William Anastasi: Talk About Dumb
Anastasi: “The drawings were made of dots. I found that if I didn’t look where I was putting the dots, it turned out better then if I did look.”
McEvilley: “You got better results with your eyes closed?”
A: “A thousand times better.”
In regards to Modernism ending
A: “I was very dumb then as far as these things are concerned. It might have been intuitive.”
“…tautology – the kind of statement where the subject and the predicate are the same, and no information is added to the assertion of identity.”
solipsism: the idea that only oneself exists
“The theme of tautology in early Conceptual Art may come out of the kind of solipsistic self-obsessiveness, and obsessive introspection, of the expressionist artists…”
“…the critique of representation as somehow lacking reality compared with real presence…the whole question of the relationship and between them and the presented thing arises.”
Quote by Franz Kafka – “You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
A: “Whenever you put a frame around something you idealize it; that’s the way we emotionally respond to the frame.”
A: “It’s a paean to the here and now.”
On the surface removals
A: “I have often said I doubted this work could have been done by someone who believed in a consciousness after death.”
According to Nelson Goodman’s Seven Strictures on Similarity – “…there are infinite ways that one thing is like or unlike another; to pick out similarity or dissimilarity and take it as a defining meaning is arbitrary; it is a wish-fulfillment fantasy of controlling the world by believing we know what is like what.”
In regards to the play Plants and Waiters – A: “The play is there all right, it’s just a matter of finding it.”
Kal L. Cloonan 