Shop > Artists' Books

#11754

A Picture is Always a Book

Artist
Robert Seydel
Price
$50.00
Date
2015
Publisher
Siglio
Format
Artists' Books
Genre
Catalogue, Collage, Photography
Description

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 Picture Is Always a Book accompanies the exhibition “Robert Seydel: The Eye in Matter,” opening September 2 at the Neilson Library, Smith College and traveling to the Queens Museum of Art in 2015 and the Center for Paper and Book Arts at Columbia College Chicago in 2016.

Clothbound.
112 pages.
Illustrated in color throughout.
6 × 8.5”

  1. A Picture is Always a Book
 

Related Items

  1. Ryan Gander: Culturefield
  2. Cory Arcangel: All the Small Things
  3. Kenneth Goldsmith: Letter to Bettina Funcke
  4. Robert Smithson in Texas
  5. Reto Pulfer: Der Themenkatalog
  6. Katharina Ammann: schwarz auf weiss: zeichnerischer Realismus - zeitgenössische Positionen
  7. Takeshi Murata
  8. Robert Longo: Stand
  9. Art or Sound
  10. Copy by Kueng-Caputo
  11. Angela Bulloch: Source Book 10
  12. Paul Gerhard Diez, Reise durch die USA (German)
  13. Drunk Complexions
  14. Oscar Figueroa: Less than a First Draft (Testing)
  15. David Robbins: Concrete Comedy: An Alternative History of Twentieth-Century Comedy
  16. Anne Moeglin-Delcroix: Ambulo Ergo Sum
  17. Animal Spirits
  18. Robert Kleyn: Toward the Great Attractor
  19. Derek Sullivan: Lynn Valley 8
  20. Sun Foot and Stefan Marx: The Rain Song 7“, 2012
  21. This Book is a Classroom
  22. Joachim Koester: Message from Andrée
  23. Carl Johan De Geer: DE GEER
  24. Tyler Coburne: I’m that angel
  25. Dan Graham: Nuggets: New and Old Writing on Art, Architecture, and Culture
  26. Raqs Media Collective: Casebook
  27. Neue Slowenische Kunst: NSK from Kapital to Capital
  28. Making Art Global, Part 1

The Third Havana Biennial 1989
  29. Michael Schmelling: Land Line
  30. Emelie Chhangur, Ryan Doherty, Derek Liddington , and Fabien Maltais-Bayda: Derek Liddington: the body will always bend before it breaks, the tower will always break before it bends the tower will always break before it bends, the body will always bend before it breaks
  31. Jalal Toufic: Reading, Rewriting Poe’s “The Oval Portrait“
  32. Joan Jonas: In the Shadow a Shadow
  33. Daniel Frota and Padraig Robinson: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/18/israele-soldier-posts-instagram-palestinian
  34. Remedies to the absence of Reiner Ruthenbeck
  35. Paul Collins: The Killer
  36. Ben Branagan: DOGGERLAND
  37. Daniel Olson: The Book of Luke
  38. Image Bank: International Image Exchange Directory