Episode 21: George Quasha, Tuesday, March 9th, 2021
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George Quasha, artist, poet and musician
Quasha works across mediums to explore principles in common within language, sculpture, drawing, video, sound, installation, and performance.
His axial stones, delicately balanced sculptures of 2-3 stones positioned one upon another at the most precarious point discovered. "Axial" refers to the invisible axis that comes into focus at the moment of precarious balance.
Quasha has also created axial drawings, made with 2 hands simultaneously; axial drumming/music, non-metrical pulsation-based rhythm arising from interaction of instruments, sounds, surfaces; and axial poems, discovering points of charged variability in actual language use and bringing about a self-actualizing process.
His video installation art is: Speaking Portraits, includes multiple volumes (art is,music is,poetry is, he has recorded over 800 artists, poets, and composers (in 11 countries and 21 languages).
His recently emerging 5-vol. work of preverbs extends this principle (axial/liminal/configurative) in discrete acts of language called preverbs.
"A preverb, in this special usage, as distinguished from proverb, is a saying in a state of language that stands previous to any claim on wisdom... It contains a certain wild, which here aims to preserve the rich complexity and uncertainty of the impulse to state truth and to protect the mind against oversimplified interpretation."
In 2006 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in video art. Other awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry. He has taught at Stony Brook University (SUNY), Bard College, New School University (Graduate Anthropology Department), and Naropa University.
With Susan Quasha he is founder/publisher of Barrytown/Station Hill Press.
wiki/George_Quasha; www.quasha.com