published in William Anastasi. A Retrospective 1960-1995. The Galleries at Moore. Moore College of Art and Design. Philadelphia 1995
In 1967 William Anastasi offered paintings that seemed to acknowledge the obtrusive nature of painting by making paintings of the walls that the paintings were to be placed upon. Thus the "covered up" area - the area that traditionally suffers at the expense of the imperialism of painting - was acknowledged to exist and actually illustrated (via photographic technique)...
In these paintings one tyranny of painting was discovered. The form of painting took a giant step into the present.
Gregory Battcock, Wall Paintings and the Wall, Arts Magazine, c. 1971, republished in Why Art (book), Dutton, 1977.
An image comes to mind of a white, ideal space that, more than any single picture, may be the archetypal image of 20th-century art...
Anastasi photographed the empty gallery at Dwan, noticed the parameters of the Wall, top and bottom, right and left, the placement of each electrical outlet, the ocean of space in the middle. He then silkscreened all this data on a canvas slightly smaller than the wall and put it on the wall. Covering the wall with an image of that wall delivers a work of art right into the zone where surface, mural and wall have engaged in dialogues central to modernism.
Brian 0'Doherty, Inside the White Cube, Artforum, 1976 republished in Inside the White Cube, (book), Lapis Press, 1986.
William Anastasi gave four exhibitions at the Dwan Gallery in New York between 1966 and 1970. The era in which these shows occurred - the beginning and height of the classical conceptual period - might be described, without exaggeration, as the most critical or abnormal years in the entire long and wide history of art. Anastasi's work in
these shows was a groundbreaking demonstration of the meaning and power of conceptual art and, indirectly, all art that has been made in the late- and post-conceptual traditions.
Thomas Mc Evilley, Introduction, Scott Hanson retrospective catalogue, New York, 1989.
Anastasi's five projects - Continuum, Transfer, viewing a film in/of a gallery of the period and audition, Plastic Coincident, Through - are but a sample from the large corpus of his conceptual photographic, film, and video projects of the sixties and seventies. The history of the reception of these works offers an insight into the challenge Anastasi poses to the museum and to the institutions of art history and critical writing. His career articulates what is arguably the most sustained, rigorous, and sophisticated examination of the conceptual basis of the photographic text and that texts engagement of the spectator in the site of its creation and reception...
Anastasi is the Borges of the visual arts who has fulfilled, within the self-referential circuits of a meta-textual narrative, an infinitely retelling interpretation. The rhetorical ploys and play that the art of both Borges and Anastasi share is gleaned from their reading - an interpretive process that uncoils through the circuit and self-referential logics of art made to be seen and consumed in one gesture. In this process, Anastasi emphasizes the chance play of the viewer and the immateriality of art as a creative process that each of us experiences in the infinite play of daily life. Anastasi breaks the frame of the museum and gallery and asks us to look to what we see: That's art enough.
John Hanhardt, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Reframing Time and Place: The Art of William Anastasi, catalogue to the Moore College of Art Retrospective, 1995.
His pieces, for all their simplicity, are not mute. They are argumentative; they deflect our energy, and like a ball hitting a Wall, they come back at us at a different angle. They are hard to play. Anastasi has spent a long time at his art. He has made a body of work that is both historically important and esthetically rewarding. He is part of a tradition that continues to challenge perceptual complacency. He is necessary.
Richard Kalima, William Anastasi: Deadpan Conceptualist, in: Art in America, 1990.
Anastasi's notational spree worked by establishing connections in front of your eyes. lt was like watching a time lapse film of coral growing, an intelligent reef of thought, with fronds of information drifting lazily in the interstices...
Anastasi captured... what might he a viable future for conceptual representation - not a struggle pitting Grace against Reason, but a delicate balancing act in which the life of the mind becomes the inner Eden.
Matthew Ritchie, The Word Made Flesh, in: Flash Art, 1995
Anastasi resists any temptation to be either mainstream or easily explained away with words. Instead, the work - highly innovative and, in some respects, decidedly cryptic - drives you to respond emotionally, intellectually and soul searchingly.
Brilliant examples of conceptual art, Anastasi's oeuvre is eminently compelling and richly memorable. Transcending trivial questions of whether they provoke reactions of being liked or disliked, the works on display rise above such petty issues to stand their ground incontrovertibly, as a body of esthetic forms loyal to the integrity of their own being.
Burton Wasserman, review of Moore College of Art Retrospective, Art Matters, Philadelphia, 1995.
William Anastasi has been a significant figure in conceptual art... since its emergence in the early sixties... His Works (give) evidence of three decades of continual movement, of restless experimentation, of an incisive imagination that brings to light the contradictions at the heart of his subjects, whether religion, politics, or the art space itself.
Duncan McLean, review of Pier Center Exhibition, Stromness, Scotland, The Scottish National Paper, 1995.