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Slought Foundation, a non-profit organization rethinking contemporary art, presents an introductory talk by William Anastasi about his work, organized in conjunction with the opening of “me altar's egoes," an exhibition by William Anastasi from January 31-March 31, 2004. 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.
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 online in conjunction with the exhibition. To access the recording, and for further more information on the exhibition, visit: http://slought.org/content/11179/
Please note: the word coprophilia, as employed in Anastasi's talk, signifies an abnormal, often obsessive interest in excrement, especially the use of feces for sexual excitement.
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)
Organized by
Osvaldo Romberg, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Aaron Levy
Media files on the Slought.org website are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
MLA Style:
William Anastasi. "On Coprophilia and the Avant-garde." Slought Foundation Online Content. [31 January 2004;
Accessed 18 March 2010]. <http://slought.org/content/11205/>.
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