William Anastasi at white box annex - New York

In late 1966 when resistance to the war in Vietnam was beginning to roil, Conceptual artist William Anastasi not awayed Blind to the Dwan Gallery as part of a series of site-specific casts that posited the space of the gallery as an essential constituting of the work. For logistical reasons, Blind, a critique of the realities and illusions of warfare and perception, was not at any time installed, although it seemed a finished vehicle for much of the sentiment of the times. not long ago almost 40 years later, in the midst of another divisive military intervention, Blind was finally realized, and it appeared real timely. Stunningly simple, it might be considered a latitude designed for deceptions.

Anastasi painted the gallery in camouflage pattern, from floor to walls to ceiling, covering doors, light switches, round pillars reception desk and two office chairs. A telling detail was the meticulous bisecting of the structural rounded pillar located at the gallery's entrance. It was camouflaged upon the side that was part of Anastasi's allocation--the space is not completely enclosed--but remained its usual white upon the other, which is part of another artist's installation. This is the kind of territorial demarcation that wars are all about. Roughly energetically execut in pale olive drab, dirty browns, lightly tanned flesh tones, grays and blacks, the camouflage was vertiginous in overall issue The viewer's orientation and faculty of perception of measure was disrupted, as three dimensions press togethered into two, the room flattened and distances became confused--a metaphoric equivalent, it would look to a world blinded by means of the rhetoric of war.

Camouflage in its in every one's mouth form was developed by artists during the course of World War I, roughly coincident with Cubism and with the observation that flattened, broken-up surfaces nurse to read ambiguously. Here, Anastasi camouflaged an interior space rather than an exterior manner of making making what was invisible visible, reversing the usual strategy of camouflage. more [i]or[/i] less questions Anastasi's installation provoked: in what way visible or invisible can war and its effects be? Can we camouflage death and destruction, the piles of corpses, the shattered domiciles villages and cities? Does war cloak our essential humanity or is our essential humanity war? Is civilization itself barely veneer, filigree, camouflage? Blind gave us a great deal of to think about.

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