George Quasha and John Cage at Baumgartner

As a young artist, George Quasha was liberated by John Cage's esthetic. In celebration of that influence, this exhibition included a selection of Cage's New River Watercolors (1988). With their quiet forms and textures, these are the refined residue of an extended consultation of the I Ching. Quasha's own works are in two mediums: rocks, and graphite on paper. Quasha's rocks are medium-sized and usually flattish. It is the work of an instant to spot a likely rock, but it may take the artist days--or years--to see how two rocks fit together to form a single piece. This fitting follows strict rules: one rock must be balanced on another at a narrow point of contact; no adhesive is permissible, nor may either rock be modified in any way. The results are astonishing.

At first glance, one doesn't quite see what one is looking at. Quasha, it seems, has found a batch of wildly eccentric rocks. Then one realizes what is going on: in each case, two rocks have been joined at precisely the point that turns them into a unity. These are configurations so delicately balanced that the slightest touch would topple them. The title of this series, "Axial Stones," draws attention to the axis around which each configuration 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 Quasha's "Axial Stones" are different: clear and for the moment stable, but charged with an air of contingency. Uninterested in the sort of axis that establishes solidity, he finds ones that look alive with precariousness.

To produce the "Axial Drawings," as he calls his works on paper, Quasha uses a graphite stick. First he lays down a dense and concentrated line. Then, as he drags the edge of the stick over the surface in quick, curving motions, he induces this line to expand into elegant swirls of translucent gray. Hovering at the midpoint of a paper sheet, each of these bursts of gestural energy looks as if it might vanish as quickly as it came into being. Nonetheless, the basic line from which the image evolved--and around which all its complexities revolve--provides a clarifying anchor. In their two-dimensional way, the best of these drawings bring the certainties of a stable axis into delicately felt balance with idiosyncratic forms. This is what the "Axial Stones" do, as well, though the balance of the stones is literally precarious and that of the graphite forms is not. They only look as fleeting as the gestures that produced them.

For Quasha, an axis is like an intention: a force that, as it generates possibilities, gives them a contingent 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.

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