William Anastasi was an American visual artist working in a wide range of media including drawing, painting, sculpture, photographic works, and text, a highly original if underrated member of the group known as Conceptual Artists, which notably included Sol LeWitt and Lawrence Weiner. This work is from a series titled Sound Objects, each object being accompanied by a relevant sound. With the Sound Objects, Anastasi introduced the concept of tautology, a strategy of Conceptual Art. They consist of sounds made by ordinary things such as an electric fan, an inner tube, a radiator, shovel, pick, pneumatic drill, power saw, among them, that were recorded while in use and presented as sculptures with speakers that remember their sounds. In Sound Object [Deflated Tire], Anastasi inverted the idea of Robert Morris’s earlier Box with the Sound of Its Own Making, by taping the process of disabling an entity — deflating a tire — rather than that of constructing it. Being self-referential the Sound Objects are simply about themselves, not representing something else, as much art before and after has been and still is. They are as much about the present moment, the here and the now, another Conceptual strategy, along with the erasure of boundaries, yet another, as they are about tautology. As Gertrude Stein said long ago, no adjective can stand in, no metaphor can explain other than that things are what they are – “a rose is a rose is a rose.”
The Brooklyn Rail | July/August 2007 | In Conversation
William Anastasi with Phong Bui
