A Picture is Always a Book: Further Writings from Book of Ruth

Artist and writer Robert Seydel (1960–2011) often used personas and fictional constructs in a vast body of work that incorporated collage, drawing, photography and writing. His primary alter ego Ruth Greisman--banker by day, artist by night, friend of Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell--lived in Queens, caring for her shell-shocked brother, a veteran of WWI. This book collects Ruth’s “journal pages,” typed on paper purloined from old photo albums and adorned with drawings, narrating Ruth’s inner life and the tenuous creation of self. She says, “I’ll invent who I am, against what is. My time and name: a Queens of the mind.” All of Ruth’s works--collages, journal pages and drawings--were purportedly discovered buried in boxes of miscellanea in the Joseph Cornell Study Center at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art and in the family garage. A definitive selection will be exhibited at the Neilson Library, Smith College.

He exhumes and invents, treating style, composition, imagery, and identity as raw material. It’s as if the work sprouts from the fingers of a living reading list. (Owen Daniel Hyperallergic)

One of the beauties of A Picture is Always a Book: Further Writings from Book of Ruth is that it's primarily a book about process. I picked it up not knowing what in the world to expect, yet found myself completely entrenched―in the best sense―within Robert Seydel's complex thought processes. It could be a result of the mercurial text itself, as it strays from prose to poetry in an instant. Or the superimposed doodles and drawings Seydel himself made upon the pages themselves―made just so they interact with the text physically. Or some strange combination of both. And the effect is two-fold. You read the book, then you see the book, each reading lending new information to what the other reading lacked, or perhaps could not suggest on its own. Once or twice through the text and you will not be able to separate image from word as a symbiotic relationship develops. (John Gibbs The Improbable)