As long-time New York City and area residents, Allerslev and Weber have deep connections to the rebellious poetry of fellow Brooklynite Walt Whitman and the Gay communities and identities that Whitman spoke of in his poetry and in the discourse of his personal and public life. They acknowledge that Whitman’s legacy is complicated by his colonialist beliefs, and also acknowledge his good; many fellow Brooklynites, especially poets, hold Whitman dearly in their heart. Whoever Degrades Another Degrades Me is part of an errant series of unique books created by Weber over the decades that uses and misuses Whitman’s poetry. Flow, held in the Special Collections Library of the Library of Congress, is another.

Weber also lived through the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco during the 1980s and witnessed the carnage caused by politically manipulated homophobia and the brutal public health policy of that time. The Covid era catalyzed a reconsideration of the AIDS era as ignorant healthcare policy and racism again compromised the safety of entire populations and traumatic memories of pandemic crowded the global consciousness.

The book is formed with five major layers, the first layer is a walking mono-(foot)-print of Weber’s feet. Weber had booked a major body printing performance at Franklin and Marshall College that was scheduled to take place in March of 2020. The performance was cancelled and after much consideration Weber did the performances privately at Booklyn’s studio in Brooklyn in April of 2020. After telling Allerslev about this endeavor they discussed the next step for the book, but further complications from Covid and other matters prevented them from executing the next layer till 2024 when they did rubbings from the Triangle Park AIDS Epidemic Memorial in Manhattan, NY, previously the site of Saint Vincent’s Hospital (the building itself was destroyed in 2025). The grounds of the AIDS Memorial is, in part, composed of bricks engraved with portions of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself. Allerslev and Weber further fragmented this poem by rubbing fragments onto the Kozo paper focusing on stanzas that had especially visually suggestive language. This was the second layer of activation.

The third layer of activation consisted of outlining the rubbed letterforms thus further redacting or highlighting aspects of the poem. Using poetry concrete and the cut-up strategies of Brion Gysin and William Burroughs. Weber and Allerslev further excavated Whitman’s poem by recomposing some of the letterforms into non-existent asemic languages, and by also changing the typographical dynamics of the stanzas, which suggested possible reordering the lines of the poem so they could be read in numerous new re-orientations.

The fourth layer consisted of cutting in all the letterforms with yellow, red, brown, and black inks to construct the spatial illusions of fore, middle and back grounds populated by now almost anthropomorphic letterforms. Almost a year into the painting a final fifth layer of shadowing, outlining, and further redactions completed the intriguingly evocative elegy for Whitman and for all those others dead by malfeasance, negligence and travesty.

Slide show notes, images of the book being presented at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta and at the Tufts/School of the Museum of Fine Arts Art Library, Boston; rubbing the pages at the AIDS Memorial January 22nd, 2025; workshopping the book with Kameelah Janan Rasheed at the 2024 Codex Book Fair, various work in progress shots, painting party November 2025 with Allerslev, Weber, Sarah Tarr Kowalski and Laura Smith.

Weber did the mono-body print (documenting the performance “The Ascension”.)
Book and print design, calligraphy, rubbings, painting by Allerslev and Weber
Backing and binding by Sophia Kramer
Additional painting by Sarah Tarr Kowalski and Laura Smith
Whoever Degrades Another Degrades Me is bound as a large folded, but unsewn, accordion fold so that it can be easily paged as a codex with an accessible verso but can also be unfolded for exhibition as a monumental painting. The books unfolds to measure 24.5 feet