Robert Seydel received his BFA from New York University
in 1984 and earned an MFA in photography from the Rhode
Island School of Design in 1990. Mr. Seydel's background
includes extensive curatorial and editorial assignments,
and his work has been displayed in galleries in
Connecticut, Massachusetts, Texas, and Washington. He has
taught at both the University of Connecticut and the
University of Massachusetts. Currently, he lives and
works in Amherst, Massachusetts and teaches at Hampshire
College.
A Short History of Portraiture is an archive of
sorts, the first part of a much larger project modeled
upon the idea of a contemporary Canterbury Tales. It is a
kind of Tale of the Collector, whose lineaments can be
read between the lines, as it were, of his gathered
horde.
The selections from the Short History presented
in this exhibit are best approached by emphasizing the
two primary activities that bear most upon its
production. First, the activity of the Collector himself;
a pedant by nature, this Collector is devoted not only to
his portraits, and to the myriad forms by which they have
been represented, but also to books of divers sorts. The
somewhat odd and endless Sections into which he divides
his History, his shuffling of figures across innumerable
conceptual categories, represents a psychology that has
learned the psychoanalytical game of substitution to near
perfection.
The second activity to be addressed defines procedure.
By looking at cave paintings and bone inscriptions,
paleontologist Alexander Marshack has defined a system of
writing based on the employment of previous marks to
generate, on the same object, secondary and tertiary
markings. Marshack calls this multilayered writing system
"the concept of variable image use and reuse." This
concept holds a key to the Short History; images
therein have been taken as texts, and added to. The act
consists of a form of overwriting, like a type of Hebrew
midrash or creative interpretation. The pictures
themselves are meant as thoughts made, in the sense that
they express an interest not in experience per se, but in
the thinking that the visual image can
contain.
Artist's Statement
Dodd Research Center, West Gallery
Curator: Rutherford Witthus
