Tag Archives: poem

Strong misreadings: Tom Phillips at Flowers Gallery

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Installation view of “Pages from a Humument” at Flowers Gallery

A row of one hundred unadorned pages from an old book entitled “A Human Document.” Below, a row of pages similarly numbered but with words inked out or colored over to tell a new story with old words. Beneath those two rows, another row of the exact same pages but manipulated with drawings, collages, and a different selection of words. On view at Flowers Gallery, the exhibition “Pages from A Humument” offers the viewer both the starting point of this body of work and its reinvention twice over. British artist Tom Phillips took the Victorian novel “A Human Document” as the basis for an alternate narrative first exhibited in 1973 (the middle row). He returned to the original pages for another alternate reading, debuting in 2012 (the bottom row). Different strings of words are selected each time. Following the thread of them down the page the viewer finds poetry rather than straightforward narrative. This kind of strong misreading does not suggest an anxiety of influence, but rather a decided optimism about the depths to which a text can be mined for meaning: the birth of a reader.

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Recently I wrote about works by Robert Seydel that are similarly text-based. Seydel used old pages from albums and books as fodder for an inventive merging of text and image bound together by a loose fictional persona as narrator. Here in Phillips work, no clear authorial hand, even fictional, appears. There are recurrent concerns about art–also seen in Seydel’s work–and certain words such as “toge” seem to have specific meaning, cropping up again again across unrelated pages. Unfortunately, unlike the show of Seydel’s work, Phillips’ pages on view at Flowers are primarily high-quality photocopies, losing some of the intimacy and surface interest that the hand-inked pages would have.

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“A Humument,” which combines “human” and “document” from the original book’s title, suggests other trains of thought; the artist said in a recent interview:

There are little echoes within. It’s a funny little word. Human and humument and exhumed, earth humus, and all that. That pleases me because it’s not fixed.

Monument also comes to mind, as working and reworking the pages has become the artist’s life work, something he has returned to time and time again since his initial selection of the book in 1966 and now, at age 78, continues to develop.

Installation view of Pages from a Humument at Flowers Gallery

Installation view of “Pages from a Humument” at Flowers Gallery

The birth of the reader, ala Barthes, suggest the need for a strong, able reader. Phillips waxes poetic and facile, but remains fragmentary, at least as far as I could tell. His suggestions for a new narrative might be pithy, funny, or romantic, but they never build to more in narrative. However, as a testament to the capacity for human invention and some beautiful colored small drawings, they are well-worth a look. “Pages from A Humument” is up for one more week, through August 29th, at Flowers Gallery in Chelsea.

Collaged poetry: Robert Seydel at the Queens Museum

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Collaged poetry, or poems via the pictorial medium of collage? Robert Seydel confuses distinction between the visual and literal in his works on paper. When Queens-based artist Robert Seydel died in 2011 at age 50, he left behind of corpus of pages older than he was–taken from vintage albums and books, thick and yellowed with age, to which the artist added found images, paint, and words. Now many of these collages line the walls of the Queens Museum as part of the exhibition Robert Seydel: The Eye in Matter while pages from his journals and typed poems fill cases in the center of the room. Playful, dense, intimate–this is a show that rewards careful attention and voyeuristic complicity.

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I characterize the act of looking here as voyeuristic because the intimacy of scale is combined with the intimacy of the diarist’s musings. The first-person viewpoint of Ruth, an alter-ego Seydel adopts in these quasi-fictional accounts, creates a framing narrative to these fragmentary poems and paragraphs. Seydel tells an inaccurate story of Ruth and Saul, people who in real life were siblings–his aunt and uncle. Pages might describe Ruth’s obsession with artist Joseph Cornell. Seydel knew Cornell, working as his studio assistant, but the one-sided love affair was (probably) his own invention.

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To a great degree, his own concerns blended with those of his fictional aunt, to the point that he said in an interview:

She’s so taken over part of my art-making function that I don’t really question her authenticity anymore. I thought originally I wanted to inhabit another person; now she inhabits me.

What keeps the interest of the viewer in such elaborate, personal arcana is a strong sense of humor, like in the work pictured above. The protagonists are pictured with Ruth’s emblem–the hare–like respectable 1940s space aliens having a family portrait made.

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Seydel uses text in highly visual, nuanced ways. Even when typing up pages of poetry, the artist carefully spaced the words and allowed room for the insertion of stars or painted hares. “A picture always wants to be something else” Seydel said, and one has the sense that in his hands pictures and words were mercurial, amorphous vehicles for expression.

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Robert Seydel: The Eye in Matter is on view at the Queens Museum of Art through September 27, 2015. Plaid Duchamp Recording in Magenta, a complimentary event featuring photographs, poetry, and 8mm short films inspired by Joseph Cornell, is happening this Sunday, August 16 from 3 to 5 pm.

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