Gallery Purchase

In the winter of 2006, several of Robert Lazzarini’s works on paper were displayed here at Davidson College. During his visit, Lazzarini digitally manipulated a 15th century woodcut entitled "A House Beleaguered by Devils," c. 1482, (Accession Number 2340) to make three new pieces, Untitled I-III. All four pieces, including the original, feature Old German text from Hieronymous’s Leben der Heiligen Altväter.

Lazzarini’s work reminds us that it’s important to challenge what constitutes our definition of a “text.” Who, historically, has been excluded from the canon and from academia writ large? Perhaps textual histories are not the only credible sources of knowledge.

Untitled I-III raises questions of textual accessibility through its use of Old German and dramatic distortion of the letters. It is simultaneously inaccessible to those are visually impaired, intellectually impaired, and those who have no disability at all. The act of looking at these woodcuts “crips” even those who conform to the normate, defamiliarizing the familiar. In addition, the three different distortions reflect the range of variation in ability. Because there are three distortions to the one original, here, the “normate” is in the minority––gesturing towards both the large disability community and the idea that we will all experience disability one day.

Even Lazzarini’s technique in creating these pieces represents a new, accessible kind of art. Since he used a computer to digitally distort the images with sine waves, it represents a methodology that can be used by anyone, regardless of physical or mental ability, to create art.