From Taos Magazine, Jan/Feb 2008
Little Poems of Outrage
Anthony Hassett’s drawings are unflinching studies of cruelty and compassion.

Anthony Hassett of Santa Fe is an artist/poet who uses his pen to illustrate his passionate responses to the world. An inveterate traveler – he’s visited some 40 countries in the last decade – Hassett has witnessed abject poverty on New Delhi streets and in the favelas of Buenos Aires, felt the hatred of U.S. aggression in Hanoi, Caracas and Beirut. Sitting in cafes or riding on buses, he uses a couple of colored pens to record his responses in hip-pocket journals.

“In my travels I’ve seen amazing oddities,” Hassett says, “amazing and odd from my personal, cultural perspective. How odd life can be – in India you see half a man on a skateboard approach every 15 minutes, begging you for money, people with tongues ripped out, families who do that to a daughter and then put her on the street to beg. I have a satirical mind. I want drawings to be thought-provoking, or my new favorite term, ‘down-lifting. So, no, I’m not an optimist. It doesn’t look good for the human race, based on my observations while traveling.”

A recurrent theme in recent works has been the bizarre role that body parts play in the subsistence of desperately poor people. “. . . what people do to survive, extreme, black-market strategies that involve people’s bodies, which is all they have to use, to barter. In Brazil you see people, transsexuals, who have an added body part. Latin cultures seem to spawn transsexuals, and sex change can provide a way out of poverty.”

In Praise of Cosmetics is one of Hassett’s tamer drawings of the body mutilation theme. With a few lines and fewer colors, he creates a gripping image of an impassive androgynous figure, probably male, who has just rendered himself more female.

Hassett has drawn since childhood. Growing up in southern California in the late 1950s and 60s he was obsessed with the military hardware that was the subject of so much television and comic book fare, “armies, fighter jets, nuclear explosions, pandemonium, slaughter,” he remembers. “I wasn’t attracted to the obviously beautiful.”

Early influences might have been illustrators of the comics he read, men like Marvel Comic’s Jack Kirby who drew such classics as Fantastic four, X-Men and Captain America. “Illustrators like that weren’t regarded as artists,” Hassett says. “I think of my drawings as fairly trivial things, I’ve never considered myself an artist. You have to have a resume of influences to be an artist. You should be profound . . . I’m at the level I’m at. I’m influenced by what’s in front of me.”

Irony figures prominently in much of Hassett’s work, and he finds irony aplenty in the clash between U.S. and fundamentalist Arab values: “There’s the idea among Arab terrorist that when they die, they get 72 virgins or whatever, all these culinary and sexual delights that they’ll receive in Paradise, whereas in this country, the Judeo-Christian consumerist cultures, we expect those things in this life, on earth. And, of course, vice versa, Islamic cultures pursue a kind of aesthetic and spiritual purity on earth that we aspire to in heaven. In Los Angeles recently, all the clubbing, sex, materialism – it made me think of what those terrorists expect in paradise. And yet we ridicule Arabs for wanting in the after-life what our culture pursues in everyday life.”

“I heard a quote from Orrin Hatch who said that capital punishment was a way of recognizing the sanctity of human life!! I’m trying to incorporate that kind of logic into my new drawings.”

In Department of Sanitation, an arrogant, pink, capitalist pig struts in front of stately, ornate Moslem minarets that exude their own brand of authoritarianism. Mois de Blanc, with its scowling, enrobed Arab and equally costumed insouciant cowboy, echoes with commentary on current strife in the Middle East.

“For me, drawing pictures has the same satisfaction as writing small poems,” Hassett concludes. “They are personal observations of the world. As Voltaire said, anything that’s too stupid to be said can be sung. That’s how I feel about illustration. It’s a little song. It’s not classical music.” -- Stephen Parks

“Homelessness Begins at Home: the Travel Journals” will be the first of an occasional series of drawing exhibitions at Parks Gallery. “I’ve always loved drawings,” gallery co- owner Joni Tickel says, “and one just doesn’t see them often enough in Taos. Yet most artists do them, they tend to be affordable, and at their best, like Tony’s, they have great narrative and aesthetic appeal.”