Edition of 7 copies
Cloth case: 21” x 22.5”; box: 10” x 10” x 4.5”; book: 6” x 10”
2020
Seeding & Weeding – L.o.G. Construction Set (2020) is a means to make visual the seven U.S. editions of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” from 1855-1892. This construction set has many elements, including 300+ painted and printed garden stakes that chart the life, development and sometimes death, of the Leaves of Grass poems from 1855-1881. It also contains a Tyvek booklet with an index of the poems and a colophon which you may read at the end of this description. The best way to learn about this complex multiple would be to watch the 16-minute film about it created by Emilia Figliomeni.
At times I have made work in hotel rooms or parking lots, sitting in my car. As Covid-19 began to unfold in February 2020, I was unable to return to Italy and friends in Cambridge, Massachusetts invited me to set up a studio in their home, with a folding-card-table up to their spare guest room. As things worsened, we formed a quarantine pod for close to three months, minus a trip to my studio in Maine in April. There, I managed to get caught in a snowstorm, losing power and heat for several days. It was a neighbor’s turn to shelter me, together with a new lamb who had lost her mother, and was prancing around the house in a diaper.
I seek to communicate through my work. But over three decades as a working artist, it habitually becomes clear that my carefully constructed, dogmatic approach, my earnest intentions in art-making, snap back like a boomerang. I may try to teach, but the lessons seem to be for me. The process of creating art or writing can feel like omnipotence. Within my own modest sphere, I get to make a lot of decisions, and bring into being things that previously existed only in my mind. But this sense of control is illusory when I realize I am a pawn in my own process.
The joke was on me again in spring 2020, when I found myself constructing a rustic scene of Lincoln-log cabins isolated in the woods, as I myself was isolated from the world, except for my quarantine pod, and thankfully with Internet. I was not roughing it, until I was, in Maine, actually alone in a wooden house in the woods, trying to assemble a drill-press, unable to consult any tutorials. I am not comfortable with power tools, and I had planned on getting the help of skilled artisans, but lockdown prevented that. Forced to be self-reliant, and to overcome my phobia, I drilled holes in carpenter pencils for the homemade erector set with which you can write Walt Whitman’s name.
Whitman was a carpenter early on – apprenticed to his father – which maybe he thought gave him street cred as “a rough,” like the buff, working class types he lusted after on the Brooklyn Ferry. It surely wasn’t lost on him that Jesus was reputed to be a carpenter. Over time, rearranged Leaves of Grass poems resembled verses of the Bible. Some of the language sounds like a god or mystic talking. For me this is repellent, as it is hard not to blend this omniscient voice with Whitman “the man,” as if HE is God’s gift to man, a messiah or prophet. I was drawn to Whitman because of the radically shifting structure of Leaves of Grass over 40 years time. But when I dipped into the poetry, I recoiled.
Literature often requires an annotated text, or a teacher or guide. We need tools. We need perspective. Biography has been one of my passions from elementary school. I like people. I am interested in lives lived, and in what constitutes a good life. I am drawn to archeology and material culture – things people make, do and build. What do we have in common across the world and the millennia? What hasn’t changed?
Literature is harder, because of language barriers and inside jokes and contexts that need deciphering. Author Jamaica Kincaid stressed in a symposium I was part of a few years ago that if students haven’t read certain works in the Western canon of literature, like the 10,000 lines of Milton’s Paradise Lost, they can’t possibly understand her own writing. It can be hard to crack the code without help.
In college I decided it would be good for me to read the Bible. I quit early on. It was so incredibly violent and depressing. The biblical language of Whitman, and the way he was saying how great America was in the 19th century, was off-putting. His writing is inclusive for his time, celebrating immigrants and indigenous peoples and the religions and cultures of the world, but this going on about the greatness of America – it didn’t ring true for women, or so many people living in America, in terms of basic civil rights, especially the right to vote. Not to mention those who were enslaved, slaughtered or removed from their lands, or who had their businesses torched.
Visual biographers don’t need to fall in love with their subjects. It’s better if they don’t. Impartiality is good. The reason I felt compelled to visually depict the seven US editions of Leaves of Grass from 1855-1892 was that, like the Bible, many people think of it as one book, or one work, when it is really made up of changing bits and pieces that get added and subtracted and rearranged over time. It is not a static, fixed thing. Leaves of Grass is one of the most famous works of 19th US literature. But it is not one book.
I gave myself a deadline, 2019, Whitman’s 200th birthday. That was back in 2007, the summer I was Resident Faculty at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. I had come across a reference to Whitman’s “Dough Face Song” poem, which is not in the Leaves of Grass – it’s an abolition poem he published in 1840 signed with the pen name “Paumanok”. This is a creepy poem to read now: it addresses how compliance allowed politicians to feather their nests like jackdaws.
The “Dough Face Song” also struck me because I have created a lot of edible art and faux-food projects. My husband is a skilled baker and gelato and chocolate maker, and we collaborate sometimes. I had other ideas for bread installations, so I started exploring Whitman. When I gave a public lecture two months later at the Brooklyn Museum, I was able to discuss the local hero Whitman with Deirdre Lawrence, former library director, who shared the history of Whitman’s editions.
That is the genesis of the work. I shared my lack of enthusiasm about some of the poetry with Lynne Farrington at the University of Pennsylvania. She suggested I think of Whitman’s elegiac tone celebrating America as aspirational instead of literal or descriptive. That helped. At any rate, I am not an expert on Whitman, and the construction set I created is not about meaning or interpretation – it’s about structure.
As I created the various elements of Seeding and Weeding – L.o.G Construction Set, painting and printing wooden garden stakes, sawing pencils and carving them into Lincoln logs, every day at noon I would look at the graphs charting the Covid-19 pandemic in Italy. After a while the charts began to resemble mountainous karst landscapes in Asian art. When I was in high school, cleaning up by myself after printmaking, I began creating similar landscapes with the recycled ink, off-printing it onto paper. I recreated the process to print overlays on the construction-set directions based on the Italian Covid-19 statistics.
(Text of Tyvek “altered book” with poem index and colophon)
Contents
One drawstring bag made of canvas drop cloth, recycled linen bedding and spinnaker sail, in which are placed:
Five interlocking crepe rubber pegboards and pegboard fragments to be arranged as desired (some patterns and shapes reflect Walt Whitman’s poetry and biography) and
one wooden box.
Contents of wooden box:
Tyvek booklet with poem index and colophon. The poem index is an altered book. The pages were ripped out of 8 copies of Volume I of Leaves of Grass: A Textual Variorum (1980) and painted to resemble birch bark. This avoids copyright infringement of the authors and NYU Press, as the pages have been purchased and used, not reproduced. In several instances the Variorum does not agree with another index with which it was cross-referenced, Walt Whitman: A Descriptive Bibliography (1993), by Joel Myerson. With reluctance the artist corrected two presumed Variorum typos by hand.
15 clothespin fragments carved with tally marks representing poems numbered 1-12 from the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. The brown clothespins signify poems or fragments that died out before the 1881 edition.
312 garden stakes/popsicle sticks representing poems numbered 13-324 from five Leaves of Grass editions from 1866-1881. The brown stakes are poems that were eliminated, or weeded, before the definitive 1881 edition. The green stakes are the final poems present in the printing matrices of the 1881 edition. This last typeset version of the poems was bound together with the First and Second Annexes Sands at Seventy (1888) and Goodbye my Fancy (1891) to create the so-called “Deathbed Edition” of Leaves of Grass published in 1892 at the end of Walt Whitman’s life.
One Small drawstring canvas drop cloth bag, itself containing:
Two “roof” books in outer pockets with information regarding the First Annex (Sands at Seventy) and the Second Annex (Good-bye my Fancy).
63 Lincoln Logs created from sanded, sawed and carved cedar pencils with rainbow leads representing poems 326-388 in the First Annex. These may be used to create two log cabins (upon which to place the two roof books) and split rail fences.
31 erector-set carpenter pencils, drilled and sawed, representing poems 389-419 in the Second Annex. These may be arranged to form Walt Whitman’s name using the brass paper fasteners provided. Alternatively,
19 paper clips may be threaded through the pencil and pegboard holes to create fencing or other structures affixed to the crepe rubber pegboards.
To compose (make visual) any of the 6 editions of Leaves of Grass from 1855-1881:
The poems from the 1855 edition did not at first have titles, a trend that continued with so-called “clusters” of poems in later editions. Insert the narrow ends of the clothespins, marked with tallies as opposed to numbers, into the green pegboards. At a glance they are easy to distinguish from the five Leaves of Grass editions that follow, which are represented with numbered garden stakes/popsicle sticks.
The later editions of Leaves of Grass from 1856, 1860, 1867, 1871 and 1881 may be composed by looking at the numbers rubber stamped with erasers onto the green and brown garden stakes, and placing selected poems into pegboards.
2=1856 edition
3=1860 edition
4=1867 edition
5=1871 edition
6=1881 edition
Accordingly, if you want to make visual the 1881 edition, cast aside all the brown stakes (they were weeded along the way) and look for every stick printed with a six, as well as the green clothespins.
To make the 1891-1892 “Deathbed Edition” simply add to the above 1881 edition configuration a construction of two Lincoln Log cabins and a split-rail fence plus Walt Whitman’s name written with carpenter pencils to the rubber pegboard.
Or, to visualize just the 1856 edition, select all the stakes, both green and brown with a number two printed on them, plus the clothespins.
The “striped” garden stakes and clothespins represent poems that split into fragments or are essentially “conjoined” poems made up of grafted fragments. These poems sometimes have an A or B following the number, consistent with the Variorum’s numbered poem index.
Enjoy playing with this construction set, based on vintage games from the UK and the United States in her ephemera collection. The project was conceived at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2007, but most elements of the edition were created and assembled in self-isolation, withdrawn from the world during Covid-19, in Searsmont, Maine and in the apartment of Lia and Bill Poorvu in Cambridge, MA, near where the famed 1881-1882 “Osgood edition” was published. Sail and canvas drop cloth bags were sewn in Wayland, MA together with former MFA Boston Library Director Nancy Allen. Garden stakes/popsicle sticks courtesy of Gelateria Il Gelatauro in Bologna, Italy.
Acknowledgements go out to the Whitman scholars that answered questions along the way, especially Ed Folsom (University of Iowa), co-editor of the Walt Whitman Archive, free online for all courtesy of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Lynne Farrington of the University of Pennsylvania’s Kislak Center provided indispensable resources as well, including hosting the outstanding Whitman@200 symposium in March 2019. For further information regarding the conceptual meanings of the materials and processes in this edition, visit the artist’s archive: http://www.angelonium.com
Angelonium 