About the Lesser Angels....

Quite a few years ago (almost thirty), while traveling in London, I found The Abridged Compendium of Lesser Angels at the bottom of a pile of old books in an open air market near Picadilly. If you've been there, you know how market fairs appear one day in a narrow, nameless alley and disappear the next.

The book has no publishing date, nor does it have a named author--just an anonymous staff of diligent and sincere catalogers referred to as Editors at Large. Some time early in the last century, these Editors at Large attempted to identify several of the Lesser Angels for whatever benefits such a directory might provide.

A compendium is a catalogue. To abridge a compendium is to shorten it. Thus--The Abridged Compendium of Lesser Angels. I think the editors had every intention of compiling The Compleat Compendium of Lesser Angels, but became so overwhelmed with the sheer number of Lesser Angels and their myriad tasks, that they truncated their efforts.

Naturally, a catalogue about Lesser Angels would be abridged since theirs is the secondary, even tertiary work of the world. They go about, quiet and unnoticed, toiling away at the most obscure, menial jobs, like making sure letters with postage due still get delivered, or overseeing the sweep second hand on your watch. What follows is a small sampling of the known population of Lesser Angels.

(This show ran from December 2005 to February 2006, at the Mudhouse Gallery in Springfield, Missouri.)