a life as boring and constrained as I thought mine was back when I was a student in college. Silly, isn't it? You'd think you'd want to invent a heroine with some tooth to her…
But there's been a number of characters in my work besides Ruth, beginning with an early abandoned figure named R. Welch, who was a researcher in charismatic quotients, which he applied a mathematical formula to. Welch already contained in embryo a shift in gender identity, in that his name was derived from Raquel Welch. In fact, he understood their sharing of surname as prophetic of his scholarly research into charisma, which of course she had in spades. So he made an appointment to interview her, which didn't go very well. As for Ruth, perhaps it was simply a challenge—could I be believable as a woman artist? That's always been a question for me, but particularly early on. Now it's mostly not an issue—she's so taken over part of my art-making function that I don't really question her authenticity anymore. I thought originally I wanted to inhabit another person; now she inhabits me.
Your connection to Ruth is complicated by the fact that she is a woman. What is the productive function of this contradiction for you?
- Well, I love artists who contain a mixed pedigree, or who are contaminated in some way, who contain contradictory impulses. And I'm particularly drawn to an image of the artist as non-professional or anti-professional, outside the sphere of trade and the economies of art and product, which is a word I hate as applied to art. Ruth kind of begins in that place —she says, for instance, "The galleries are made for fashion. Nothing I make is." In a journal text not reproduced in the book she expresses jealousy about Cornell's gallery representation and goes to visit Julien Levy, who rebuffs her (although that's mostly in her own mind). But her desire nevertheless to do that is symptomatic of her conflicted nature: she works in a bank but hates money, and while her art remains deeply private, she associates herself or otherwise insinuates herself into the lives of two relatively famous and public artists. Such dilemmas are partly my own, but they also seem centrally a woman's and particularly a woman artist's during the fifties and sixties.
I understand Ruth's status as a woman and a type of artist outside the mainstream as a kind of double-whammy here. Even Cornell, who in a sense is a domestic artist himself, doesn't take her seriously. They share care-taking roles, Ruth as regards Sol and Joseph as regards his brother Robert (who in a mostly invisible way is a stand-in for myself). And they're both located in the boroughs, beyond, let's say, the corridors of power, which lack is also evident perhaps in the choice of materials—detritus, garbage, street-sweepings—that they use to make their art. But, while sharing these things, Ruth's a woman and Joseph isn't. She's more distant and further along the line of powerlessness than he is, which is a condition and maybe even an ethical stance that I'm interested in, in league for example with someone like Robert Walser. Ruth's distance from power and her status as a private or amateur artist, just as much but in part related to her being a woman, is what I think attracted me to her possibilities in the first place.
And that privacy, her being an artist so to speak without portfolio, allows me a certain latitude and freedom to examine my own dilemmas as related to art—public speech versus private content, insularity and a propensity for withdrawal versus love and care for art writ large. As well, Ruth, in a perhaps bizarre way, allows me to talk to myself, to listen to what I'm thinking as if from the outside. Art, to accommodate reflection on itself, needs indirection and distancing. I don't know that I could have written something like the "Formulas" in my own voice—it needed Ruth as its presumptive author. I can lodge my idiosyncrasies and romanticism in her in a way I wouldn't altogether know how to do otherwise.
And, to go beyond Ruth's circumstance as a woman artist, what draws you to the female consciousness in terms of artistic capabilities, form and mentality?
- There's both a quickness and interiority as well as verbal abundance in the women artists and writers I admire that I think is different in kind from men, and I've tried to access that as best as I know how to. To catch the mind in flight is one way to describe what I mean—Joanne Kyger, who is obliquely named in one of Ruth's journal texts, is one example of this speed and informality, which has a kind of power associated with dailiness and the mind's capacities to both hold and celebrate it. The other quality I'm after, which I think women writers in particular embody, and which in an almost paradoxical way is related to this idea of quickness, is a type of chiseling of language, as in the poems of Dickinson and Lorine Nediecker and even Stein in her idiosyncratic way. Ruth tends both ways, as I do generally—towards interior verbal excess and also towards a sometimes sharp and sculpted rhetoric, at once oblique and specific. This swaying between approaches is apparent, or at least I think it's apparent, in the visual work as well, from a clogged and thick kind of a collage structure to a quicker, less dense picturing.
So in a sense taking on the voice of a woman has meant accommodating and attempting to take possession of certain ways of working for myself, ways that I think were already apparent in my art-making prior to coming to Ruth. But, to use this word again, these approaches were amplified and extended by my effort to work through her. And in a number of ways my first models for what an artist was came from the women in my family. My mother wasn't really an artist, though she did paint for a while and she played the violin, but her delicacy and her profound care for rightness in the world were certainly associated in my mind with the idea of the artist when I was young, or so I imagine it now. It's no accident that the book rides on and contains her name. My mother and Ruth were in a sense my first teachers in art. But while it's Ruth's book, it's dedicated to my mother. She stands I think as its invisible center, which feels right and somehow predetermined. The tangle backwards to the location of art and its importance as an activity is centrally through women for me.“ – Interview by SAVINA VELKOVA
Robert Seydel: Artist's Statement
Making proceeds for me by serial invention, from piece to piece and across time. The means are collage and drawing, picture as writing, scaled intimate and to the hand. Essentially I want to write an art, to make of the visual a kind of text, and have it be as well a poor art, assembled from scraps. Material is essential; scuffings carry history, which wanders throughout. In one of her journal pages from The Book of Saul, Ruth Greisman, both eponymous and real aunt and the artist of the Book, wrote: "Art an ongoing limit, open to wind. I make it thru me, draughty R." Her formulation holds throughout the Book and also across the wider field. But the Book defines the territory. It is composed of fragments and encompasses a rotation of styles, is a biography of her (our) making and consists of a pile of pictures in and across time. Artifacts of a life, both hers and mine; the refuse and rejecta of days, "open to wind."
Other figures besides Ruth run through the work. Her brother Saul, for example (the two together make up my initials, and also carry my mother's), and the recurring Droon, a maker of drawings ("Droon is to Draw as Draw is to Coleslaw"), and previously Welch, a professor, and Eckstein-Sousa, and others. Personas, altar egos, others, not myself. Every figure reveals aspects of the total form, which is open and green. Art, as creation and as sign of primary Imagination, is not objects but a state, a kind of fluid. It is revelation of a sort that both objects and figures are the excess of. Nor is it happenstance that the face, the portrait, the animal, fantastic or otherwise, is central. Everything starts from there. Children always begin with it: two eyes, a mouth, animal or human - a round, split and trussed and multiplied and confused. The portrait is also artifact, collage of time, a token and remnant. In her work Ruth is always speaking to herself: "To collage night, against and for stays." The wind is what comes through, barely glued down, sign of what maker here.“
"Formulas & Flowers" from Book of Ruth by Robert Seydel
Robert Seydel, A Picture Is Always a Book: Further Writings from Book of Ruth, Siglio, 2014.
Read the complete PDF Press Release.
[Book of Ruth] is one of those rare events in art and poetry that actually inspires the reader to write, to create, to make something, and to document and even celebrate the many seemingly insignificant things that make up a human life. - Los Angeles Review of Books
Artist and writer Robert Seydel often used various personas and fictional constructs in a vast and multi-layered body of work that incorporated collage, drawing, photography, narrative and lyric writing. His primary alter ego Ruth Greisman made hundreds of exquisite collages, a selection of which Seydel collected in the artist’s book Book of Ruth (Siglio, 2011). As Ruth, Seydel explores the boundaries between the salvaged and the lost, the unknown and the unknowable, art that is made and art that is found. A Picture Is Always a Book is a first-person, fictional archive, collecting over seventy of Ruth’s “journal pages,” luminescent and startlingly original writings—typed up on paper purloined from old photo albums, adorned with drawings in colored pencils, oil pens, white-out and ink stamps—that penetrate Ruth’s consciousness with visceral honesty and poetic precision.
With the acrobatics of her emblem the hare, Seydel’s Ruth makes leaps from the banalities of her daily life into an expansive, alchemical imagination that embraces the shape-shifting of meaning, the occult in letters, and the magical invocations of animals—domestic and hallucinatory. For Ruth, the creation of self is tenuous, the artistic impulse implacable, and the distance between the ecstatic and melancholic “infra-thin.” She writes, “I’ll invent who I am, against what is. My time and name: a Queens of the mind.”
A prolific artist and writer, Robert Seydel (1960-2011), left behind a multi-layered, highly original body of work marked by both an unrelenting sense of play and an extraordinary and eclectic body of knowledge. Seydel’s ongoing and interrelated series incorporated collage, drawing, photography, narrative and lyric writing, often using various personas and fictional constructs. Beginning in 2000, Seydel created a vast series of works using the alter ego Ruth Greisman, who was inspired by his aunt of the same name, including the “journal pages” collected in A Picture Is Always a Book (Siglio, 2014) and the works Seydel himself selected for Book of Ruth (Siglio, 2011). Other Seydel alter egos and invented personas include S., author of the Songs of S. (Siglio and Ugly Duckling Presse, 2014), Saul Greisman (“scholar of sewage”), Eckstein-Sousa (“sometimes lecturer and a kind of [failed] poet with Proustian leanings”), and R. Welch (a professor developing a theory of “the biochemical construction of Charismatic figures”), among others.
In addition to the exhibition “The Eye in Matter,” Seydel had a single solo show, curated by Peter Gizzi, at CUE Art Foundation in 2007 and his work was also exhibited, and “Five Contemporary Visual Poets” at the Wright Exhibition Space in Seattle curated by Joshua Beckman. A beloved professor at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts for more than a decade, he also served as curator at the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University for a number of years where he organized ambitious exhibitions and programs. Seydel also edited Several Gravities (Siglio, 2009), a volume of collages and poems by National Book Award-winning poet Keith Waldrop.
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