Michael Zansky (born 1947, in the Bronx, New York) is an American artist working in installation art, sculpture, painting and photography.
Zansky’s work goes beyond this dichotomy in directions pointed in the art discourse by such seminal proto-post-Modernists as Robert Smithson and Joseph Beuys.
Bradley Rubenstein wrote in ARCO Madrid 2005 catalog when describing Zansky's lens installation The American Panopticon: “Astolphe de Custine, writing about the late 19th century Czarist Russia, said “we are all tormented with a desire to know a world which appears to us a dungeon.
One is reminded of Duchamp’s Precision Optic experiments… image making machines to demonstrate the idiocy of “retinal art.” Zansky takes it a step further by creating the device, and then focusing on objects reflective of life in the 21st century.
Again Duchamp reminds; the only contributions America makes to culture are her bridges and plumbing.” [3] In his most recent series, The Western Lands, Zansky uses digital, color photography as an end product.