A Tapestry of Thoughts

Seth Siegelaub: Beyond Conceptual Art
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
12.12.15 – 17.04.16

I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order. … Instead, I must ask you to join me in the disorder of the crates that have been wrenched open … to join me among piles of volumes that are seeing daylight again after two years of darkness, so that you may be ready to share with me a bit of the mood – it is certainly not an elegiac mood, but rather one of anticipation – which these books arouse in a genuine collector.

The invitation is Walter Benjamin’s, asking the reader to share his excitement in rediscovering his books after being separated from them for years. His 1931 essay, Unpacking my Library, is not so much about the accumulated knowledge contained in Benjamin’s library as the heightened state of mind of the book collector. Benjamin, a genuine collector, observed that the passion of every collector borders on the chaotic, and that the library, in essence a chaos of books, finds its counterpoint in the order of its catalogue. As he concluded, ‘There is in the life of the collector a dialectical tension between the poles of order and disorder.’

I had to think of Benjamin’s observations when I found myself sitting amid a disarray of books and dozens of half-unpacked cardboard boxes. They belonged to Seth Siegelaub, an avid book collector, and their contents needed to be catalogued after his sudden death in 2013. Administrative drudgery, you would think, but no: every box revealed a fascinating ‘chaos’ of books. It could hold a year’s issues of 1930s magazines on embroidery, antique manuscripts with dye recipes, or titles on textile crafts from around the world, including Guatemalan Textiles Today: The Art and Technique of Weaving, Dyeing, Spinning, Crocheting, Looping, and Netting in Guatemala Today ( 1978 ), or The Art of Bobbin Lace: A Practical Text Book of Workmanship ( 1908 ). The same box might also contain publications on the social history of specific crafts or the economic development of the textile industry and trade, such as La Technique et l’Organisation de la Draperie à Bruges, à Gand, et à Malines au milieu du XVIe. Siècle ( 1920 ).

As random and disjointed as this all first seemed – covering different periods, geographies, academic disciplines and socio-political fields – as I worked my way through them, a narrative pattern started emerging, and with each box I opened, the intricate web of knowledge and materials that Seth Siegelaub had assembled increasingly peaked my interest.

The books are part of the Center for Social Research of Old Textiles ( CSROT ), a one-man research institute dedicated to investigating the socio-economic history of handmade textiles, which Siegelaub founded in the late 1980s. As well as building CSROT’s comprehensive archive and expanding his collection of antique textiles from around the world, he also tirelessly constructed a detailed bibliography, each item meticulously described and systematically indexed. In 1997 he published the Bibliographica Textilia Historiae: Towards a General Bibliography on the History of Textiles, the first general bibliography on the subject ever published.

Parts of the CSROT library and the Seth Siegelaub Textiles ( SST ) collection are currently on view in the exhibition Seth Siegelaub: Beyond Conceptual Art at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Arranged alongside cross-sections of rare antique books and more recent volumes are the most exquisite and delicate textiles from Europe and far afield, collected by Siegelaub on his travels. Most of the fabrics show traces of wear, in keeping with the nature of his interest in them, which concerned not merely their aesthetic beauty, but the histories they lived and convey. ‘Textiles’, he wrote, ‘occupy an interesting place in our history: they are intertwined with the history of the applied arts on the one hand, and with commerce and economic developments on the other.’

Seth Siegelaub: Beyond Conceptual Art is a survey of Siegelaub’s life’s work, highlighting not just his pioneering projects of the 1960s, making him the ‘Father of Conceptual Art’, but dedicating equal space to lesser-known activities that he developed while living in Paris and Amsterdam. Occupying the notoriously difficult 1,100 m² exhibition space in the museum’s new wing, the exhibition is broadly in three sections. To the right is a richly documented survey of each of the legendary art projects that Siegelaub developed with Lawrence Wiener, Robert Barry, Joseph Kosuth and the Dutch artist Jan Dibbets, among others, in New York in the 1960s. The centre of the exhibition offers a cross-section of left-wing publications that Siegelaub collected or published in Paris in the 1970s and 80s, and on the left is a selection of exquisite textiles from the SST collection, accompanied by books and documents from the CSROT library.

Curating a comprehensive overview of Seth Siegelaub’s achievements is no straightforward task. How does one pay due tribute to a man who was a gallerist and dealer in antique carpets; who stood at the cradle of New York’s conceptual art movement, organising such experimental exhibitions as The Xerox Book ( 1968 ) and January 5–31, 1969, which introduced the ‘catalogue-as-exhibition’; a man who published artists’ books, political pamphlets and translations of such controversial works as Mattelart and Dorfman’s How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic ( 1979 ); who was engaged in political activism, ran a one-man press and news network ( the leftist PP+NN, 1972 ), drafted the first artist contract ( The Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement, 1971 ), was an archivist and bibliographer, a self-taught researcher running interdisciplinary research institutes and, of course, an obsessively curious collector, who spent his money on books and textiles?

‘Seth was a modern homo universalis,’ writes Marja Bloem, his ex-partner and co-curator of the exhibition, ‘someone who didn’t let himself be bracketed into one category, nor wished to spend his entire life specialising in one thing.’ When asked why he abruptly had left his successful career in the art world and moved to Paris in 1972, Siegelaub answered, ‘I don’t like to repeat myself too much – which of course is the essence of success. I try to avoid comfortable, often uncritical situations by transforming my interests every ten or fifteen years.’

The threefold structure of the exhibition appears to follow this rhythm: New York and Conceptual Art; Paris and Political Publishing; Amsterdam and the History of Textiles. But instead of using partitioning walls, dividing the exhibition in clearly defined sections, the curators chose an open structure, allowing long lines of view across the space, which generated fascinating and unexpected connections. The Oriental carpets, which Siegelaub exhibited in his New York gallery alongside paintings by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, for example, can be linked with a geometrically patterned fabric from a Peruvian Chimu carpet ( AD 1000–1200 ). His love of lists seems to be a recurring motive throughout his life: lists with artist names, titles etc. used systematically to plan his projects, down to the detailed indexes in his bibliography on old textiles. But one the most significant threads that appears out of this rich and hybrid overview, connecting the wide array of activities, is Siegelaub’s passion for the book, as a bearer of knowledge, as a democratic medium to circulate knowledge, as a designed object, and as an alternative exhibition space. His catalogue-as-exhibition projects may now be deemed ( or even canonised ) a dematerialisation of the artwork, but Siegelaub cared about books as objects, their material and aesthetic qualities, printing, font, how they were made, etc.

Siegelaub’s outspoken left-wing political engagement is another theme that runs through the various projects on display. Like the artists with whom he worked, he distrusted established conventions and economic power structures in the art world. By producing art in limited editions and creating exhibitions as books, rather than in ‘hallowed’ gallery or museum spaces, Siegelaub rejected the aura of the ‘authentic’ art object, and the prices that accompanied it. The catalogue-as-exhibition was an aesthetic experiment, but also an institutional critique.

The pompous names and acronyms, and the fact that they comprised only a single person, were a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the conventional academic system. However, although these were the product of one man’s convictions, Siegelaub was no soloist. Both as a curator and as a researcher he was deeply embedded in social networks. In contrast to conventional academic practice, his research method consisted of long kitchen-table discussions with artists in New York, and activists and political thinkers in Paris. It provided him with a rich variety of sources and materials, which were often overlooked – or ignored – by the official institutions.

The dialectical tension, as Walter Benjamin calls it, between the organic chaos of this intuitive collecting and the meticulous ordering in lists, indexes and bibliographies is perhaps the key to unlock the intricacies of Siegelaub’s practice. In the far left corner of the room the curators installed a small watchtower, offering a bird’s-eye view of the exhibition: five decades of collecting, producing, publishing and distributing, mapped out like an atlas, through which new trajectories can be drawn.

Seth Siegelaub: Beyond Conceptual Art gives us an excellent perspective of how knowledge and materiality were interwoven in Seth Siegelaub’s varied practices. It is also an indirect critique of our need to classify what cannot be classified, of the mechanisms of simplified categorisation and neatly boxing things in. The assembled objects and documentation show Seth Siegelaub’s prolific production. But it is thanks to the open structure of the exhibition, which invites us to roam and meander, and to get lost in the different periods of Siegelaub’s life, his projects, themes and interests, that we can begin to grasp the fascinating fabric of his inquisitive thinking. The fluid arrangement suits the free spirit that was Seth Siegelaub, whose meandering mind can best be understood not in terms of strict frameworks or categories, but patchworks, interwoven threads and knotted networks.

This is a revised version of ‘Seth Siegelaub – Tegendraadse Doener en Denker’, originally published in Dutch in De Groene Amsterdammer, 17 February 2016.