| Angela Lorenz ~ Massachusetts and Italy | |
Catalog for "Creating with Abandon" exhibition |
|
Bacon's Bits of Broken Knowledge 6" tall x 2" round plastic jar with lid. 5 pages; multiple clay bacon bits. Materials: plastic spice jar; lens; compass; brass wire; paper label; plastic modeling clay. Contains sayings from Sir Francis Bacon's Essays embossed with letterpress text on fake bacon bits. (Yes, fake bacon bits, not to be tried at home.) Angela Lorenz: "This work is an attempt to encapsulate a bit of knowledge about Sir Francis Bacon (1561- 1626) in a spice jar. I became curious about Bacon when I learned, through a history of science scholar, that he had windowpanes in his study with symbols on them to help him remember things, which relates to a project I am doing on memory. Then in Peter Ackroyd's book Albion I discovered Bacon's concept of 'broken knowledge,' which is adapted from the term 'broken music,' referring to the many parts for different musical instruments in English music. Months later I spied an old book of Bacon's Essays in my grandmother's parlor, which contained Bacon's aphorisms, officially known as Ornamenta Rationalia. "A few of Bacon's sayings are printed with letterpress text onto fake bacon bits in the shape of the continents. Bacon was one of the first to notice that the continents fit together. The term scientist was not in use, so Bacon was known as a 'natural philosopher' and the label boasts Natural Philosophy! The spice jar label also claims, New Atlantis and New Organum. These are two famous works by Bacon which underline his unconventional approach to the Platonic and Aristotelian schools of thought. Aristotle wrote a work called Organum and Plato created the mythical Atlantis in Timaeus and Critias, two of Plato's dialogues, which Bacon reacted against. Bacon's New Atlantis is a utopia which became the model for one of the first scientific institutes, The Royal Society (1666), [formed] forty years after his death. It was actually Sir Thomas More who invented the term Utopia, the title of one of his books, and popularized the utopia genre of writing. Bacon wrote about More, and both occupied the highest appointment of the King, Lord Chancellor. Both plummeted suddenly from power and went to prison. But Bacon, accused of taking outlandish bribes, paid a fine and was soon released and pardoned by James I. "Bacon is most famous for his Essays, which are listed on the back of the label. He is considered the father of essay in English, rivaled only by Montaigne, and can be credited with popularizing the genre. Some consider Bacon a pioneer in science as well, advocating scientific method, as opposed to relying on the theories of Aristotle. He asserted the need to begin an investigation by collecting as much data as possible, upon which theories might be formed, so that science may be built upon facts obtained through experiments. Bacon is also respected for stating that there was much knowledge still to be discovered. "The lens in the top of the jar pays homage to Bacon's call for experiments. The navigational compass attached to the bottom of the jar references Bacon's statement about three innovations or technologies which transformed Europe: the compass, printing, and gunpowder. Gunpowder is represented symbolically in the number of the edition, 22, which relates to bullets and the weapons that shoot them. All of these technologies were spread to Europe from China during the Mongol Empire." |
|
Ornamental Deciduous Tree 6" long fan-shaped book housed in a test tube. Light verse and artistic invention offer homage to the scent of the ginkgo tree. (The verse is not doggerel although dogs and gingko trees share more scents than nonsense in common.) Angela Lorenz: "For years in Bologna I noted the stink in Largo Respighi by Bologna's city theater. Underneath the tree with fan-shaped yellow leaves the city created a place for people to let their dogs relieve themselves. There was a little sign: W.C. CANI. One day, two young women were walking ahead of me in that street when one turned to the other and said, 'This tree is so smelly!' I thought to myself what an idiot this woman is — didn't she notice it's a designated dog bathroom here? How strange to cast blame on the tree. Well, several years later, near the Post Office, I recognized the same smell under the same variety of tree, the Chinese ginkgo tree….Thus I realized, even as people around me kept stopping to look at the bottom of their shoes for dog excrement, I was the ignorant one. "In October, in New York City, walking along a ginkgo-tree-lined section of 57th street, I noticed many people checking their feet. I watched the same thing happening in Bologna several days later, and realized the shape of the leaf could easily be evoked in a paper binding. The poem followed soon after. The first person I shared it with, a neighbor across the street, said her uncle, Koji Nakanishi, professor emeritus at Columbia University, New York City, discovered the medicinal properties of the ginkgo 30 years ago, launching the movement to find the medicinal properties of many plants. He also loves to do magic tricks in front of his colleagues. This work is dedicated to him, and inspired the chemistry packaging from which the magical form may be extracted. "Photocopy text transferred by bone-folder onto saffron-dyed Japanese mulberry paper and cardstock title label with magic marker blender pen. Bound with early 19th-century yellow linen Barbour drug twine. Housed in a test tube with rubber stopper. Test tube and stopper are from Di Giovanni chemistry supplies, Bologna, formerly located opposite the Teatro Communale, and the large ginkgo tree from which germinated this poem and project. When the owner saw the paper gingko leaf, he informed me that his shop used to be opposite a great ginkgo tree, causing him to laugh all the time at the pedestrians checking to see they hadn't stepped in something, which he adeptly mimed from behind the counter." |
|
The Strength of Denham – 3.5" x 4.2"x .3", 3.5"x 219" fully extended. Only the first 10 of the edition are housed in a pair of jeans which is the deluxe. This is one of the standard edition with a scrap of the jeans and one of the embossed paper buttons on the inside cover of the protective box. Poem printed with a Canon printer on Ermine paper. Bound with scraps from Sir John Denham Jeans, rubbed with a Decoro color pencil on mulberry paper. Cover based on an antique tax wrapper for playing cards housed in the Victoria & Albert Museum. Inset is composed of a Denham Jean button embossed on Nile paper. Portrait of Sir John Denham drawn in pen and ink with a border based on the old American game "Authors Improved". The book consists of a 696 line biography in rhyming verse, explaining the life and times of English poet, spy and architect Sir John Denham Angela Lorenz comments on the making of "The Strength of Denham": "[It] is highly concentrated in puns and double-entendres, in keeping with 17th century satire, which often aimed below the belt anatomically speaking. The wit was crude, not subtle. Mine is very mild in comparison, but describes the themes wielded by the wits of the period. Behinds, pants, briefs, bestiality, adultery, flatulence and sexual disease are all prominently featured, albeit mildly. While Denham is defined through his homophone, in punning with fabric I am not alone. Textile terms are present throughout the poem. This is consistent with Denham and his contemporaries, especially in satirical "mock" genres, like mock advices, mock eulogies and mock heroics, which Denham helped establish as genres. In a poem ridiculing poet and playwright Davenant's "Gondibert", Denham writes," As I came from Lombardy with my fustian style." He is joking about clothing, as fustian is the term for the stiff, robust material we call jeans, or denim. But Denham is also punning with the word "style", which means stylus or pen, not just fashion of clothing. To this day, fustian refers to stuffy language. In Denham's wonderful elegy on his friend and fellow poet Abraham Cowley, written and published within three weeks of Cowley's death, he praises his knowledge of ancient authors and his ability to emulate as opposed to copy them: "And when he would like them appear, their garb, but not their cloaths, did wear." Two possibly unfamiliar textile terms for readers might be "woad", a blue dye of the time, and "tailor's hell", a box where tailors' leftover scraps were ossed. ... The color blue is a recurrent theme, as it is associated with royalty and nobility as well as being the color of jeans. Royal blue is the color of the ribbon worn by the highest chivalric order, or knighthood, the Order of the Garter. Blue is also associated with blue-prints, appropriate for Denham, who became the chief architect in Britain as Surveyer General, although this cyanotype process postdates Denham. The numerous low-points in Denham's life would make great material for the blues, but Denham preferred to make light of woe, writing humorous bawdy verse instead of wallowing in self-pity, and needed to devote his time to conniving his way out of one disaster after another. ... There are numerous references to playing cards, gambling and poker, appropriate for Denham the gambling addict. His nickname Jack relates to cards, but suits him in its definition as "knave" as well as laborer, in regard to all of the public works he was responsible for with his various titles and building committees. There are references to work clothing and equipment, such as jackhammer, compressor and plumb, as well as architectural terms such as "folly", an ornamental architectural structure. ... The terms pens, pencils and drawing appear in Denham's own verse, as well as in this biographical poem, including words and names starting with Pen, as in "My Lady Pen" and "Penshurst". ... Lastly are the references to the US West, where jeans were invented, and sheriffs, cowboys, frontiers people and pony express riders wore them on horseback. The names of Denham's father's estates Horseley Parva and Horsenden Manor, his claims of being of Western origin, his being named High Sheriff of Surrey, his trip west to Portland, his role as mail courier between royals, and his bawdy references to horses and farting all conjured up images of the rough times in the old west. ..." |
|
The Theater of Nature or Curiosity Filled the Cabinet 6.5 x 7" accordion structure. Pop-up museum housed in a magic lantern box. Images reproduced in a facsimile version of the original deluxe edition. Angela Lorenz: "This work was inspired by the remnants of the most famous and extensive collection of artifacts, mostly natural, in 16th c. Europe. They were amassed by Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605), the first professor of natural history ever appointed in Italy, at the University of Bologna. A tiny fraction of Aldrovandi's 18,000 items are still on display in today's Aldrovandi Museum at the University of Bologna, but a few of the strangest pieces caused the artist to investigate the collection. Oddities, such as a frog with a lizard's tail plastered on and fishes' teeth inserted into the frog's mouth, led to research that included not just Aldrovandi and his thousands of tempera paintings but the History of Museums in general. What was originally going to be a work about the fakes created for museums and natural history collections gave way to the broader topic of museology from Hellenistic Greece to the Enlightenment. "The Trade Edition of "The Theater of Nature" is a mechanical reproduction of a limited series of handmade books created in two slightly different versions. Both the original series and the Trade Edition contain the same imagery and text. In the first handmade series of nine copies, each book has nine original watercolors of completely different subjects based on manuscripts commissioned either by Aldrovandi or by Manfredo Settala (1600-1680) for their collections of curiosities. Settala's museum was in Milan, but his manuscripts are housed today in the Biblioteca Estense of Modena, not far from Bologna. The artist spent a year making this cycle of 81 unique miniature paintings which were glued and sewn into the nine books. The Trade Edition more closely resembles the second handmade series, known as the Magic Lantern Edition. It contains the same black and white copperplate etchings as the first version, and looks identical when set upright and extended to make the "theater", but the cover is entirely different. It is really a case as opposed to a cover. When the book is removed from it, the case may be set up to form a magic lantern, a sort of early slide projector from the 17th century. "The historical research for The Theater of Nature, both iconographic and textual, was boiled down to a 900-word rhyming poem that accompanies the color illustrations. The color images and text are hidden from view, however, when the book is viewed in the theater format. In this position, the 11 copper-plate etchings form a collection of curiosities or wunderkammer, receding into the distance. The etchings, hand-drawn and printed by the artist, are based on the images of six early museums in Europe, put together here to form one fictitious museum. Lorenz adapted the images from engravings commissioned by the founders of these early collections to depict their museum at the front of a published catalog. In most cases, these engravings and the lists of museum contents are all that is left of the early collections. The etchings demonstrate a goal of early museum founders: to shock the visitor into a state of wonder by trying to make the entire collection visible at once, through both open architecture and crowded displays on every surface. " |
|
Soap Story 4 x 5.75" Two packages—one containing the boxed album and the other the bars of soap—come wrapped in acid-free reproductions of pages from a 1956 woman's magazine. They are tied with twine, in keeping with the practice of wrapping packets of soap and eggs in recycled newspaper for travel. Handbound into a cloth-covered album and housed in a matching box lined with rags and sealed with a color-lithographed soap label. Silk-screen and lithograph in Stone Sans and Stone Serif. This artist's book tells the story of a young woman in Calabria, Italy, during the 1950s whose real life reads like a fairy tale or "soap" opera. Six installments are silk-screened on linen pages that are in turn embedded in small, square blocks of soap imprinted with figures from lead type. After drying, the linen sheets slot into six acid-free pages with oval die-cuts through which the text remains visible.. The process confronting the reader reflects what the protagonist must face. In transforming the story, you allow the young woman to wash her hands of her sorrows. Lorenz' editions focus on nonfictional cultural phenomena. She endeavors—and succeeds at—creating artist's books that utilize every imaginable aspect of the work, including process, sequence, typeface, materials, edition number, and self-written text to contribute to a unified message. |
|
| Catalog for "Creating with Abandon" exhibition | |
Creating with Abandon: 8.5 x 11"; 61 pages. Cream illustrated wraps. Illustrated with images of bookworks and bookmaking processes. Flyleaf summary: "This catalog was produced to accompany an art exhibition of the same title at The Fleet Library, Rhode Island School of Design and the John Hay Library at Brown University in 2006. The primary purpose of the exhibit and catalog is to illustrate how the artist's limited edition artworks are created by showing stages of development along with the waste created, normally invisible to the viewer. Six essays provide critical analysis, backstage observations and background information." Angela Lorenz: "Creating with abandon may be defined in several ways. I feel more akin to the idea of creating with 'unbounded enthusiasm, exuberance' as opposed to 'a complete surrender of inhibitions' as far as the American Heritage Dictionary goes. There is also the idea of abandoning solutions - casting out, editing and changing elements along the way. Then there is the sheer waste created, the tare of the finished product, from notes and prototypes to scraps, die-cuts, printing plates and packaging, essentially trash. And in my own case, there would be the connection to abandon through the collecting and documenting of things lost, forgotten or tossed by others. Most of the above is invisible in the final product, except where I have visibly incorporated process in a few editions. This catalog attempts with viewpoints from five different individuals, to demonstrate the adventurous, accidental and error-fraught journey to my finished works of art." |
|
Maxim Series: Angela Lorenz: “The maxims here are heartfelt opinions, autobiographical musings and human observations. Some are intended purely to amuse, but all spring from truth. A number of the maxims are composed in rhyming couplets or metric verse, which is why "meter" figures in the title. That is also why there are precisely one hundred copies in this edition; one for every centimeter in a meter." |
|
Maxims by the Yard Diameter 5", .75 x 144" fully extended. Spool title printed at Stamperia Valdonega of Verona on acid-free cardstock manufactured by Cartiere Fedrigoni. Spool die-cuts created and executed in Bologna's industrial quarter. Ribbon woven in Carpi, Italy. Sewing, ironing and cylindrical forms carried out by the artist. The volume is stored in a non-adhesive cardstock clamshell box, with one woven maxim, visible on the spine, used to bind the clamshell together. Angela Lorenz: "This volume of 36 original maxims mimics a spool of ribbon from a sewing shop. The maxims, one for every inch in a yard, are woven, not printed, on a computerized loom. The letters are red on a white ground, with reverse tones on the verso. The ribbon scroll has two joins, sewn on a sewing machine, with ironed folds to evoke the folds of banners or scrolls with titles or mottos, often with Latin text, found in paintings, crests and seals. The typeface is san-serif to increase the legibility of the woven letters, but the upper-case initial letter of the first word in each phrase is in a Roman type approaching Palatino. The titling on the cardboard spool itself is genuine Palatino, designed by Hermann Zapf. It was based on Renaissance letterforms which in turn reflected Ancient Roman chiseled lettering, when both serifs and maxims were very popular. One of the maxims on this roll, "Good messages bear repeating, not plagiarizing" relates both to the Palatino typeface and Hermann Zapf's career. Good messages, verbal and visual, have always appeared in history. The existing record of human creativity makes it impossible to be entirely original. But every epoch needs its bards and good ideas bear repeating. Zapf, a highly gifted, self-taught calligrapher and type designer was greatly disheartened to see his influence deteriorate into plagiarism: Palatino is known by many different names in type catalogs and computer programs all over the world, with no royalties or recognition to the man who created it. The initial letters are not only distinguished by being a different typeface, they are also larger than the letters that follow, and are woven in bold type. This is to convey the idea of a rubric, which is a distinctive initial letter or heading usually in red lettering. A rubric is also a rule or instruction in religious texts and law codes. Maxims are similar, in that they attempt to express fundamental principals, as well as rules of conduct, in a concise manner." $375 Some in Meter Spool of Knowledge Vol. I |
|
Angela Lorenz Out of Print Title: |
|
Home | About Us | Contact Us | New Arrivals | Fine Press & Artists' Books | Broadsides | Miniature Books | Resource Books | Order/Inquiry
Copyright © 2008 Vamp & Tramp, Booksellers, LLC. All rights reserved.