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ON THE ART OF ROBERT SEYDEL
BY LISA PEARSON
All rights reserved. Copyright © 2007, Lisa Pearson and Siglio Press.
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.
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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, February 7, 2011
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