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Slought Foundation, a non-profit organization rethinking contemporary art, presents “me altar's egoes," an exhibition by William Anastasi from January 31-March 31, 2004. Anastasi will give a 15 minute presentation on the work at the opening at 7:00pm. The exhibition consists of two works spanning more than 2000 handwritten sheets of paper, "me innerman monophone” and “Du Jarry,” installed with the artist on the walls of Slought Foundation. The project engages the art of interpretation and the interpretation of art through recourse to James Joyce, Alfred Jarry, and Marcel Duchamp. Curated by Osvaldo Romberg; brochure with essays by Jean-Michel Rabaté and Osvaldo Romberg available upon request. An intimate recording of Anastasi rehersing on May 7, 1994 for his Sorbonne lecture has been made available in conjunction with the exhibition at Slought.org (see above). This Slought Foundation exhibition will subsequently travel to Dublin (June 10 – August 28, 2004) as part of the Royal Hibernian Academy exhibition "Joyce in Art: Visual Art Inspired by James Joyce," curated by Patrick T. Murphy and Dr. Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes.
In conjunction with the exhibition, Slought Foundation and the Rosenbach Museum & Library present a public conversation with conceptual artist William Anastasi and Joyce scholar Jean-Michel Rabaté, Senior Curator at Slought Foundation and Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. The Rosenbach Museum & Library of Philadelphia is the holder of the fair copy manuscript of James Joyce's novel Ulysses, and will host this collaborative event with Slought Foundation on Saturday February 28th, 2004, from 2-4pm. It will take place at the Rosenbach Museum (2008-2010 DeLancey Place; Ph: 215-732-1600). More information on the event online at : http://slought.org/content/11192/
Read the full curatorial essay
Considered to be among the first "classical" conceptual artists, William Anastasi is known for rediscovering the radical through painting, sculpture, collage, photography and drawing. Anastasi has, since the early 1960s, grounded his work in the ideology of chance. Anastasi's "unsighted" works, begun in 1963, attempted to separate artistic creation from conscious thought. In his Subway Drawings, begun in 1968, Anastasi closed his eyes, allowing the vibrations of a subway train to move his hands, recording the train's motion in a collection of completely random lines on paper. In a 1990 interview about Anastasi’s modus operandi vis a vis Surrealism’s Automatism, John Cage made a clear distinction: ”It’s not psychological; it’s physical.” Similarly, critic Pamela Lee has argued that “it is an art object that expresses the physicality of its making.” His work is in the permanent collections of NY institutions including The Museum of Modern Art, The Guggenheim Museum, The Whitney Museum, The Metropolitan Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, and The Jewish Museum, as well as The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, The National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., The Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Staatsgalerie fur Kunst in Denmark, and The Kunstmuseum Dusseldorf in Germany, to name but a few. (Born 1933, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Lives in New York)
"An image comes to mind of a white, ideal space that, more than any single picture, may be the archetypal image of 20th-century art... Anastasi photographed the empty gallery at Dwan, noticed the parameters of the Wall, top and bottom, right and left, the placement of each electrical outlet, the ocean of space in the middle. He then silkscreened all this data on a canvas slightly smaller than the wall and put it on the wall. Covering the wall with an image of that wall delivers a work of art right into the zone where surface, mural and wall have engaged in dialogues central to modernism."
(Brian 0'Doherty. Inside the White Cube, Artforum, 1976 republished in Inside the White Cube, Lapis Press, 1986.)
"William Anastasi gave four exhibitions at the Dwan Gallery in New York between 1966 and 1970. The era in which these shows occurred - the beginning and height of the classical conceptual period - might be described, without exaggeration, as the most critical or abnormal years in the entire long and wide history of art. Anastasi's work in these shows was a groundbreaking demonstration of the meaning and power of conceptual art and, indirectly, all art that has been made in the late- and post-conceptual traditions."
(Thomas McEvilley, Introduction, Scott Hanson retrospective catalogue, New York, 1989.)
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To Cite this Page using MLA Style:
William Anastasi. "me altar's egoes." Slought Foundation Online Content.
[31 January 2004;
Accessed 20 July 2008]. <http://slought.org/content/11179/>.
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This program was made possible in part through the generous sponsorship of The Rosenbach Museum & Library and the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin
 
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