Untitled (Pocket Drawing) is a blind drawing made between the limbs of the arm and leg, next to the body instead of in front of it. These scratches and scrawls are recordings—ticks and twitches of the body, mind, and eye—that multiply as Anastasi folds and refolds the paper. The drawing’s intensity is evident twofold: first, in the glare of graphite, a sheen that is produced by pressing forcefully, and second, in the creation of a much fainter image—the transfer and mirror image of the primary marks. (I have to refrain from using the terms ‘original’ and ‘copy’ as the two drawings are made simultaneously.)

The double image places the drawing within the realm of chimera. Not the chimera of fantasy but the chimera of chemistry: a term that is used to define a pair of molecules that are the mirror image of each other, but that cannot be inverted or inserted into the other, even though they are generated by the same code. Chimerism is universal to our existence from a molecular to a physiological level. An example is the structure of our hands: the left and right mirror each other. They are the left and right articulations of a single and original design encoded in our genes. The double image in Untitled (Pocket Drawing) functions the same way. The darker and lighter drawings are mirror images but their orientation prevents them from aligning—the way a right hand would fail to dock within a left glove. Being so fundamental to our nature, the chimerism of Anastasi’s drawing resonates within the root our awareness.

The double image wipes out any element of surprise or chance that might come from a blind process. The idea that Anastasi could make the same drawing—simultaneously an original and a mirror image—twice and by chance, is impossible and inconceivable. However ‘dumb’¹ his process, he draws in earnest. His work is a portal.

1. “One, just one. And simple. As simple as simple. Even dumb.” From a conversation between William Anastasi and Thomas McEvilley, 1989, printed in “William Anastasi, A Word: words / Words: a word”, Drawing Papers 70, The Drawing Center, New York, 2007.

Tad Mike: The issue of touch or lack of touch in your work is of interest. You are dealing with something as fragile as soot. There is this issue of approach, namely, how you begin to approach a white sheet of paper and marry these two disparate elements together. Do you imagine and prepare for a number of variables and factors to create these pieces?

Kristin Holder: Yes, pain being the first thing, burning myself. (Laughter)

TM: Oh really?

KH: Yes, that’s genuine. The soot is not applied any other way rather than using fire and using a piece of paper large enough really to have a good distance.

TM: So you are not heating objects to place on the paper, only using fire directly?

KH: Using only fire. I have to hold the piece of paper while I am burning it. I guess I could choose a larger sheet of paper, but I don’t.

TM: Obviously you want a certain scale and a certain mark to fit the sheet, so it requires the paper to be a certain size.

KH: Yes, but I was interested in following the direction the fire took me as a one-shoot work, not making a series of marks.

TM: You were working alla prima, and what happened or what did not happen was the work?

KH: Yes.

TM: How did you arrive at using soot and burning the paper as a way of working?

KH: I had been exposed to and been thinking about Yves Klein, the burned pieces he did. They are much larger, obviously, and reveal an image, but I had seen those works and I was working up in a studio in rural Washington State. Part of my ritual every day, every morning, was to heat my studio by starting a fire in a wood stove. To make it accommodating for me to work, the experience was all about fire. So I had these materials around and was using dried pigment and some of it was very coarse. I was using dried pigments in gum arabic and was interested in making my own pigments from what I had there.

TM: I think the non-art-making experiences that occur before one works are very important. Building a fire is a gesture almost like a sketch for you.

KH: Yes, much of the time in the studio is not about making capital A-R-T.

TM: All of the works made with soot and fire have an oneiric or dreamlike quality to them. The French writer Gaston Bachelard wrote a book, Fragments of a Poetics of Fire, where he describes fire as something that entices the imagination.

KH: Yes…

TM: The work in the exhibition at the Katonah Museum of Art has a presence that speaks to something very specific, although I really don’t know what…what that is? It has a presence outside the time it took to create it.

KH: I would admit to a parallel conscious, but while I am working in the studio I am pretty pragmatic. I don’t want to discount any other states of awareness going on at once. At this point in my life I am really not drawn to that way of being or thinking. I really wasn’t then either. I don’t totally discount it because I admire it in other people, people who are able to speak clearly about it with a stated set of beliefs.

TM: For some artists being able to articulate what their work is about could destroy the work.

KH: I suppose so. I feel totally out of touch with that part of myself. My early influences from my early twenties were Chinese art and Japanese art. On the west coast there is more of an eye towards Eastern art. That is where I grew up and went to school. I like that so much hard work goes into something that appears, as you said, otherworldly.

Untitled inches into our space. Both the deposits of paint at the edges and perimeter and the layers of tape over paint over tape affirm this fact. Although Plimack Mangold places frame within frame—alternating graphite and painted tape with fields of paint—she is not framing a view for us to look into or through, but rather something to look at. It is as though she is directing us: “Look here, look at this drawing about drawing.”

“Images, impulses, clues. Never enlightening me to any more than performance. (Demonstration)”¹

1. Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Inches and Field, Lapp Princess Press, 1978.