Reflections on Anastasi

The fifth chapter of Thomas McEvilley’s Triumph of Anti-Art: Conceptual and Performance Art in the Formation of Post-Modernism contains an interview between the author and William Anastasi, which is titled, Talk About Dumb. McEvilley opens the interview with asking Anastasi about the initial connection he had with Duchamp. The artist explains that at age 13, he hitchhiked to a museum in Philadelphia, where he saw the work of Duchamp. The Dada artist’s work made Anastasi think, “either this guy’s completely lost, or I’m completely lost”. Anastasi continues to explain his initial encounters with discovering art, and looks back on his youth; the artist explains to McEvilley that he would buy any of the Skira books that he could get his hands on in Philly, tear the pages into pieces, and then mount them on museum board, which would eventually cover all of the walls, floor to ceiling, in his house. The books contained photographs of artists ranging from Lascaux to Mondrian, and Anastasi became increasingly infatuated with art as he continued to layer his walls with collage of torn photographs of art.

         This initial section of the chapter gives such a vivid insight in to how Anastasi became enamored with art. I could picture the artist gathering these books and looking through each page, intuitively choosing which images to tear out of the book (based off of aesthetic preferences or an emotional reaction) and then pasting the pieces of paper on museum board, which would then be displayed on the wall. I can imagine this act because I did the exact same thing at the age of 14. As a young kid, I was always working with my hands, building, creating, sometimes drawing, but always using my hands. When I reached the age of 14, I went to a used book store in Chicago, and after walking through the incredibly smelling store, I walked into the art book section. After spending a solid hour looking at the books and feeling the thick yet worn paper, I left with 20 art books, from Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Contemporary, Japonisme, African Art, German Expressionism, Baroque, Renaissance, Catholic Art through the ages, Figurative, Abstract Expressionism, and more. I spent the entire summer sitting in my bedroom, going through these books, tearing out the pages, rubber cementing the paper on to poster board, and arranging the boards from top to bottom of my walls and the ceiling. At the end of the summer, my dad came into my room for the first time since I began this endeavor, and when he looked around the room, he began to tear up (which he never does), got his camera, took pictures, and left. When I left for college a few years later, my dad gave me a framed picture of my room, covered in art. My dad also has this picture on his desk at his office.

         That summer, as I was going through these books, I began to research more about the artists of whose work I would be looking at. Egon Schiele, Chuck Close, Joan Mitchell, Philip Guston, Richard Diebenkorn, Tracey Emin, John Singer-Sargent, Louise Bourgeois, Marlene Dumas, and Alice Neel became my new infatuations. Similar to Anastasi, I began reading about these artists, the critics that wrote about them, and books about the philosophers that inspired them. This entire process played a large role in investing myself in painting, drawing, and collaging.  

        The interview is full of stories about Anastasi’s youth and his experimentation with art. The artist describes how as a child, he would draw Donald Duck from memory, draw with his eyes closed using india ink on paper while listening to Wanda Landowska’s recording of Well-Tempered Clavier, and then blind drawings that consisted of lines. In his early career, the artist was vey aware of Guston, DeKooning, Pollock, Newman, and Rothko, yet did not necessarily emulate their work with a conscience mind. Anastasi explains that he used elements of randomness, blind technique, and renunciation of control because that was part of his intuition in making art. The fact that the artist claims to have been “very dumb then as far as those things are concerned” (as far as those commonly used elements during the movement that those artists were a part of) is an interesting thing to think about. Even though other artists, and well-known artists, were using elements of chance and methods of relinquishing control, Anastasi was implementing these processes just because he wanted to, rather than copying mentors. This made me think about the intuition of artists, and how intuition does not change necessarily based off of what is being talked about or what is popular during a specific moment in history or time. To elaborate on this further, Yoko Ono and Marina Abramovic were doing very similar performance pieces at the same time (Ono’s Cut Piece and Abramovic’s Rhythm 0. Rhythm 0.), but Abramovic’s performance was talked about more at the time she was doing them compared to Yoko Ono’s performances. Art has so much to do with timing, place, and what is occurring in society, which is something that we, as artists, can think about, or not think about. There is something to be said about both ways of thinking; using what is currently going on in society as a driving force behind one’s work can be impactful and powerful to the viewer, but not letting the world influence one’s art and rather creating art based off of pure passion and the wanting to create art is powerful in its own way as well.