Sink by William Anastasi, 1970

rusted steel, 20” x 20”

“I was chatting with a scientist I’d just met at a party, and our conversation turned to the why and how of rust.  I was told that iron ore from the mountain is all but useless, except maybe as a doorstop.  It’s not malleable.  But some forgotten discoverer learned that when heated to a sufficient intensity it liquified.  Then if the surface was skimmed off, the remainder, when cooled off and solid again, behaved diffferently from the ore of its earlier state.  It would now be wonderfullly malleable—we call it steel.  But a marvelous thing about steel is that wherever it is, it wants to take from the moisture in the atmospher neither more nor less than the very elements that had been ealier skimmed away.  The result of this struggle brings about the kind of corrosion we call rust.  I thought it’s as though the steel has a memory and wants to go home.  I said, “This is the most poetic thing I’ve ever heard of.”  The next day I drove to a steel supplier in Brooklyn and brought back two plates of hot-rolled carbon steel.  I leaned one against a wall and lay the other flat on the floor.  I poured on it a couple of ounce s of tap water and watched.  The dark blue surface begain to blister with the familiar off-red before my eyes.  Within a few days I wrote a recipe so that anyone could repeat the operation:  Set a rectangular piece of hot-rolled carbon steel level on a floor.  Pour on it a measure of tap water so that the resulting pond holds its position short of overflow.  Each time the water evaporates, repeat.  I titled it Sink, for the verb, since the surface would be eaten away over the years.”

-William Anastasi from an interview he conducted with himself for Art on Paper magazine, May 10, 2007.