Gary Hill, George Quasha & Charles Stein
14.04.2018
Three Ways At Once (I Don’t Understand Language)
With Gary Hill, George Quasha & Charles Stein

Performance + Panel Discussion
Zaterdag / Saturday 14.04.2018, 20:00 uur
5 € entry

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A performance for multiple cameras, microphones, video projection, computers, and other instruments, all manifesting towards ‘glossodelia’. What are glossodelia? To answer this question beyond the literal meaning of the word – ‘revealing tongues’ – Gary Hill, George Quasha, & Charles Stein enter into a state of co-performative inquiry through what they use for language. This includes just about anything that can be generated in real (and hyperreal) time, such as sound, image, word, gesture, and a range of semi-definable electronic phenomena (electronic linguistics). What they make happen through various instruments (psychonautic languaging vehicles) becomes a field of strange attractors (dynamical lingualia) with a pull toward possible language realities (lingualities). They have called it 'a pulsational conversation with stepped-up intensity in which Real Time is invited to show its other side'.

Who understands language anyway?

Gary Hill is often viewed as one of the most important artists of his generation and is known for his unique combination of video, sound, performance and installation. Gary Hill has continuously offered multilayered investigations into the phenomenological nature of how we perceive the world through a network of visual, aural and linguistic signals. Exploring the cognitive and sensorial conditions that underlie our discursive modes of communication, Hill experiments with the material and sonic properties of language to offer provocative meditations upon the production of meaning within our everyday contexts, as well as highly personal poetic spaces. His works are characterized by their experimental rigor, imaginative leaps, and conceptual precision. What differentiates his practice from the solely theory-driven is a visceral necessity that is almost palpable. Since the early 1970s, Hill’s use of video, and by extension electronic media, has occupied a central role in his artistic practice, using the medium as a formal site and structure to both examine and destabilize the power of the image. Concerned with an increasingly homogenized visual culture, Hill disarticulates the primary communicative function of electronic media by playing with sound, speed, sequence and light, to produce not only radical ruptures within our normative processes of perception, but new ways of encountering meaning – whether it be grappling with, accumulating, absorbing or surrendering to it.

George Quasha, poet/artist/musician, explores a 3-term principle (axiality/liminality/configuration) in language, drawing, sculpture, video, sound, and performance. Most recent of some 20 books: in sculpture, Axial Stones: An Art of Precarious Balance (2006, foreword Carter Ratcliff). In poetry, Speaking Animate (preverbs) (2014), Scorned Beauty Comes Up From Behind (preverbs) (2012), Verbal Paradise (preverbs) (2011), and three more of "preverbs" forthcoming this year: The Daimon of the Moment (Talisman House), Glossodelia Attract (Station Hill), and Things Done for Themselves (Marsh Hawk). In art writing: An Art of Limina: Gary Hill’s Works and Writings (2009, with Charles Stein; foreword Lynne Cooke). A 2006 Guggenheim Fellow in video art, his art is: Speaking Portraits, recording over 1000 artists/poets/composers in 11 countries has been exhibited internationally. One-person shows include the Baumgartner Gallery (NYC), The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art (New Paltz), Slought Foundation (Philadelphia), and the Snite Museum of Art (University of Notre Dame). Recipient of an NEA Fellowship in poetry. Co-founder and -publisher of Station Hill Press in Barrytown, New York.

Charles Stein's work comprises a complexly integrated field of poems, prose reflections, translations, drawings, photographs, lectures, conversations, and performances. Born 1944 in New York City, he is the author of thirteen books of poetry including There Where You Do Not Think To Be Thinking: Views From Tornado Island Book 12 (forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil), a new verse translation of The Odyssey (North Atlantic Books), From Mimir’s Head (Station Hill Press), and The Hat Rack Tree (Station Hill Press). Prose writings include a vision of the Eleusinian Mysteries, Persephone Unveiled (North Atlantic Books), a study of poet Charles Olson’s use of Jung, The Secret of the Black Chrysanthemum (Station Hill Press), and with George Quasha An Art of Limina: Gary Hill's Works & Writings (Ediciones Polígrafa). He holds a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Connecticut at Storrs.