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preverbs installation

The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, 2007

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George Quasha: “art is” and Axial works in stone, graphite, and video
June 23 – October 7, 2007
Sara Bedrick Gallery, SDMA
Curator: Brian Wallace

The “Preverbs” installation is now in the collection of SDMA,
SUNY New Paltz

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DEFINITION

A preverb is a one-line intentional act of language that, in the reading, becomes
a singular event of meaning.

This language artist’s conception of preverb derives originally from William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell [1790]) in which the traditional wisdom proverb (as in the Biblical Proverbs) is turned on its head, as it were, in the interest of breaking convention and reinventing “wisdom” as a non-dogmatic state of visionary perception; it subverts mind-control by originary verbal acts that bring one to one’s senses. (E.g., “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise” or “No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.”)  Preverbs project a state of language awareness previous to wisdom while honoring the wisdom impulse—the wish to state enduring truth. Accordingly a preverb embodies, say, an insight, stating it in alignment with a principle of variable sense and requiring engaged attention in discriminating meaning. This describes an axial principle in language, implying that meaning issues from choice and is impermanent.

Proverbs traditionally are memorable and subject to frequent repetition; preverbs are resistant to memorization and repetition and attract further thinking. (Blake celebrated the Daughters of Inspiration over the Daughters of Memory.)

The principle of installation follows the core preverbial principle of singular acts of meaning.

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INSTALLATION SPECIFICATIONS

Lettering on walls: Previous installations have used vinyl lettering (Slought Foundation, SDMA). Color: charcoal has seemed optimal against white walls. Type: must be all lowercase; size is variable according to space and distance of viewing, and in medium size galleries has worked best as lowercase letters of approximately one inch height. A determining consideration should be maintaining a degree of subtlety that leaves the viewer free to discover (or not), and requiring some alertness on the part of the viewer. The meaning of the work is in part related to the freedom to “read space” in new ways and intensities, and there should be no feeling of coercion.

Placement: Each preverb is to be placed discretely in a unique and anomalous location in the exhibition space, not so much a “picture on the wall” as a manifestation of message emanating from the space itself.  The aim is to create a felt sense of singular languaging that reframes the experience of physical space. There can be no strict method here; it’s an intuitive choice in each case. The artist’s approach is to meditate the space and language together and follow certain cognitive impulses, as much as possible in active dialogue with the curator.

An example from the SDMA exhibition is:

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the trance in between is sudden entrance

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Placement above an “entrance” to a cove (where video work was being shown) emphasized the play “between” the parts (sememes) within the single ordinary wordentrance (as entrance and entrance) and various possible meanings: e.g., that an entranceway is a threshold between different states (such as the liminal zone between ordinary consciousness and trance). Architecture creates separations between the physical embodiments of such states (eating, sleeping, playing, working, etc.), but ordinarily nothing points to the building as an array of thresholds. A gallery or museum is based on the presumption that there are finer, more charged and intense, perhaps even more beneficial states of mind such as art. So, the placement of the preverb might bring out this meaning of space disposition, perhaps suggesting that our attention to unexpected messaging (a somewhat cryptic statement in an anomalous spatial position) is the opportunity for entrance into transformative states.

This approach to placement and understanding is quite site specific in the sense that the preverb was not created with such a location in mind; rather, the specific approach arose in the contemplation of the space.  One could comment on all nine of the SDMA-installed preverbs and placements in such an illustrative fashion, but that might over-determine future installations, particularly if the artist is not present.  The process of installation should involve original discovery based on contemplation of the polysemous potential of a given preverb and should be singular in its final installation.

Lending the work: The Preverbs may be freely lent to galleries and museums where there is a commitment to maintain the principle of installation as described here. Whenever possible the artist should be engaged directly in the installation (or in the approval thereof), but this is not an absolute requirement.

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Preverbs

(axial language installation, 2007)

(The Dorsky Configuration)

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seeing leaves a film

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things on edge disappear the surround

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the trance in between is sudden entrance

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the hand writing on the wall

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writing is reading only more so

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falling things land free

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map a land trapped underhand

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the space takes in as you read

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watch for wobble

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NOTE: A related Preverbs installation was previously part of similar exhibition of axial work, including axial drawings, axial stones, and axial video:

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Zero Point Axis

Slought Foundation, 2007

April 05-May 23, 2007
Slought Foundation
Philadelphia
Curator: Osvaldo Romberg
with Aaron Levy

from the program:

Slought Foundation, a non-profit organization rethinking contemporary art, is pleased to announce “Zero Point Axis,” an exhibition by artist George Quasha featuring “axial stones,” paired stones configured through the artist’s acts of precarious balance (without alteration of stones or the addition of fixing agents). … The exhibition includes as well axial works on paper, axial video, and an installation of axial language (preverbs).

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Axial means awake and aligned right now, happening at zero point,

free in the danger of the moment

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“In this exhibition stones, graphite, and language are doing something different from what people expect of them. The stones stand improbably, carried to the edge or thrown into interdependence, and balancing on a precipice of their own making. And they can seem to be of this very moment, in the viewing, impermanent, revealed as they are, enjoined in a further nature. I call them axial, a word I use somewhat idiosyncratically to draw attention to a certain state of being—free being, or being coming into its natural state as free. The axial is not a thing: not a philosophy; not a religion; not an aesthetic; in short, not itself any of the many ways that can be used to understand it. It’s more like a space, a worked space–an intentional state of awareness in which something unpredicted can occur: a unique event resulting in what seemingly embodies its origin and yet itself is original. At once unchanging and nonrepeating. The axial is what makes these stones what they are as you see them; that is, in the way that they appear and in the process by which you see them. The axial is what presents them thus, at the horizon of their own event. For me, after some years of working with them, to experience the event is to be awake at the horizon.” —GQ

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“A yearning to transcend one’s particular self animates much of Western culture. Or we try to have it both ways, as in Expressionist art, which claims that the way to the universal is through the individual. [...] Only some artists—really, just a few—have followed John Cage to a full acceptance of contingency. Outstanding among them is George Quasha, whose axial art makes it clear that an immersion in the flux of experience is not a submission to happenstance. For Quasha, an axis is like an intention: a force that, as it generates possibilities, gives them a provisional but intelligible order. Every esthetic advances a hope, for truth or clarity or beauty or whatever. Quasha’s esthetic is driven by the hope that possibility will always be open and fresh, never predictable. Thus will our possibilities remain human, thoroughly ours and in no need of transcendental alibis.”

—Carter Ratcliff, Foreword to George Quasha’s Axial Stones: An Art of Precarious Balance (North Atlantic Books, 2006)