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"William Anastasi's Pataphysical Society: Philadelphia Launch"

William Anastasi, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Aaron Levy, Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes

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Event Date: Friday, September 23, 2005
Location: Slought Foundation
Slought Books Series

Cover for Anastasi's Pataphysical Society

Please join us for the Philadelphia release of "William Anastasi's Pataphysical Society: Jarry, Joyce, Duchamp and Cage" at Slought Foundation on Friday September 23, 2005, from 5:00-6:00pm. William Anastasi, the editors, and select contributors will all be in attendance. Dr Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes will be joining us from from Dublin, Ireland, where she recently curated the exhibition Joyce in Art at the Royal Hibernian Academy; she will also give a series of brief remarks on the occassion of the book release.

This new publication, the third in our Contemporary Artist Series, engages work by conceptual artist William Anastasi in relation to literary and artistic predecessors and contemporaries including Jarry, Joyce, Duchamp, and Cage. This publication is edited by Aaron Levy and Jean-Michel Rabaté, with contributions by William Anastasi, Joseph Masheck, Thomas McEvilley, and Steve McCaffery, and an introduction by Osvaldo Romberg. In addition, nearly 40 manuscript pages from William Anastasi's manuscripts "me innerman monophone" and "du jarry," engaging Joyce and Duchamp via Jarry, are reproduced in the book, alongside 10 pages of reproductions of Anastasi's work from the 1960s. By showing concretely that many passages in Finnegans Wake contain buried allusions to Jarry's characters and vocabulary and personality, Anastasi is not simply annotating Joyce's masterpiece; he provides a new way of reading all avant-garde literature. If Jarry is shown to be somewhere in Joyce's texts, how can we be sure that he is not everywhere?

Information on the accompanying exhibition at Slought Foundation is available: http://slought.org/search/Anastasi/


Purchase this book online!


William Anastasi (Born 1933, Philadelphia; Lives in New York), considered to be among the first “classical” conceptual artists, is widely recognized for his pioneering contributions to painting, sculpture, collage, photography and drawing. 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, among many others. At Slought Foundation, he recently exhibited me altar's egoes, a project engaging Jarry, Joyce, and Duchamp. Recordings of William Anastasi in conversation are available online in audio format at http://Slought.org

Dr Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes is a Lecturer in Historical and Theoretical Studies in Visual Art at the University of Ulster's School of Art & Design in Belfast. She gained her PhD at Cologne University and began her academic career there. In 1996, she spent nine months as James Joyce Foundation Scholar in Zurich and moved to Dublin the following year to teach at UCD and NCAD. She has published numerous essays, catalogue contributions, art criticism, as well as a book on Joseph Beuys (2001, in German) and one on Joyce in Art: Visual Art Inspired by James Joyce, Dublin 2004. This accompanied the major art exhibition Joyce in Art, which she curated for the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin.

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To Cite this Page using MLA Style:

William Anastasi, et al. "William Anastasi's Pataphysical Society: Philadelphia Launch." Slought Foundation Online Content.
[23 September 2005; Accessed 25 July 2008]. <http://slought.org/content/11304/>.



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