PERFECT

William Anastasi

A Retrospective

Collaboration Galleri Specta

26.3 to 24.4 1999

Reviews

Words on the Wall

The American conceptual artist William Anastasi has been associated with Galleri Stalke for more than a decade, and it is therefore no coincidence that the gallery, together with Galleri Specta, now presents a nearly retrospective of his almost fifty-year-long career. A career that has its roots in the sixties’ American avant-garde scene around people like Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage.

"Perfect," as the exhibition at Galleri Stalke and Specta is called, consists of over thirty stone-, copper-, and silk screen works, some earlier works printed by the Danish printer Niels Borch Jensen, which Anastasi has not shown together for a long time. Even though some works are not as effective in smaller formats, especially the very space-specific photograph Wall on Wall, Anastasi aims to give meaning to his works and make the prints an important part of his artistic project of tackling tautologies and self-references.

For instance, there are the so-called blind drawings, which he has drawn or rather scratched onto metal plates on trains with his eyes closed. In these drawings, Anastasi searches for an existential essence and to find himself, precisely where chance reigns, and he loses himself. Stalke is showing a video of one of these blind drawings, which illustrates the intense concentration and mental focus that characterize all of Anastasi’s work. And the works also express an unmistakable closeness to physical effort and spiritual sensitivity, as intense traces of physical exertion and mental surrender are evident.

In other works, there are references to other artists who interest Anastasi, especially Andy Warhol, with works such as A painting of a soup can used to hang here. This is characteristic of Anastasi’s artistic philosophy, where he lets art comment on itself and other works in a place between copy and original.

In a third series, Jew, which Anastasi has worked on since the early 1980s, there are more political issues. On canvases and paper and in several languages, he has written the word "Jew." For Anastasi, the word "Jew" is the symbol of humanity as a victim, the most burdened word in the world, as he says, and he thus seeks to open up that little word to the audience's own history. These are effective images, which today have an eerie and renewed relevance in relation to the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.

Jacob Lillemoes

Information 13.4.1999

Pressure on the Ideas

"I own the war," it says in English, German, and Japanese. The phrase can be read in blue, white, and red monochrome lithography. Next to it hangs a charcoal work with the word Jew scratched into it. American William Anastasi links this word to a number of wildly unusual meanings in his art. The word Jew he has used in countless paintings, photographs, drawings, and prints. It is disturbingly hard to figure out the meaning of the word here. It can be seen as a kind of idea-kitsch, where one hand marks the other and does so with explosive politically charged meanings. Even Anastasi himself, as a non-Jew, binds the otherwise so fragile word in an attempt to rethink its use: "Everyone is a Jew, both Christians and those who don't know they are because they build their worldview on the life of Jesus, who fulfilled Judaism."

You are invited to the effective but dubious embrace of a kind of reinterpretation. Anastasi's idea-graphics, which also include the perfect image in five versions, are currently presented in a retrospective double exhibition at two galleries. At Galleri Specta, you can also see the remnants of a performance, where Anastasi scratched the word Jew out of the gallery wall.

Conceptual Art by William Anastasi

Perfect will be on display from March 26 to April 24 at Stalke Galleri, Vesterbrogade 14 A, and at Specta, Peder Skramsgade 13.

He was part of the movement from the start of the 1960s, where a small group of American artists formulated the concept of conceptual art. He has exhibited at the Guggenheim in New York and, in March, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

At the end of the month, it is Copenhagen's turn to host a special visit when the American conceptual artist William Anastasi comes to Denmark. It is the two galleries, Stalke and Specta, that have collaborated to showcase parts of the artist's graphic production, which he has created over the past two decades. And the fact that he is exhibiting in Copenhagen at all is due to his collaboration with the Danish printer Niels Borch Jensen, who has been instrumental in printing his works.

In the spirit of conceptual art, Anastasi has previously created art out of his own urine and by drawing with his eyes closed in a subway car, but at Stalke and Specta, his later works are being shown, where words or entire sentences are figures on large canvases. Among other things, he has written sentences like "I don't want this on my wall" and played with the historically charged word Jew by writing it in various languages or in sentences like "Ich bin Jude."