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foreword
Gathered into one another’s company, George Quasha’s Axial Stones establish a zone of riveting stillness. Yet each was brought to that shared state by a history—a tempo of events—entirely its own. It is the work of an instant to spot a likely stone, but it may take the artist days or years to see how two stones fit together to form a single piece. The fitting itself can be quick or slow. In any case, the process follows strict rules: one stone must be balanced on another, at a narrow point of contact, and no adhesive is permissible nor may either stone be modified in any way. The results are astonishing.
At first glance, it looks as if Quasha has found a batch of wildly eccentric natural objects. Then one realizes, with a start, what one is seeing. In each case, not one but two objects have been joined at precisely the point that turns them into a unity. These configurations appear to be sturdy. Yet each is so delicately balanced that the slightest touch would topple it. Their collective title, Axial Stones, draws attention to the axes around which all of them must, out of deference to gravity, be organized. Most axes—the axis of the earth, for example, or the crossed axes of a Beaux Arts building—are not only clear but stable and, we hope, permanent. The axes of the Axial Stones are different: clear and for the moment stable but charged with an air of contingency. Uninterested in the sort of axis that enforces solidity, Quasha finds ones that look alive with precariousness. Thus he collaborates in a redefinition of art that was launched by John Cage, his favorite predecessor, and might be understood, in brief, as a dismissal of Plato, who dismissed art as derivative.
In the Republic and elsewhere, Plato argued that painters and sculptors make images of perishable and earthly things that are themselves inadequate images of imperishable models, ideal Forms residing in a heaven beyond the reach of human intellect. Plotinus insisted that art can show us those Ideas, those absolute Realities, and for nearly two millennia artists adapted his faith to their eras. Though transience is the subject of the Impressionist painters, the structures of their pictures are no less stable than those of the Academics who preceded them and the geometric abstractionists—Mondrian and company—who came after them. As crucial as it is to harmonious composition, that stability does not reveal a transcendent order. Yet it is an emblem of the yearning for transcendence, and it remains intelligible. Plotinus still haunts us with ghostly encouragement to believe that art is representation and the best art represents the highest things.
As the middle of the twentieth century approached, John Cage suggested that a work of art need not be a picture of anything. It can be the trace of an action or the action itself. Early in the 1950s, Harold Rosenberg invented the figure of the American Action Painter. Toward the end of the decade, Allan Kaprow proposed that painters set aside their brushes and enter three-dimensional space as instigators of Happenings. This flurry of art-as-activity was stilled for a moment by the sudden, blunt immobility of the Minimalist object. Then several of the Minimalists and many younger artists shifted their attention to the process of making things. Process itself became the focus for them that it had long been for Cage. Process art, performance art, real-time video art—all these and more freed art from its ancient hope of revealing absolutes. To acknowledge action is to flirt with contingency or, in Quasha’s case, to embrace it without reserve. Or it may be that he induces it to embrace him.
To make the Axial Stones, he must use two hands. This is obvious and worth mentioning only in light of the process that results in the Axial Drawings. When he draws, Quasha works with both hands simultaneously. Dragging the edges of his graphite sticks over the paper in quick, curving motions, he produces elegant swirls of translucent gray. Though these images look as if they might vanish as quickly as they came into being, each is anchored by the presiding line that emerges from the pulse of Quasha’s gesture. The Axial Drawings bring the clarity of an axis into delicately felt balance with idiosyncratic forms, as the Axial Stones do in three dimensions. Of course, the balance of the Stones is literally precarious and that of the graphite forms is not. Beyond this difference is everything that the Stones and Drawings have in common: grace, an acceptance of contingency, and the two-handedness of the processes that generate them. Consciously or not, we gather from every work of art an intuition of a bodily state. Ambidextrously improvising, Quasha endows his work with a limber, responsive sense of the body—his body, in particular, and all bodies, not so much in general as in their specific potential.
Quasha’s bodily sense finds its most telling contrast in Leonardo’s image of Vitruvian Man, which aligns the human form with the symmetries of circle and square. Invoking the authority of the Roman architect Vitruvius, Leonardo declared that the proportions of the body are not only compatible with geometric form but reflect the structure of the universe. To make his analogy between micro- and macrocosm as persuasive as he could, he depicted the body front-on with a strictly vertical axis for a backbone. This anatomical symmetry reappears in buildings, in city plans, and in traditionally composed pictures—and elsewhere, too, for we like to project our cosmological notion of the body onto the world around us. It comforts us to see our structure mirrored by our surroundings. Yet we enjoy this comfort at the price of a drastic generalization, for Vitruvian Man is an abstraction: no one in particular.
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. As I noted, it has only been in the past half century or so that artists have given up the transcendental bootstrapping that began with Plotinus. To put it the other way around, they have plunged without reservation into their particular circumstances. Of course, the allure of the universal persists. 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