“A surd is a radical whose meaning cannot be exactly ascertained.” – Lewis Carroll

One exciting thing about the creative act (in the parlance of Marcel Duchamp) is its way of bringing about, for actor and viewer, things that haven’t been experienced before. At least not in the same context. Some of what’s been made by the Belgian poet, filmmaker, and artist Marcel Broodthaers is a good example of this, and in a way that also allows the viewer to creatively complete the picture by way of imagining new meanings of what’s being shown. With this I’d like to bring up nonsense, or better another sense, which is what to my mind what Broodthaers was engaged in. In My Ogre Book, Shadow Theater, Midnight (Siglio, 2016), he tries on Lewis Carroll’s shoes and explores the partitions of reality and make-believe. In one edition of texts and images spanning a little more than a decade, the book collects three short works. The first of three parts, Mon livre d’ogre (My Ogre Book, 1957), is a tableau in a series of poems — with Midnight (1960) in similar fashion, and then the all-image collection Shadow Theater (1973-1974) between the two, made from one of Broodthaers’ Projection series.

Like in Carroll, the why of Broodthaers needn’t be put into words. The tale that Broodthaers weaves is often a fragmented one that is at times homely and always bewildering. These things are what make his poetry congenial, seeming from the wellsprings of consciousness. Consciousness, after all, as writer Harry Mathews has said, “does not produce a particular meaning — it produces no conclusions.” That seems a pretty apt description of this collection: Broodthaers isn’t concluding anything, and with that he makes an adventurer of his reader. For children first, this nonsense has always been a secret means of access to a more vibrant, harlequin world — one I’ve come to find belongs to poetry, in all of its guises.

When the first of the three books came out, it was 1957, a post-war world. The first US edition of Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat appeared, and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl was printed in England and seized by customs officials that year. What is the significance of this? Maybe nothing. To liken Broodthaers’ writing to Carroll is, by the way, in no way to call it anachronistic — a word I’ll look askance at, not abiding by the notion that styles “belong” to specific eras. At the start of My Ogre Book, through the “present day mirror,” morning becomes a world unto itself, reminding one of Alice holding to her orange. Broodthaers also, while courting a familiar style, brings to the poems motifs and highly unusual turns all his own. There is otherworldly music where donkeys play the drums, and the bells of Easter Island, well, remain silent. Elsewhere goats knock on doors, fairies grind coffee, paper flowers fill with dew, and all the while everyday, clearly explained things happen too, making some of this fantasy material even more interesting. “The wind allies itself with the fire/ the rafts burn in the night” is one such line so lucid you can almost smell the smoke, and “The key is under the doormat” as ever.

In his writing and in the images within Shadow Theater, Broodthaers was able to summon the chance-originated play, conundrums, or (un)concerns that his later visual artworks hinge on physically. I’m thinking of Broodthaers’ La Pluie, a 1969 film wherein the artist tries to write as “rain” falls on him, washing away text even as he continues to write. A simple, strange tableau on astronomical situations, human effort and circumstance, all of Broodthaers’ work seems to engage the processes of being in the world and making things. But in his writings, the poet plays with meaning with an almost wholesale disregard for ordinary sense — no net as far as the game of reasoning and logic goes, he creates extra significances that endlessly drift in and out of new senses. In Midnight, surprising things take place: rain falls from the sun, a straw man guards the sea, a black cat constellation is made, centuries get lined up in a matchbox, and stars are turned to salt. This memorable nonsense impresses me just about as much as the regular phenomena it parodies.

Calling it an artist’s book is no stretch — at just over 150 pages, its layout has the look of a children’s book juxtaposed with the simple aesthetic appeal of Raymond Roussel and the artist Zo’s collaboration from 1929, New Impressions of Africa, where images and cantos are informed by one another throughout. The images in this book lie between the two short collections of poems but have no text on their pages.

Thumbing to Shadow Theater (Ombres chinoises) (1973-74) — a series of 80 slides of images taken from comic strips, books, and a photography manual, all of which were projected somewhere sometime — Broodthaers tells another story, again a provisionary one that unravels and winds up again by turns. A visual lexicon involving ordinary or comic incidents, objects, and figures, is reimagined in new juxtapositions that make the familiar baffling. In Shadow Theater, celestial bodies career through outer space and transform to erupting volcanoes, exploding perhaps through a kitchen window, to maybe cause the seasons to tear a man from limb-to-limb. Volcanoes, shadow puppets, and solid black rectangles are a few of this book’s recurrent motifs.

Broodthaers explained the effect of his work in 1965, saying, “The preference for eternity and the natural had ended up producing academicism, as we know. Its replacement by a preference for the ephemeral, for the artificial, for all that is false, aroused my enthusiasm as much as my poetic loyalty.” In Broodthaers, assumed logic is, for a moment, set aside or transmogrified. Be the truth “interstitial,” as Broodthaers calls it, or mere traces in the mind of the artist, the person experiencing the objects will always come away with something new when the imagination has a say.

Broodthaers, Marcel. My Ogre Book, Shadow Theater, Midnight (New York: Siglio, 2016). Trans. by Elizabeth Zuba with Maria Gilissen Broodthaers. ISBN-13: 978-1-938221-11-8. 160 pages. Edition of 1,000. $39.95

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Cage — a prolific avant-garde musician-composer, writer, and artist — created works that pushed at the confines of music and sound, thus redefining the medium. He was a pioneer of prepared piano compositions, where modifications were made to the instrument’s mechanisms, and he often created atonal musical works rather than using traditional Western melodic techniques. His interest in aleatory devices and Eastern philosophy, particularly the Chinese I Ching, heavily influenced his creative output, as well as music indebted to him ever since.

Diary, completed between 1965 and 1982 and printed with an IBM Selectric typewriter, also uses constraints derived from chance operations. Depending on the outcome, Cage would write a fixed number of words every day, limit the number of characters and determine the margins and indentations of each line, creating what he termed mosaics. Color figures prominently in the text, too, with lines alternating between 28 different shades of blue and red. This vacillation between typeface, colors ranging from muted gray-blues to red-browns and variance in the surrounding white space gives each page a sculptural element, a welcome counterpart to Cage’s careful attention to the rhythm of the text. At times, this renders Diary poetic and delightfully meandering.

While relying on chance operations for its form, Cage maintained a deeply personal vulnerability in the content. His ideas about a variety of global issues are punctuated with casual references to his friends, mentors, and colleagues, including Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan, and Marcel Duchamp. Vignettes of domestic life — time spent with his mother or his life partner and collaborator, the choreographer Merce Cunningham — figure prominently throughout. (Cage’s father died in 1965, shortly before Diary was published and delivered in public address. His mother would die a few years later in 1969.) In one section, Cage gives a story about trying to purchase fresh coriander in Chinatown with a friend, and in another, he shares that as he was completing benefit forms after the death of his father, his mother revealed to him that she had been married twice before.

The Diary’s philosophical meditations (“The goal is not to have a goal. The new universe city will have no limits. It will not be in any special place . . . ”) and social commentary (“Act of sharing is a community act. Think of people outside the community. What do we share with them . . . ?”) provide effective contrasts to Cage’s seemingly stream of conscious musings and rant-like observations. In one instance he speculates that, “Encouraged, instead of frightened, children could learn several languages before reaching age of four, at that age engaging in the invention of their own languages. Play’d be play instead of being, as now, release of repressed anger.” In another, he observes “ . . . People ask what the avant-garde is and whether it’s finished. It isn’t. There will always be one. The avant-garde is flexibility of mind and it follows like day the night from not falling prey to government and education. Without avant-garde nothing would get invented.”

The I Ching acknowledges that life and everything in it is in a constant state of flux. Diary reveals how Cage took that philosophy to heart in his daily life. His critical, yet hopeful musings about the cultural context on which Diary reflects capture life’s impermanence as well as Cage’s personal comfort with ambiguity during a time when people around the world were desperately seeking certainty. Observations such as, “Edwin Schlossberg told me that while Fuller was writing a dedication in his book Utopia or Oblivion, he paused and said, ‘Those are not the only possibilities . . .’ ” or “New York’s the largest Puerto Rican city in the world . . . ” show Cage to be not only an artist, musician, and thinker, but also a compassionate, active citizen of the world.

Cage, John. Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse). Co-edited by Joe Biel and Richard Kraft. (New York: Siglio, 2015). ISBN-13: 978-1-938221-11-01, 176 pages, $32

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Sophie Calle makes portraits of herself and strangers through investigative methods including surveillance, interviews, photography, and text. In Suite Vénitienne (Siglio Press, 2015) Calle follows an acquaintance, Henri B., through Venice for two weeks. Calle’s route includes systematic trailing and sporadic tracking of strangers with whom Henri B. might have some connection. Suite Vénitienne, reissued from Siglio in the form of a die-cut, hardcover artist’s book, is handsomely bound and readable. The book contains four color and 56 black-and-white illustrations and photographs accompanying plain and descriptive narratives of Henri B.’s, and therefore Calle’s, maneuverings.

The book becomes about the act of following. Through the specificity of Calle’s intention — to trail this vague acquaintance — the reader/viewer finds herself following Calle following Henri B. The text takes the form of a paced trail-making. Henri B.’s decisions set the pace. Calle’s decisions — the ways in which she describes her subject’s actions, the photographs she chooses to present — make the trail and narrate a specific version of his trip. As in much of Calle’s work, a pointed problem is worked towards or through by Calle herself and the labor overlays the life of the artist. What is uncovered is relatable and applicable. Calle is versed in getting at the universal through the acutely personal, via factual and plain observations. On the first page, she sets a tone and moves along the path accordingly:

For months I followed strangers on the street. For the pleasure of following them, not because they particularly interested me. I photographed them without their knowledge, took note of their movements, then finally lost sight of them and forgot them.

At the end of January 1980, on the streets of Paris, I followed a man whom I lost sight of a few minutes later in the crowd. That very evening, quite by chance, he was introduced to me at an opening. During the course of our conversation, he told me he was planning an imminent trip to Venice. I decided to follow him.

Calle is not interested in Henri B. She is interested in the investigation. Henri could be anyone. Calle becomes the subject. I became interested in her decisions and modes of framing Henri B. Immersed in her detailed and straightforward descriptions of her subject, I couldn’t help but wonder about the intricacies of her positioning. Where was she in relation to Henri B.? Calle tells us that she is in disguise — wearing a blonde wig. She carries a camera. In the charged moments when Calle reveals her proximity to Henri B., the act of following becomes a performance and the quality of the relationship between follower and followed reveals itself to be one of a high tension:

8:45pm Their legs appear on the top steps. I crouch into my hiding place. They go, turning to their left. I wait a few seconds. At the very moment I leave the alley to follow them, they turn around. She was the first to turn back. She scares me more than he does.

If the site of following is the site of performance, then Suite Vénitienne might be a document of the act, which happened under clandestine circumstances in Venice in 1980. However, this considerately designed book is a work in itself. It is a re-enlivened iteration of Calle’s two week carrying-out. Here, the performance and narrative notations are inseparable. Time stamps, detailed maps, and street photographs help situate the portrait. Calle is practical but fluid in her narrative and physical plays:

I always see the same faces, never his. I’ve come to find some consolation in knowing he’s not where I am looking for him. I know where Henri B. is not.

For a few moments, I take a different tack and absentmindedly follow a flower delivery boy — as if he might lead me to him.

The distance between what one desires (follows) and the object of one’s desire is vast and often hastily filled with projections. Once the distance is closed (Henri discovers that Calle has been following him) the elusiveness dissipates. Calle is the most interesting thing about Henri. B.:

I think about him and that phrase by Proust, ‘To think that I wasted years of my life, that I wanted to die, that I felt my deepest love, for a woman who did not appeal to me, who was not my type!’

I must not forget that I don’t have any amorous feelings toward Henri B. The impatience with which I await his arrival, the fear of that encounter, these symptoms aren’t really a part of me.

Those symptoms are perhaps a part of the loaded act of tracking. Calle becomes quite immersed in the object of her gaze. But, there are edges around the project. Her final entry reads: “10:10am I stop following Henri B.”

The compact intimacy of Siglio’s re-edition of Suite Vénitienne is an apt form for Calle’s discreet findings. The book form creates space for the reader to make a third trail against and through those of Henri B. and Calle.

Calle, Sophie. Suite Vénitienne. (Los Angeles: Siglio, 2015). ISBN-13:978-1-938221-09-5, 96 pages, $34.95

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Siglio and Ugly Duckling Presse have just published Songs of S. with Maybe S.: a posthumous cycle of poems, collage works, and journal writings left behind by Robert Seydel, who suddenly died of a heart attack in 2011 while preparing for a course he was to teach at Hampshire College. Siglio has also newly published A Picture is Always a Book: Further Writings from Book of Ruth, another posthumous collection. That book is a collection of journal pages written by Seydel’s alter ego, Ruth Greisman, who was inspired by his aunt of the same name. Opening with a fitting collage frontispiece featuring a beaten vintage photograph of a sailboat on a raging sea with a painted red-orange sun hanging in the sky and the word “V O Y A G E” in bold black typeface, the publication of A Picture is Always a Book accompanies an exhibition entitled “Robert Seydel: The Eye in Matter,” showing at the Neilson Library at Smith College in Northampton Massachusetts, and later traveling to the Queens Museum of Art in New York, and the Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College in Chicago. These pages taken from old and brittle photo books add even more playfulness to a body of work that’s already fascinating and impressive (if only for its singularity and dreamlike perspective).

Spending time with the two newly published books, it’s clear that Seydel’s very strange and marvelous work challenges stock adjectives and remains indifferent to genres. They are objects to be admired. With A Picture is Always a Book, each photo book paper collage page containing the Ruth journals typed from a typewriter, features Seydel doodles in pen, crayon, and marks using various media. The presses did a fine job of assembling and printing Seydel’s work, and allowing his genre-less work to stand on its own: Songs of S. is the book of slightly more refined writings in the form of lyric poems. With the keen editorial eye of Robert’s friend, the poet Peter Gizzi, this cycle of poems is paired with Maybe S., a color pamphlet of drawings,neatly tucked into a fold in the back of the book’s jacket. A Picture is Always a Book also contains, along with Ruth’s journal pages, an interview between Seydel and Savina Velkova.

Who was Robert Seydel? With one glimpse at the smattering of Seydel’s collages, the pamphlet of drawings by S., and other parts of the Ruth-engaged work made available since his death, it becomes clear that he was an inventive archivist of human experience. A professor at Hampshire College in Massachusetts, Seydel had a fascinating practice of art-making, with classes geared toward teaching students how to collage and collect; and his own archives of curiosities, artifacts, references, annotations and histories show a thrill for knowledge and a connective universe. He seemed to have been one of those rarities who not only taught others, but was always busy making things, and, a distinctively important and timely trait, he was interested in the “shiftiness of gender and identity,” as he tells it in the interview with Velkova.

There are many pages in A Picture, which might appear to be observation or emoting, from the author behind the author: Seydel. But in fact, it was decidedly Ruth who wrote and drew and rendered all these things. A little red breasted robin on a wobbly street light, the many stamp-looking stars or the smoking black or red locomotive stamps boxed in with crayon; or surreal lines like the Reverdy-esque: “A man w/ a hole in his head coughed,” or apparently “personal” and the deceptively-confessional: “I was beautiful as a girl. But that wrecked me.” The use of nonsense (or better: other sense) tenderness, loose construct, live editing, and amateur visual aspect belie Seydel’s having a rigorously conceptual approach. Part of his amateur style emerges in conversation with, for instance, “what’s referred to as the ‘Animal Style’ in art — from Native American pictographs and the history of Paleolithic stone to, say, Henri Michaux and Dubuffet” (p. 101).

Seydel’s work is experimental and highly original, like that Joseph Cornell, and unlike Marcel Duchamp (whose works both artists come after in terms of lineage and affinity). His collages seem to spring from a responsive sense of reverie, rather than a colder kind of intellectual assemblage. With Cornell as an important precursor to Seydel, Ruth is able to share and explore “the idea of collage as a total way of working, and of magic and combinatory art,” with a sense of fantasy, longing, and relation. Ruth even “sends objects and missals and valentines of sorts to Cornell just as he sent his to Dietrich or his ballerinas,” which explains in part why so much of this work seems so open. Seydel, or Ruth (or both) wished to show something.

In the tradition of many who preceded him, Seydel most often worked under the guise of another identity, such as the aforementioned Ruth. “From Browning to Pound to Pessoa, speaking in voices was a way to carry history and multiplicity into the poem.” (p. 104) As a child does, the artist-poet situated himself in the realms of the imagination with a sharp eye for discovery in daily life, and from there was able to bemuse on anything he’d like. He seemed to have done this effortlessly. Take for example, from one of Ruth’s Further Writings, the simple and odd lines: “Light of Snow, Hat-Solitude & Portense. Is Portia me?” or in “florida” when Ruth relates the “pelicans moving across the marsh” in typeface which suddenly turns into an Apollinairean calligramme where the words “cough drops” are first encircled and then descend the page like rain. This kind of odd juxtaposition delights because it really isn’t trying to tell you something. The former text example is accompanied by the surprisingly satisfying scrap of purple and white paper, which looks like a drawing of an ice-capped mountain with an inverted goal post. The words seem to sit there beside each other, beneath constructed landscapes bearing black circle suns, bluebirds, curtains, matzoh balls, geometric shapes, various types of eyeballs, and figures which are neither human nor alien: all just to wait and see what happens. Another of Ruth’s journal pages begins with the simple line “I seek a flower in my mind.” And don’t we all, Ruth?

For outsider artists like Robert Seydel — many of whom keep their work private throughout their careers — there’s no need for aesthetic sophistication, only the revelry during making and discovering that comes easily to the amateur, and little need for audience at all. Do something, goes the age-old order. In the case of Seydel, who saw art “as a kind of exit out of the self” as giving animation to imagination, we’re left with hitherto unseen hand-drawn doodles, collages, and typewritten object-lessons that are epitomes of our time — the fragmented, curious, and anything but ordinary world in which we’ve found ourselves.

Robert Seydel with Peter Gizzi. Songs of S. with Maybe S. (New York: Ugly Duckling Presse with Siglio, distributed by DAP, 2014). ISBN: 978-1-938221-05-7. 112 pages, $24.00

Robert Seydel and Savina Velkova, A Picture is Always a Book: Further Writings from the Book of Ruth (New York: Ugly Duckling Presse with Siglio, distributed by DAP, 2014). Ed. Lisa Pearson. ISBN: 978-1-938221-06-4. 112 pages, $36.00

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