Edition of 45 copies
9 ⅝” x 11 ¾” closed; 18 ½” x 11 ¾” open
2019
This work serves as both a visual biography of the Italian author and chemist Primo Levi (1919-1987) and a vehicle to express the last chapter of his seminal work “The Periodic Table” with cutouts and poetry. The 21st chapter titled “Carbon” describes a potential, imaginative life of a carbon atom, transformed in the artist’s book into an epigrammatic poem in verse. The carbon atom is released from a chunk of limestone cooked in a kiln, as CO2, passes through a falcon’s lungs, and travels repeatedly through water and air with stints in plants, foods and the human body in between.
“Carbon Atom” is constructed by hand out of recycled and scavenged materials including Italian archival paper named Savile Row (produced by Cartiere Fedrigoni). The cover paper resembles a pin-stripe suit but also recalls bars or stripes of the incarcerated. It takes the appearance of a medical file or folder, with Levi’s number from Auschwitz on the tab: 174517. In the first chapter of The Periodic Table, Levi discusses his Sephardic ancestors that brought silk cultivation to Turin. Accordingly, the book is bound with silk embroidery thread. Opposite the title page is the symbol of the carbon atom, nesting perfectly in the Star of David, alternately known as the Magen or Mogen David, with its six electrons in a hexagon. In a later page-spread, a cut-paper silhouette of a falcon’s lungs is based on the aspirated Hebrew letter ayn.
Using scrounged materials and a few simple tools – a razor blade, a bone folder, a needle and silk thread, beeswax and a German “tailor’s chalk” pencil – was a conscientious effort to create parameters, to underscore the creativity and invention that arise during times of deprivation.
Carbon Atom was produced in an edition of 45 copies, representing the year Levi was released from Auschwitz,1945, to mark the 100th anniversary of Levi’s birth. During the extended period in which this piece was researched and created, the artist learned of her own Jewish ancestry, still embodied in the name Lorenz, but obscured by her grandfather Keith Lorenz (and his two brothers) born in Pennsylvania in 1890 of Ashkenazi parents and raised Lutheran.
While Levi’s biography is encompassed in the materials and processes of the work itself – an Italian chemist deported to Auschwitz – it is the literary structure of Levi’s work “The Periodic Table” that inspired “Carbon Atom”. There are many reasons to read “The Periodic Table” and many aspects to respond to in this work intended by Levi to relay the profession of a chemist. But this most unusual book manages to collate unrelated chapters of fiction and non-fiction, memoir and short story between two covers in 21 distinct chapters.
There is the amusing analogy of Levi’s Jewish ancestors in Turin as inert or noble gases, reminiscent of the humorous and eccentric science analogies of anatomy professor and author Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. There are equally uproarious and hair-raising accounts from his life as a chemist. One example would be the chemical factory he ran out of a colleague’s parents’ apartment in random crockery scattered about the house, calling to mind Giuseppe Marconi’s youthful contraptions of borrowed crockery and wire preceding his invention of wireless telegraphy. Some chapters resemble mystery novels, with the chemist as sleuth, a fixer called in to solve a company’s problems. Other chapters convey his identity and allegiances, his friendships and work as an Italian anti-fascist partisan and his navigation as a chemist of the microeconomy of Auschwitz in an effort to stay alive. Two enigmatic short stories – pure fiction that read like fables or parables – are plopped in the middle. The last chapter is simply an explanation of the potentially infinite life and movement of a carbon atom.
How can all these very different bits of writing possibly hang together? What justification could there be to put them between two covers? This is the reason for the creation of the artist’s book “Carbon Atom”: the mass is tacked together through the titles of every chapter, each title name an element from Mendeleev’s Periodic Table. While not as monumental as the mass of Balzac’s 90 novels and stories, justified or envisioned as one work titled “The Human Comedy” with repeating characters throughout, Levi’s structure is a stroke of genius, even without consulting the content therein. The artist created a paper computer, the Balzaculator, to convey Balzac’s structural innovations. “Carbon Atom” is another attempt to convey an author’s literary structure.
But the greatest stroke of the book is the last. The book “The Periodic Table” becomes a conceptual work at the end of the last sentence: the final full-stop or period of the book, the last stroke of the typewriter key, or the last mark on the page of the manuscript. The final period is described as resulting from that same carbon atom, now in the author’s brain, occupying the exact location of the brain commanding the hand to create the last period of the book. It is the most brilliant ending of a book that I know of. The punctuation becomes visually symbolic.
In the artist’s book “Carbon Atom,” however, the final period or full stop is not written in tailor’s chalk like the rest of the poem. It is a circle cutout, the last of three in the work. A circle appears first within the carbon atom/Star of David on the frontispiece, and then as the sun, which mates with the carbon atom in a grape leaf, releasing oxygen in the act of photosynthesis.
An attempt to convey this scientific literary structure visually led in many directions. Several times the piece felt fully resolved, only to evolve again. But after a chance experience in Bologna, Italy the project transformed from a baroque structure encompassing every chapter to a rather pared down, traditional book, focused on just one chapter (for now, anyway).
The change in the project came about as swiftly and invisibly as some chemical reactions one evening after an activation (performative live reading) of Le Corbusier’s “Le Poeme de l’Angle Droit” in the architect’s “l’Esprit Nouveau” pavilion in Bologna, rebuilt in 1977 with the plans and materials of the original. Le Corbusier constructed the original in 1925 for the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris, after which it was destroyed.The pavilion rebuilt in Bologna even used former employees of Le Corbusier’s firm.
Even if they are quite distinct, “l’Angle Droit” calls to mind Matisse’s Jazz. They were both produced in 1947 by the same publisher in Paris, Teriade, and some of the colors, cutout titling and imagery in Le Corbusier’s book will seem familiar to viewers of Matisse’s much more famous edition. This immersion one evening in an intimate public reading of “Le Poeme de l’Angle Droit” in Bologna seeped into the text and design of “Carbon Atom.” While the locations the atom travels through – a falcon, grapes, wine, a man’s liver, were previously cut out of magnetic material and placed in a sculptural structure, the rough silhouettes from “l’Angle Droit” (recalling others from Jazz) inspired a representation of the objects with negative space instead, as cutouts.
As science writing, “The Periodic Table” received a remarkable accolade, named “the best science book ever written” by the Royal Institution of Great Britain in 2005. Considering that the chemistry profession is a primary reason Levi wrote the book, he would certainly be pleased. But the book allows him to convey many things of value, including imagination, a necessary ingredient for problem solving, nourishment of all kinds, and survival. It shows not just the potentially infinite life of an atom, but the potentially infinite life of a human with a day job as a chemist.
Artists may describe their intentions, and the public may or may not ever receive what the artist intends to communicate. The public’s experience of the work is subjective, and valid. But sometimes viewers add insights that the creator, working intuitively as well as intentionally, failed to recognize. In the case of this work, Yale professor emeritus Jay Winter, who has lectured on Primo Levi, remarked to the artist that this book of cutouts also symbolizes her recent ancestors that cut out the knowledge of the artist’s Jewish heritage.
Dedicated to Karl Lorenz and Rose Wurtemberg, who immigrated from Austria to Pennsylvania in c.1870, and their children Joseph Lorenz, Keith Lorenz and Abraham Lincoln Lorenz.
Carbon Atom: Homage to Primo Levi’s “Periodic Table” (1975)
Italy/USA 2019
Edition of 45 copies
Text and Colophon within the artist’s book:
Carbon Atom: Homage to Primo Levi’s “Periodic Table” (1975)
With limestone, pickaxe, kiln,
cleaved from calcium.
CO2 takes flight,
in falcon’s lungs alights.
Thrice dissolves in sea,
in one river be.
With sun and leaf does mate,
and oxygen expirate.
Leaf, sap, vine,
pedicel, grape, wine.
Liver, muscle, thigh.
Lactic acid, sigh.
Cedar of Lebanon.
Woodworm, moth, gone.
Slough, milk, brain,
Full stop.
(again?)
Cut by hand, fashioned in tailor’s chalk and bound with silk thread on Savile Row paper made from recycled cloth, plus scavenged white paper,
to mark 100 years from Primo Levi’s birth in Italy, and 150 years of Mendeleev’s Periodic Table.
Angelonium 