Review:

Subtlety and Transience

Highly recommended exhibition of William Anastasi and Dove Bradshaw at Stalke’s art gallery.

This is the second time that Stalke Kunsthandel has shown a larger display of William Anastasi’s work. He was a frontrunner in the early conceptual art of the 1960s, alongside names like Joseph Kosuth and Lawrence Weiner. For a while, he faded somewhat from the spotlight, but in recent years he has gained significant recognition in the United States. However, despite Stalke's efforts, he has never received the attention he deserves in Denmark. That should change now, as this small 30-year retrospective makes it clear how much of the young art scene aligns with his simple, conceptual practices. Anastasi achieves a delicate balance between simplicity and Zen-like profundity, as seen in an untitled work from 1968—a diagonal line of screws in a wall, whose shadows connect to form a line.

One of Anastasi’s most well-known works is Trespass (1966), which, in its simplicity, involves scraping off a piece of wall. Anastasi has performed numerous such wall removals, photographed sections of walls, and projected those photographs back onto the same walls. In another work, Through, he displayed a photograph of what one would see if the wall were removed.

Anastasi’s works may appear expressive, but they are guided by principles that eliminate personal input. From 1994, we see one of his so-called Subway Drawings, a method he practiced for years while playing chess with John Cage. While commuting on the subway, Anastasi created these simple, sensitive pencil drawings by holding a drawing board with paper, closing his eyes, and letting the vibrations of the subway guide the pencil's movements.

Tautology and duality are frequent stylistic devices in Anastasi’s work, such as in his sound-controlled Sound Drawings, where he recorded the sound of the pencil on the paper. One questions what is the purpose and what is the medium: is the drawing the medium for the sound, or is the sound merely a documentation of the drawing's growth?

Dove Bradshaw
Like Anastasi, Bradshaw allows the world to paint her works. Quite literally, she creates some of her works on rooftops in New York, originally because the materials she works with are toxic. Over time, her works have come to reflect the passage of time and weather, absorbing the world’s influence as they change. As Marcel Duchamp once remarked, art only lasts 50 years. Bradshaw embraced this as a challenge to create art that is constantly evolving.

At Stalke, she displays pieces that may last 100 years but will eventually turn entirely black. Contingency is the title of five works created using sulfur and sulfuric salts, a yellowish material that dissolves in water. The salt absorbs moisture from the air (and even from the viewer’s breath, making us participants in the artwork’s evolution). Over time, it crystallizes into golden patterns. Meanwhile, the sulfur oxidizes and gradually turns black. What we see is essentially a fire in slow motion.

Once the artwork is initiated, it cannot be stopped—a tangible reflection of the impermanence of existence. All her works are finite. The organic metaphor of growth and decay is also present in another work titled Zn + S + H2O, composed of zinc and sulfur granules on a slate plate. It requires daily watering, which causes the granules to spread into curious formations. This piece seems to suggest that one must care for art as one cares for a garden.

Bradshaw, rather than scraping away walls like Anastasi, embeds a silver mirror into her works—a mirror that will tarnish over time, refusing to return our reflection as a persistent memento mori.

There is a concurrent exhibition of Anastasi's work at Anders Tornberg Gallery in Lund (Kungsgatan 4, 

By Mai Misfeldt

Berlingske tidende 22.2.1996

Dove Bradshaw

William Anastasi