Formats
Anthologies
103
Audio
301
Catalogues
348
Clothing
23
Editions
27
Ephemera
58
Literary
42
Monographs
166
Posters
256
Video
40
Zines
143

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. Andrea Andersson, Tina Campt, and Troy Montes-Michie: Rock of Eye
  5. Robert Smithson in Texas
  6. Reto Pulfer: Der Themenkatalog
  7. Katharina Ammann: schwarz auf weiss: zeichnerischer Realismus - zeitgenössische Positionen
  8. Takeshi Murata
  9. Robert Longo: Stand
  10. Art or Sound
  11. Copy by Kueng-Caputo
  12. Paul Gerhard Diez, Reise durch die USA (German)
  13. Angela Bulloch: Source Book 10
  14. David Robbins: Concrete Comedy: An Alternative History of Twentieth-Century Comedy
  15. Shary Boyle and Emily Vey Duke: The Illuminations Project
  16. Drunk Complexions
  17. Oscar Figueroa: Less than a First Draft (Testing)
  18. Posters: November 1965-April 1986
  19. Klaus Staeck: Pornografie (new edition)
  20. K8 Hardy: How To
  21. Ryan Trecartin: Yet
  22. Anne Moeglin-Delcroix: Ambulo Ergo Sum
  23. Animal Spirits
  24. Derek Sullivan: Lynn Valley 8
  25. This Book is a Classroom
  26. Joachim Koester: Message from Andrée
  27. Source Book 5 / 2008 Geoffrey Farmer
  28. Carl Johan De Geer: DE GEER
  29. Tyler Coburne: I’m that angel
  30. Raqs Media Collective: Casebook
  31. Peter Fischli and David Weiss: Polyurethane Objects
  32. Neue Slowenische Kunst: NSK from Kapital to Capital
  33. Making Art Global, Part 1

The Third Havana Biennial 1989
  34. Michael Schmelling: Land Line
  35. 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
  36. Jalal Toufic: Reading, Rewriting Poe’s “The Oval Portrait“
  37. Joan Jonas: In the Shadow a Shadow
  38. Remedies to the absence of Reiner Ruthenbeck
  39. Paul Collins: The Killer