$35 Paper 152 pages 90 color and 32 b/w illustrations
Art / Literature ISBN 978-0-9799562-5-6
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.
PETER GIZZI: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!
ROSAMOND PURCELL:A haunting, mesmerizing, and heartbreakingly generous
work of art.
*
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.
JOHN YAU: Book of Ruth is a modern
fairy tale unlike any other, arriving from a
corner of the world where fiction and fact
are interchangeable. . . . Open this book
and lose yourself. Out of bits of ephemera
held together by cloud and glue an entire
universe will rise up to greet you.
MAGGIE NELSON:Behold Seydel’s
"Ruth"—banker by day, scriber of daily
wonders by night, whose art of "damaged
things made" pours forth from a "healing
imagination [with] animals in it." Rich with
"white magic," as Joseph Cornell put it,
Book of Ruth is an enchanting, mischievous,
often deeply moving act of invention
and homage.
A small original collage from the Ruth
archive is included in a special clothbound,
foil-stamped and numbered
edition of Book of Ruth. Edition of 25.
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