William Anastasi: Untitled (Subway Drawing) 2-3-93, 1993

The assumption that drawing derives from visual perception has been radically undermined in the twentieth century. From chance procedures in dada to surrealist automatism to the Blind Time drawings of Robert Morris,¹ an alternative tradition in works on paper has developed non-visual principles for organizing the pictorial image. In many respects, this tendency peaked in the conceptualism of the sixties. William Anastasi, commonly overlooked in accounts of the period, is a prime representative of this movement, particularly for what he called his “unsighted” drawings, begun in 1963.

Anastasi’s unsighted subway series dates from 1977 into the nineties. Inspired by his friend John Cage’s influential experiments with chance procedures in music and art, Anastasi made some of these drawings during subway rides from 137th Street to Cage’s studio downtown, near 18th Street. Sitting with a pencil in each hand and a drawing board on his lap, his elbows rigid at an angle of 90 degrees, Anastasi allowed the rhythms of the moving train—its starts and stops, accelerations and decelerations—to generate the lines on the paper. The results are drawings reminiscent of seismograph readings, images that are indices of dynamic and subtle shifts in the environment.

The example of a subway drawing reproduced here demonstrates not only the internalization of chance in a work, but also the phenomenological concerns that occupied artists of Anastasi’s generation: it is an art object that expresses the physicality of its making. The two concentrations of pencil in the drawing mark the areas where the artist’s hands were the most stable; the density of the marks, however, suggests the frenetic vibration of the train. A lateral register of sparser scrawls that transverses these areas, extending from one side of the paper to the other, is the apparent result of the train’s lurching or stopping.