I Don't Understand Language [II] on Vimeo by George Quasha

"I Don’t Understand Language" [II] (2009) (6 min. 21. sec) with performers David Arner, Alan Baer, John Beaulieu, Jenny Fox, Jan Harrison, Alana Siegel, Charles Stein, and Sherry Williams, created for the occasion of “Talking Tongues and Other Organs,” a performance in Woodstock, New York, at the Kleinert Gallery, February 26th, 2009. The apparent nonsense of the statement uttered by eight adults (artists, poets, musicians, and an architect) is played out in various states of expression, performative of its own liminality between serious claim and absurdity—a sort of agonizing play as self-fulfilling prophecy. It holds us at the threshold between understanding language and the impossibility of language. Many voices saying what even one voice can’t entirely say. The words become a voiced site of physical interaction around a charged axis, belonging to all as much as any one, and therefore none. Trans-comprehensible language momentarily passing through, and possessing, eight people.

 

 

Watch this video on Vimeo. Video created by George Quasha.

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