William Anastasi | This Is Not My Signature

[William Anastasi]

This Is Not My Signature

Milan, Italy: Mousse Publishing, 2024

264 pp., 21 x 27 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

William Anastasi - who died a year ago today, at the age of 90 - was a difficult artist to pin down. His prolific output included a wide variety of media and genres, including drawing, painting, sound art, video, instructional works, photo conceptualism, institutional critique, walking works, and process-based art. But he is often overlooked in surveys, and remains largely unknown.1  

Released in August of this year,  This Is Not My Signature aims to rectify this with a well-illustrated monograph featuring essays by Dove Bradshaw, Chiara Costa, Béatrice Gross, Valérie Mavridorakis, Hélène Meisel, Sébastien Pluot, Julia Robinson, Robert Storr, and Erik Verhagen, who also edits the volume. 

The book reads like an alternative history of Conceptual Art, with Anastasi at the centre. 

His closed-circuit video piece Free Will (1968) anticipates Nam June Paik’s signature work by six years.  

The installation consists of a small black and white monitor placed on the gallery floor a foot or two from the corner. Atop the monitor is a camera, pointed at and providing a live feed of the corner. Paik’s TV Buddha features a Buddha statue watching an image of itself on a TV screen. Paik uses the camera-on-monitor to suggest endless contemplation, but Anastasi has already noted the dead end. 

Lesser known examples of works that may owe a debt to Free Will include Gottfried Bechtold’s Video Installation (1972), which involves a mirror instead of a corner, and John Knight's Site Displacement (1969). The latter almost reads like an interpolation of Anastasi’s work from the prior year.  Here too, the gallery corner is filmed and fed to a live monitor, but in this instance the screen is placed in different corner of the room. 

Ange Leccia appears to pay tribute to Anastasi in the title of his closed-circuit video work Arrangement Stasi (1985-1990). But the Stasi in question is the East German secret police, as the work trains two cameras on each other as a comment on invasive surveillance.  

Free Will is far from the only example where Anastasi arrives at ideas years before his peers. 

Michael Snow’s Authorization (a work considered key enough to appear on the cover of the retrospective book Michael Snow: Sequences, a History His Art) debuted at the 1970 Venice Biennale, three years after Anastasi’s nearly identical Nine Polaroid Photographs in a Mirror (1967). Snow maintained he had not seen the earlier work, and there’s no reason to doubt him, but the similarities are uncanny. 

Anastasi’s World’s Greatest Music (1977) consists of three portable record players playing the run-out grooves of children’s records playing at 78rpm, predating Christian Marclay’s investigation into the mechanics of music playback devices. 

This Is Not My Signature opens with an important caveat, in a chronology that precedes the table of contents, highlighted with the caption “Nota Bene”2. It reads, in full: 

“Like many (pre)conceptual bodies of work, Anastasi’s suffered from a lack of documentation: some of his early works have not been photographically archived, while others had been produced long after they had been thought of or sketched. Although this chronological discrepancy is a truism of conceptual art, there is no attempt to minimize its scientific inconvenience. It’s true that historical authenticity and conceptualism do not always mesh. We are aware that some of the proposed dates rely on memory or testimonies that have no material documentation. The traceable works undeniably argue in favour of the artist and the originality of his ideas. Nevertheless, it seems essential to make this qualification. The dates given are those of the supposed invention of the works, whether or not they were actually produced at this time. We have relied on the artist’s archives and his testimonies as given in his publications, attempting as far as possible to cross-check this data with those reported by other institutions”. 

The works in This Is Not My Signature are often double-dated, presumably including both the year the work was conceived and the year that it was exhibited. Or the year from which supporting documentation exists. Sometimes these dates differ by decades.3  

Anastasi's One gallon high gloss industrial enamel, thrown, and a companion work One gallon high gloss industrial enamel, poured are both listed as from 1966/1989. Based on the earlier date, these pieces would predate Lawrence Weiner’s Two Minutes of Spray Paint Directly Upon The Floor From a Standard Aerosol Spray Can by two years.

If we discount these examples because of the uncertainty of their dates, there is still Lawrence Weiner’s A 36” x 36” Removal To The Lathing Or Support Wall Of Plaster Or Wallboard From A Wall (1968) to consider. The cut wall piece was first presented as part of Harald Szeemann’s important "Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form,” exhibition in 1969. It is preceded by several similar works by Anastasi, dating from 1966. Note, also, that Weiner himself back-dates the work by a year.

Anastasi clearly had an influence on the next generation of conceptual artists, also. 

Micah Lexier’s A Minute of My Time works, and charming drawings made by placing a pen to paper as an airplane lands, undoubtedly took inspiration from Anastasi’s Subway Drawings.4 These were produced when the artist was traveling to visit his friend John Cage, with whom he played chess, daily. Anastasi would sit with a pencil in each hand and a drawing board in his lap, and surrender the drawing to vibrations of the subway car.5

Jonathan Monk’s This Painting series find an antecedent in Anastasi’s A Painting of A Soup Can Used to Hang Here. 

In the essay “Small Wonders”, former MoMA Senior Curator Robert Storr argues that “Anastasi is a conceptual artist who has—well—conceived innumerable formal gambits that trap our vague thoughts in precise conundrums, which is to say, in physical manifestations that expose their inherent ideational paradoxes, which he ingeniously presents to us for all to see—and think about. Some of these gambits share characteristics with those of other artists of his period and orientation, raising questions of who did this or that ‘first.’” “Firstness”, he goes on to say, "is supremely important". 

Chiara Costa’s chapter “The Idea Behind the Art: Virginia Dwan and William Anastasi” is mostly about Dwan and the important and influential gallery she operated for twelve years. Her choice of artists show a keen eye, including Yves Klein (1961), Robert Rauschenberg (1962), Jean Tinguely and Claes Oldenburg (1963) and Niki de Saint Phalle (1964). 

In 1965, the Los Angeles gallery opened an outpost in New York City, the first LA space to do so, according to the press release at the time. 

Between the years 1966 and ’71, Anastasi had four solo exhibitions at the New York gallery. The second, in April 1967, was a work called Six Sites, now widely regarded as one of the very first documented example of photoconceptualism. 

Virginia Dwan championed Anastasi’s work and was protective of him. When asked about the unheralded influence of his work, she replies “the artists definitely saw it”. 

In late 1970, Anastasi participated in a Dwan Gallery group show called Language IV. Walter de Maria was represented in the exhibition with a Western Union telegram (see below) that he had sent Dwan, stating: “I urge you to consider closing the gallery and to consider world wide land operations.”6

Six months later, she capitulated to the idea. Dwan closed the space and Anastasi was without representation for sixteen years. 

“I continued to make work,” he told Thomas McEviley, "and I showed now and then in group shows, but it was tough. I was the last [type of artist] who should be without a gallery, and yet I wouldn’t go looking for one”. 

This lack of representation later in life undoubtedly diminished Anastasi’s chances of receiving wider exposure, possibly compounded by his lack of a distinctive signature style or medium. 

This Is Not My Signature is an essential overview of Anastasi’s life and work. It’s also a cautionary tale that it’s possible to win the race and still be viewed as an also-ran. 

The title is available from the publisher for € 40/ $ 45.00, here.

1. Anastasi’s work is entirely omitted from Lucy Lippard’s Six Years, which recounts the shift towards the “dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972”.

2. Nota Bene is a Latin phrase used to indicate that special attention should be paid to something.

3. The dates of conceptual works are often controversial. I’ve spoken to many Fluxus artists who dispute the dates of works in Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit, for example. 

4. Lexier and Anastasi share many similar interests, from corners to tautologies to puzzles. 

5. In a 1990 interview Cage distinguished the works from surrealist automatism by clarifying "It’s not psychological; it’s physical.”

6. Walter De Maria’s telegram to Dwan dates back to 1968, but was first framed and exhibited as an artwork in 1970.