Plato said that in utopia you wouldn't need art anymore; art is about fantasied or fake utopias and that you can have real utopia here and now if you let go of fake ideas of utopia. Plato gave the most cogent apology for abstract art that I've ever read: "I will try to talk of the beauty of shapes, and I do not mean the shapes of living figures or their imitation in painting. I mean straight lines and curves and the shapes made by them. These are always beautiful in themselves and give a pleasure quite free from the itch of desire."
William Anastasi is a pioneer in the Conceptual, Minimalist, and Process art movements of the 1960s. His interdisciplinary approach to art incorporates drawing, sound, photography, sculpture, and site-specific installations and interventions and is meditative and philosophical in its dealings with everyday life, materials, objects and spaces.
Anastasi was born in Philadelphia in 1933 and attended his first art class at the age of twelve; he says that from his earliest memory, he has been drawing every day. His mother, an immigrant to the United States from Italy by way of Algeria, instilled a daunting challenge in Anastasi at a young age, when she stated that "of course the best thing anyone could be in this world is an artist." Since then, an anxiety around this provocation has spurred his limitless curiosity into the validity of the art object, the creative process and the ego of the artist.
Anastasi moved to New York City in 1962 and promptly began making the work he is perhaps most well-known for and continues to create — his Subway Drawings, in which he blindly lets the movements of the subway car dictate the marks made on the page. These works are at the cornerstone of understanding Anastasi's approach to art making, as they are chance-driven, unbound to traditional aesthetic intent and depend solely upon the present moment.
By 1970, Anastasi was actively showing in prominent galleries in New York, including solo shows, but was not finding the financial success of some of his contemporaries; he has always been considered, reverentially, as "an artist's artist." Following Kierkegaard's principle that "the love of repetition is in fact the only happy one," Anastasi continued to create works in this narrow, yet infinitely expansive mode, saying that "in repetition, things slow up. They get better, more beautiful, with the prospect of what is coming." This maxim of the rewards of repetition can be applied to Anastasi's body of work as a whole, as well as individual works, which deepen as you devote more time and attention to them. In the decades that followed, he continued to make subway drawings, as well as Pocket Drawings, sound works, "unsighted" drawings, and site-specific works with a Duchamp-minded investigation into aesthetic prejudice and the presence of the artist in the work.
Famously, Anastasi played a daily game of chess with his close friend John Cage for many years. Cage once said of Anastasi's work: "It's not psychological; it's physical." Anastasi was awarded the John Cage Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2010 and is represented in major collections such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Referring to an adage often leveled at Duchamp – "either he's a genius or a crazy man" – Anastasi says its the "ambivalent feeling between the two that keeps [him] going as an artist...maybe it's insecurity or some sort of anxiety." Despite increasing and long-overdue scholarly and market interest in his work, Anastasi, citing yet another philosopher, identifies with Kant's declaration that "nearly through the whole of my work I have felt doubtful what to do." Anastasi continues to live and make work in New York.
