A Remembrance of Robert Seydel By Matthew Erickson

Discussed: Vacation Reading, A Certain Eccentric Photography Professor, Monkish Time-Carving, Borgesian Syllabi, Tobacco Fumes, Emily Dickinson’s Family Homestead, An Actual Aunt, A Watershed Moment, An Exit from the Self, Serial Invention, A Scarlet Star

I first met the artist and poet Robert Seydel halfway through my second year at Hampshire College, after sending him a cold-call email asking if he would oversee an independent study on the literary group the Oulipo. Over that winter break, I had devoured my girlfriend’s tattered copy of Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, and I wanted to spend a full semester taking a deeper dive into its tradition of intricate, constraint-based literature. When I asked around to see who might be able to take this project on, the name of a certain eccentric photography professor—one who chain-smoked, slept little, worked feverishly on his art, and nurtured his students’ peculiar obsessions as though they were his own—kept coming up.

Although photography was Robert’s supposed métier (he studied the medium in graduate school, and was for many years a curator at Boston University’s Photographic Resource Center before turning to teaching), his enthusiasms were deeply and genuinely hybrid; fiction and poetry influenced him as much as anything in the visual arts did. By the time I began to work under him, in the early aughts, Robert’s photographic practice had shifted toward something significantly more complex than his early work: he had become a maker of meticulously layered works on paper that incorporated all manner of found imagery and flattened street detritus, delicate small assemblages in antique cigar boxes, and an interrelated stream of written texts, all created using a common language of invented, cipher-like characters.

Robert took me on for the Oulipo study, despite his overextended schedule that semester, purely out of his own deep fondness for the more experimental strains of world literature. I then spent the next two years working with him in his idiosyncratic studio-art courses, and eventually had him on my final-year thesis committee. I remember Robert telling me, as I’m sure he often told other students who worked closely with him, that “our culture doesn’t support what we do, so we need to carve out time for our real work.” For Robert, that time-carving was a strict daily regimen, almost monkish in its commitment to art. His creative practice was a daily ritual. Every day, he would wake up early, hours before his paid workday began, to read intensely, smoke cigarettes, and drink coffee. In the evenings, coming home from teaching and meetings and class critiques and more meetings—and if he didn’t have any social obligations—he would unplug...