Another version of this playful theme is Passion, a piece also from 1966. Two photographs: The first one shows a gallery wall pictured straight on with two sawhorses bracketing the middle part of the wall; the second photo shows a large photo silkscreen of the wall scene from the first shot, mounted flat on that same wall, but seemingly held up by the same two sawhorses. An inward mirroring of a photograph within a photograph within a photograph creates a fascinating rhythm. You never quite know what you're looking at, and the view is slow, an extended process of checking for details, trying to discover inconsistencies, to outfox the artist.

It dwaned on me: this space, the one we are discussing, is this space (not). There is only the illusory depth of the pictured gallery inside this mirroring game; the wall surface becomes itself, almost, again. The viewer is not reflected; he is left (out)standing before a disarmingly incongruent but simple plane reality. This density of conception is echoed in Duchamp's Large Glass, wherein you see yourself reflected in the cracked glass. You can focus on the wall seen through the plane, making your ghostly outline blur, or you can focus on your halo so the background wall fades.

It's meaningless to worry about how dumb we feel looking at Anastasi's work, or how dumb the artist seems. He simply attacks the "dumb" materials he uses, trying to goose unexpected expression out of them. I might hesitate to call this a "dumbing-down" process, but Anastasi's art is not an easy gag to take. He means to attack your preconceptions about art, to expose your theoretical underpinnings by blind-siding your beliefs with "pointless" behavior. You should take what an artist says about his own work with two grains of salt. Give one to the artist.

I was a touch dumbfounded in the face of work Anastasi had dug out from everyday life. By finding something of extraordinary presence in his own back room, his move was to make as few decisions about it as possible. He intones the experience with a vulnerable sense of one's mortality. An empty look toward what was once a bath mirror became a full-bodied contemplation initiated by the exposure of curious geologic formations. A loss of reflection led to a mirroring of my own body decay. I stared as the wall piece with no name continued on its way - slowly pushing debris out, and incrementally retreating from the surface into the wall. It felt like my own crumbling skin imploding to reveal my insides.

This kind of visceral seeing can be fleshed out, if you accept the idea that "every work of visual art is a representation of the body" articulated by James Elkins in his book Pictures of the Body. Anastasi plays with the playfulness of making the viewer aware he has lost his old frame of responsiveness in the act of responding to his art. His toying with our sense of self, held back by habit and routine thinking, becomes a test of how far we are willing to go. We expect our sensual selves to be moved. We feel ourselves reaffirmed or rejected in the echoes of ourselves we discover when confronted by art. To adopt a new openness in questioning yourself, you might have to lose the skin you're imprisoned in.

My involved bodily response meshes better when the art seen rivals the solidity, strength and resonance of my own body's intelligence. I see the myriad gestures, emotions and intentions apparent in Anastasi's early work carried by the vehicle of the body for a sense of their meaning. As the efflorescence in plaster discussed above roughly "reflects" my own bodily fall-to-pieces condition, other early works provide ample visual equivalents for skin: eroding cement in Relief, 1961; corroding steel in Sink from 1963 metal; thrown and/or poured industrial high-gloss enamel from several Untitled's, 1966; or oil paint in Slain, 1963.

Skin is always with us, beyond any art musing. We feel pain in our corporeal existence. The distortion implicit in any representation of skin can translate sensations via the concept of "mere presence." I am here and I sense, partly through bodily memories of past sensations and whatever empathy I feel today, my response to art. Schematically, art can embody pain while we become aware of our bodily engagement with it, perhaps enhancing or defining our experience. "Objects we encounter, ideas we project," said Leo Stein in 1927.

I wish I had encountered the artist during one of his subway trips to and from his chess dates with composer and writer John Cage around 1977. To reanimate the setting from his own description - he would sit stiffly on the edge of the seat, wearing "firing-range headphones to make it silent." With eyes wide shut, balancing two pencils on paper across his lap, he let the car's jarring action direct his marking. The train moved ahead in its typical drunken march, the drawing proceeded. This quirky bodily art processing might define the strange essence of chance encounters. You might want to question this man's strange behavior, but his "blindness" prevents the easy approach, and a palpable hesitancy invades any thought of disturbing the invisible membrane surrounding every rider, a tacit understanding of inviolable personal space. The result shown here was Subway Drawing, 1985, one of many similar pieces from a series begun in 1968.

This scratching, scrawling accompaniment to the harsh quality of subway travel was a perfect match to the unwritten code most riders adhere to. With a certain alert passiveness, one rides with a vacant stare, huddled with strangers, where any antic behavior is tolerated in restless silence, hopefully ignored until one's stop arrives. A tough audience, but a safe one in which to stage a performance.

Anastasi relinquished direct control of these drawings to the random, "blind" and chancy moves of the train; he became a medium of their transport. To explain their making expands our intuition. We could make something like this because the artist has provided a manual, a kind of conceptual second skin, of how to conjoin seeing with not looking. A kid's game in which special drawings become the unforeseen results.

In similar fashion, I felt dumbstruck during another performance when I saw John Cage perform a piano piece up close at the Pasadena Art Museum in the 70's. As he stared out over the piano, he would close his eyes. I waited anxiously, until a single note from a finger striking a key would complete a small travail with my nascent love of art. In music, you don't need a vocabulary to recognize sounds when heard - that sums up why it seems transparently dumb. I found I could let myself in on the joke and relax my hunger for something real to feed my brain. The blind can lead to light, the deaf hear silence, and the dumb can learn language.

Given Anastasi's forever "dumb" approach as guide, we simplify and perhaps distort our involvement with the work. One interminable puzzle is rearranging words that attach to moments when art is encountered. A longer look at Subway Drawing reveals a more horrific confrontation: two shapes that might read as eyes. Two dense bundles of lines loosely woven, one under each hand-held pencil, seem like a map of the pathways of nervous, searching eyes, or some aftermath of two dark, blinded eye sockets, riveting in their stare. The pain in this deathly tangled look is etched in the criss-crossing build-up of strokes into a collapsed mass, like closed eyelids, seeing all. This "pain" is only a mental construct, a fragile awareness of the thought of an unspecified bodily experience, but it is enough to gauge a body's response to the power in the art.

What was the artist thinking when he made Without title in 1987? Was his tongue in his cheek? The deadpan, full-frontal, self-portrait photograph of the artist, holding the camera's cable shutter release in one hand, the word "jew" painted across part of his upper torso, took abandon and fearlessness to make. Anastasi donates his body to the word, a right Christian act. It seems out of character for an artist enjoined in the mining of significance imbedded in "dumb" materials and process, not in exposing his face and figure in a construct of conflicting modes of visual cognition.

We view a photograph whose mute figure looks straight out at the viewer, calmly confronting as a man in work clothes. The word "jew" floats in an invisible plane before him, a word that provokes instant controversy. The artist has used a word atop a photograph, creating visual semantics of havoc-making proportions. The thought is inescapable that the artist intends an opportunity for an act of self-examination, by the mix and match of incongruent elements.

The indirect quality of many other works by Anastasi, wherein the viewer is left open to attach his own sense of things, has been inverted here to include the figure of the artist, focused in a cultural context, exposing a raw nerve of morality, and leaving all doubters at the altar of self-reckoning.

Anastasi poses some obvious questions. Is he a "jew"? No, not by birth or conversion. Does this stamped "jew" represent a type of man (like the "wandering jew" pictured in frontal poses by ethnological researchers) - his mere presence denoting a way of seeing that is dangerously unaccountable in its morality? Probably not. I think Anastasi has simply given us a singular opportunity to consolidate ourselves by a comparison with his representation of mute witness, not unlike our self-assessment in front of the mirror, our daily ritual of making a face for the world to see. This very public part of our skin might be read as a text for the interpretation of a reflexive state of mind, subject to momentary change. Anastasi has found something to change your mind.

Anastasi has stated that in the broad cultural sense, "We are all jews." An individual's sense of worth is questioned; the measure of self-loathing we feel is held out for inspection. He directs the image to lie directly under the pendulum of faith. The composed look of the artist remains illegible as a mask standing psychologically for our emotions. The earnest stare is blank but inviting. The artist's body has been mediated by our minds. Any paucity of verbal response to the moment of confrontation remains herded together under the word placed near the artist's heart. I view this work and feel privy to all the marvelous cultural baggage in the western world, but hampered by the self-doubt born of living a life separate from a larger, hypocritically tolerant, Christian universe.

In Man, 1969-88, Anastasi dresses the discarded tatters of clothing (the remnants of a converted fashion victim?) around two pieces of lumber forming a cross, the ensemble replicating a memory of a favorite scarecrow. The overt religious significance of crucifixion here is ameliorated by its diminished interpretation as a scarecrow. But any rejected thing of our own is a fundamental signifier of our body, and a potential place to locate a sense of the sacred, even if its interaction with viewers as a symbolic skin is an unstable proposition. This scarecrow remains a rediscovered object, however disarming and potent.

The absence of a body, shedding the skin of clothes, presumes another life elsewhere, in an unknown plane of reality. In Assumption, 1988, the vaporization of corporeal existence is played out with two work gloves tacked to the wall above crumpled trousers (the ones from Without title?) heaped atop two shoes. There is no charge of murder without a body. The escape of the figure from view is a painless dematerialization; the concept is sensual but is not presented as a matter of feeling. The inevitable "death" of the missing person is a reminder of simply being alive within our selves, without a more specific self-reference.

The clothes are configured around a figure removed, but one that we can reanimate in our mind's eye. He dropped his clothes and all pretense of propriety, when, upon learning of his transparent condition, he decidedly left nothing to the imagination. This is a portrait of the artist as an invisible man.

Skin can be thought of as a way station for communications between the body and the world outside, separating, as a wall might, the visible from the hidden. Skin can act as a writing surface upon which the body's thoughts can be scripted. Throughout his life, Anastasi has used James Joyce's Finnegans Wake as a touchstone. There is a spooky correlation between his photographic negative print series, entitled Autobodyography, and a scene wherein Shem turns his body into parchment, writing all over himself with ink made partly from his own excrement, in a continuous flow: "The first to last alchemist wrote over every square inch of the only foolscap available, till by its corrosive sublimation one continuous present tense integument slowly unfolded..." gives new gravity to this link.

In Autobodyography, Right profile and Autobodyography, Left profile, both from 1994, the always rare but telling appearance of the artist in his own art is displayed in reversed tonality - black for white. He has writing all over his face and neck in broad child-like script wordings - the story of Bill. These snippets of a personal narrative act like some hysterical dermography - from within, intimate thoughts rising to the surface of the skin as a blush, an itch, or a rash of goose bumps.

When the skin becomes paper for a text written by the body, however, the words will only be ambiguous and suggest diverse meanings. A picture of a body, on the other hand, can only be specific if it does so in its particular skin. Then it can stand for a touching experience.

Looking at William Anastasi's art is a process, above all, of seeing with new eyes and digesting new whys. (laughter).

Resources:

Two essays by Anastasi exploring interconnections among Duchamp, Alfred Jarry, John Cage and James Joyce are available online at Tout-Fait The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal: Alfred Jarry and l'Accident of Duchamp at http://www.toutfait.com/issues/issue_1/Articles/Glass.html and Jarry, Joyce, Duchamp and Cage at http://www.toutfait.com/issues/issue_2/Articles/anastasi.html

The Arensburg Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art can be visited online at http://www.philamuseum.org.

The full text of The Creative Act, Marcel Duchamp's 1957 lecture in Houston, Texas can be found in The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, edited by Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson, New York: Da Capo Press, 1989.

James Elkins's book, Pictures of the Body: Pain and Metamorphosis, can be found in libraries and bookstores. ISBN: 0804730245.

Thomas McEvilley's essay, Setting the record straight: William Anastasi and The History of Conceptual Art appears in the catalogue for the exhibition, William Anastasi: A Retrospective, and may be available at some online and offline bookstores. ISBN: 8788860701.

The exhibition, William Anastasi: A Retrospective appeared at the NIKOLAJ, Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center from 6 January to 11 March 2001. The museum's website is at: http://www.nikolaj-ccac.dk

Into the Light appeared at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, from 18 October 2001 to 27 January 2002. Visit the museum's website for more information: http://www.whitney.org

Leo Stein (1872 - 1947) brother of the writer Gertrude Stein, was an art collector and critic.

List of Works Pictured:

1. Untitled, 1966 [Six Sites]. Photo silkscreen on canvas, 217 x 400 cm. Installation view, West Wall, Main Gallery, Dwan Gallery New York City, 1966.

2. Passion, 1966-94. Photo murals on paper, dimensions variable depending on site. Installation view, Lund, Sweden, 1994.

3. Trespass, 1966. Wall removal, 43 x 36 cm. Collection of Merce Cunningham, New York City.

4. Subway Drawing, 1985. Paper, pencil, 19 x 28 cm.

5. Without title, 1987. Photo mural, acrylic, graphite, 220 x 137 cm. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Ronald Lauder, New York City.

6. Man, 1969. Wood, wool, 174 x 99 cm.

7. Assumption, 1988. Mixed media, 37 x 26 x 12 inches.

8. Autobodyography, Right profile, 1994. Silver gelatin print, 57 x 36 cm.
Autobodyography, Left profile, 1994. Silver gelatin print, 67 x 25 cm.

About the Author:

Gordon Douglas is a writer living and working in New York City. His previous articles can be found in the Newsletter Archives.