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Distraction Series, 7

Dear Friends,

In 1968, Arakawa produced a number of works that took his use of stenciled and written language in a more playful direction than we saw in the paintings included in documenta 4. In canvas and print form, he reproduced recipes for lamb stew, fried pork with sweet-sour sauce, banana cake, and coconut milk cake. These recipes were, in a sense, readymades, found in one or more cookbooks that Arakawa and Madeline had on their shelf. They all follow a similar formula: Arakawa copied a page onto the surface of each work and then diagrammed the ingredients.

For Distraction Series 7, we present you with our playful response to Sky No. 2, 1968, which involved baking the Coconut Milk Cake recipe as it is written in cursive over the surface of the canvas, up until we are left hanging with this final sentence: “To serve, fill between the layers with:”. This incomplete direction seems to demand that the viewer fill the layers by filling in the blank. They may immediately look to the diagram at the bottom to see if that offers any hint. When it does not, they must search within their own frame of reference for coconut cake to complete the recipe rather than be left with the image of two, completely bare, single-layer cakes.

While this painting introduces language as a readymade, it also brings us away from our visual sense to a certain extent. We might picture what the completed cake would look like, and certainly had to when we turned to baking it, but, more importantly, the painting makes palpable the cake’s sweet taste, the scent of freshly grated coconut and the aroma wafting from the oven as the cake bakes, and finally the texture of the light and airy crumb and the creaminess of whatever the viewer’s brain has sandwiched between the layers and perhaps over the cake’s entirety. Another work in the series is entitled “Recipe (taste it)”, which we could take as a literal direction.

Sky No. 2, 1968, does not ask you to bake an actual cake; your mind has already produced a vivid replica, but the diagrammed ingredients at the bottom of the canvas provide the perfect mise en place to get any would-be bakers started. As in earlier paintings, Arakawa has placed these word-objects in space, and in our mind’s eye we might find ourselves standing before a kitchen table or countertop (though in real life, we would be missing the baking powder, which would keep the cake from reaching the “sky” of the title.) This is perhaps the writer’s subjective response to the painting, and in this case by someone who loves to bake and has indeed had coconut cake before. The title made it easier to conjure up images of whipped, fluffy egg whites and airy sky-high cakes; yet this created some cognitive dissonance when contrasted to the first Sky painting (Sky, 1968), which included a recipe for lamb stew.

Every person viewing any work of art will have their own individual response or interpretation.  In terms of taking viewer participation to the next level, we thought a fun, easy way to demonstrate this subjectivity would be to have at least two people make this recipe and see how their cakes differ. Please scroll down for more images of our cakes, and if you try this recipe, share your results on Instagram and tag us @reversibledestinyfoundation!

Yours in the reversible destiny mode,
Reversible Destiny Foundation and ARAKAWA+GINS Tokyo Office

Arakawa, Sky No.2, 1968, acrylic and oil on canvas, 48 x 36 in
Coconut cake with buttercream by Kathryn
Coconut cake with lemon curd and Italian meringue by Amara
Categories
Events

Neon Dance: Puzzle Creature Island Encounter

Reversible Destiny Foundation is excited to announce “Puzzle Creature Island Encounter” by Neon Dance at the Setouchi Triennale 2019, an international contemporary arts festival held every three years across 12 ‘art islands’ in Japan. “Puzzle Creature” draws on the life and work of Arakawa and Madeline Gins and will be designed to be presented in both traditional and nontraditional performance spaces.

Click here for more information

 

“In 2018, a premiere was performed at Echigo-Tsumari Kamigo Clove Theater and caused a sensation in Europe. And this time, this work is upgraded for the Setouchi Triennale. Inspired by the artist Shusaku Arakawa + Madeline Gins’s world, in particular, the final chapter of the Gins’s work “Helen Keller or Arakawa”, “Critical Beach”, dancers crosses time, space and multiple horizons freely.”

 

Event Information

Location: Kou Beach, Teshima Island

Date: 09.28/SAT , 09.29/SUN

Hours: 14:00~15:00(Open 13:30)

Admission:
Advanced ticket: ¥2,000
At-door ticket: ¥2,500
Setouchi Triennale Passport holder: ¥2,300
Elementary school to high school students:¥1,000(Both advance ticket and today’s ticket)

Online Ticket:
eplus:https://eplus.jp/sf/detail/3082330001-P0030001
peatix:https://setouchi2019event-e06.peatix.com

Contact:
Setouchi Triennale Information Center
087-813-2244
info@setouchi-artfest.jp
https://setouchi-artfest.jp/event/detail373.html

Categories
Recent Exhibitions

life and limbs

Opening Reception: September 24, 6-8PM

Location: 38 St Marks Pl, New York, NY 10003

 

life and limbs is the fourth exhibition in Swiss Institute’s Architecture and Design Series, curated by Austrian artist Anna-Sophie Berger. Considering corporeality as a primary concern for design, Berger here assembles a group of works that register the body as a habitat that can be imaginatively stretched, altered, modified, adorned, replicated or destroyed. Including works from a variety of disciplines, movements and periods,

The exhibition includes works by Arakawa and Madeline Gins, among other practitioners from a variety of disciplines, movements and periods.

Each work in the exhibition troubles the limits of what a body can consume, process, reach and become, from the metamorphosis that comes from wearing a garment to complete transfigurations into surreal, new beings.

 

For more information please visit: swissinstitute.net

Categories
Events

For Example

One of two experimental films directed by Arakawa, For Example (A Critique of Never), 1971, closely follows its protagonist, a homeless boy, as he wanders the streets of downtown New York City. Shot in a documentary style, the camera observes every step of his examination of the constantly shifting relationship between his body and its surroundings. At the time of production, Arakawa and Madeline Gins were deeply engaged in research on the workings of the mind and the body in the process of perceiving the world. The film premiered at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1972.

The screening will be followed by a talk and Q&A with Andrew Lampert, an artist, archivist, and frequent writer on art and cinema. He will illuminate Arakawa’s film from the context of the late 1960s – 1970s experimental film scene.    

 

Sunday April 14, 4pm


Location:

Emily Harvey Foundation
537 Broadway, 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10002

 

(Image: Clip from For Example (A Critique of Never), directed by Arakawa, 1971, 90 minutes, black and white 16mm film)

Categories
Events News

Testing the Limits: Arakawa X Isamu Noguchi

With their expansively imaginative works, New York-based artists of Japanese descent Arakawa (1936–2010) and Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) both pushed artistic, conceptual, and ideological limits throughout their lives—from the line between art and design to the borders within cultural identities. This program invites Brett Littman, Director of the Isamu Noguchi Museum and Garden, in conversation with Miwako Tezuka, Consulting Curator of Arakawa and Madeline Gins’ Reversible Destiny Foundation, to discuss these artists’ kinship in genre-defying interests and activities.

 

 

Sunday March 17, 2pm

The Woods Room at Christie’s New York
20 Rockefeller Plaza
New York, NY 10007

Free of charge

 

Testing the limits of any one medium is a good way of going about testing the limits of the universe. 

— Arakawa (ca. 1988)

 

 

Speaker Biographies:

Brett Littman has been the Director of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum in Long Island City, New York since May 2018. He was the Executive Director of The Drawing Center from 2007–2018; the Deputy Director of MoMA PS1 from 2003–2007; the Co-Director of Dieu Donné Papermill from 2001–2003 and the Associate Director of Urban Glass from 1996–2001. His interests are multi-disciplinary and he has overseen more than seventy-five exhibitions and personally curated more than 20 exhibitions over the last decade dealing with visual art, outsider art, craft, design, architecture, poetry, music, science, and literature. Littman is an art critic and lecturer, an active essayist for museum and gallery catalogues and has written articles on a wide range of US and international art, fashion, and design magazines.

Miwako Tezuka has been the Consulting Curator of the Reversible Destiny Foundation since 2015. Formerly, she was the Gallery Director of Japan Society in New York (2012–15) and the Curator of Contemporary Art at Asia Society Museum in New York (2005–12). She has curated numerous exhibitions, including: Maya Lin: A River Is a Drawing (2018); LOVE Long: Robert Indiana and Asia (2018); Garden of Unearthly Delights: Works by Ikeda, Tenmyouya & teamLab (2014); Rebirth: Recent Work by Mariko Mori (2013); Yoshitomo Nara: Nobody’s Fool (2010); Yang Fudong: Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest (2009). She is also the Co-Director of PoNJA-GenKon, a global online network of scholars and curators in the field of post-1945 Japanese art. She holds a PhD in post-1945 Japanese art history from Columbia University.

Categories
Recent Exhibitions

Diagrams for the Imagination

Arakawa, That in Which No.2, 1974-75. Acrylic, graphite, and marker on canvas, 65 x 102 inches

Gagosian Gallery will present Diagrams for the Imagination, an exhibition of works by Arakawa, made between 1965 and 1984.

The exhibition will be on view from March 5 – April 13, 2019

Opening reception: Tuesday, March 5, 6–8pm

Gagosian Gallery
980 Madison Avenue
New York, ny 10075
 

Tel. +1 212 744 2313 
newyork@gagosian.com
Hours: Monday–Saturday 10–6

 

What I want to paint is the condition that precedes the moment in which the imagination goes to work and produces mental representations. —Arakawa 

Born in Japan in 1936, Arakawa was one of the founding members of the Japanese avant-garde collective Neo Dadaism Organizers, describing himself as an “eternal outsider” and an “abstractionist of the distant future.” In 1961, he moved from Tokyo to New York. By the mid-1960s, his work had taken a pivotal turn with the “diagram paintings,” which combine words with highly schematic images suggestive of blueprints. He began exhibiting at Dwan Gallery in Los Angeles and New York, and was included in the now legendary 1967 exhibition Language to be looked at and/ or things to be read. Over the decades that followed, Arakawa explored the workings of human consciousness, diagrammatic representation, and epistemology.

This exhibition examines the period during which Arakawa worked in two dimensions, using paint, ink, graphite, and assemblage on canvas and paper to demonstrate what critic Lawrence Alloway called “the logic of meaning, the texture of meaning.” From the mid-1960s onward, Arakawa began to augment the simple topography of his diagrams with additional referents, sometimes engaging other sensory faculty or using prompts and instructions to make the viewing of painting into an active endeavor. In A Couple No. 2 (1966­–67), the bird’s-eye view of a bedroom is mapped out: bed, table, pillow, head, foot, lamp. The image shows only the places where the corresponding physical elements would be, had “a couple” been literally depicted. In this way, the painting becomes a catalyst for the viewer to independently construct an image of a couple in the mind’s eye, rather than receive its depiction directly from the painting.

Blank Lines or Topological Bathing (1980–81) comprises four canvases: a color chart; a vision test chart; and two patterned, off-white canvases, one of which is stenciled with the words “THE PERCEIVING OF ONESELF AS BLANK.” Signs and diagrammatic shapes such as cylinders, arrows, and concentric circles mingle with words and phrases, abstract and semiological signals coming together on the canvas. Arakawa constructed these systems of words and signs to both highlight and investigate the mechanics of human perception and knowledge. Working often with Madeline Gins, his wife and collaborator, Arakawa turned his attention primarily to architecture after 1990, and, in 2010, he and Gins founded the Reversible Destiny Foundation. In his work, the image is often merely a stimulus, as the ultimate act of representation is displaced from the canvas, or object, to the imagination of the viewer, opening up a gap between the eye and the mind. As Arakawa has stated, “Understanding is usually beside the point.”

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, with an essay by Charles W. Haxthausen.

 

For more information please visit: https://gagosian.com/

Categories
Events Recent Exhibitions

Arakawa and Madeline Gins: Eternal Gradient

It is our great pleasure to inform you that the exhibition Eternal Gradient is travelling to Graham Foundation in Chicago. There will be public programs during the exhibition period.

Exhibition on view from February 7 – May 4, 2019

Opening Reception: February 7, 2019, 5:30 – 8:00PM (RSVP here)
 

The Graham Foundation
Madlener House
4 West Burton Place, Chicago
 

Programs:
LÉOPOLD LAMBERT: POLITICAL READING OF ARAKAWA+GINS, February 21, 6pm (RSVP here)
CHARLES BERNSTEIN: NEAR/MISS, POETRY READING, April 17, 6pm (RSVP here)


Tracing the emergence of architecture as a wellspring of creativity and theoretical exploration for the artist Arakawa (1936–2010) and poet and philosopher Madeline Gins (1941–2014), this exhibition features over 40 drawings and other archival materials that illuminate a pivotal moment within a practice that spanned nearly five decades of collaboration.

In the early 1960s, Arakawa and Gins began a remarkably original and prolific partnership that encompassed painting, installations, poetry, literature, architecture, urbanism, philosophy, and scientific research. Complementing their independent artistic and literary practices, their collaborative work launched with visual, semiotic, and tactile experiments that questioned the limits and possibilities of human perception and consciousness. During the 1980s—a critical juncture in their careers—this line of inquiry became increasingly spatial as Arakawa and Gins together developed a series of speculative architectural projects that sought to challenge the bodily and psychological experience of users. Through these investigations, the artists began to articulate their concept of “Reversible Destiny,” arguing for the transformative capacity of architecture to empower humans to resist their own deaths. This exhibition uncovers a little-known body of this visionary work that anticipated the artists’ subsequent commitment to architecture and their realization of various “sites of Reversible Destiny,” in Japan and New York between 1994–2013.

Eternal Gradient originated at the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) and is made possible, in part, by the Estate of Madeline Gins and through a partnership with the Reversible Destiny Foundation.

The exhibition was curated by Irene Sunwoo, GSAPP director of exhibitions and curator of the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, with Tiffany Lambert, GSAPP assistant director of exhibitions. The Graham Foundation presentation is organized by Sarah Herda, director, and Ellen Alderman, deputy director of exhibitions and public programs. The exhibition design is by Norman Kelley, a Chicago & New Orleans architecture and design collective founded by Carrie Norman and Thomas Kelley.


For more information please visit: https://grahamfoundation.org/

Categories
Recent Exhibitions

Impossible Architecture

The Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, Japan will present the exhibition, Impossible Architecture, in collaboration with three other museums; Niigata City Art Museum, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, and the National Museum of Art, Osaka. The exhibition will travel through these four public museums in Japan from February 2019 until March 2020, and will be featuring several artworks by Arakawa and Madeline Gins, including a large-scale model of The Process in Question/Bridge of Reversible Destiny, also known as the “Epinal Project”.

This exhibition featuring an array of international unbuilt architectural designs of the 20th century and onward, has the working title “Impossible Architecture.” The word “impossible” in this context does not mean “impossible” simply because of any radical or unreasonable demands of the architectural design, but refers to the restrictive boundaries of each project’s social time and place, and encourages us to revisit and re-examine the possibilities lying at these architectural frontiers. By placing the focus on the impossibility of this architecture, paradoxically their extreme possibilities and rich potentials come to the fore, abundantly fulfilling the very aim of this exhibition.

Through a diverse mix of plans, models, and other related materials, the “Impossible Architecture” exhibition closely analyzes the extraordinarily imaginative projects of some 40 architects and artists, and casts the spotlight on new forms of architecture that have never been seen before.

 

Venues, Dates and Locations:

Museum of Modern Art, Saitama
Dates: February 2 – March 24, 2019

Location:
〒330-0061
9-30-1, Tokiwa, Urawa-ku, Saitama-shi, (in Kita-Urawa Park), Japan
Tel: 048-824-0111

https://www.pref.spec.ed.jp

 

Niigata City Art Museum
Dates: April 13 – July 15, 2019

Location:
〒951-8556 Niigata, Chuo Ward, Nishiohatacho, 5191−9, Japan
Tel: +81-25-223-1622

https://www.ncam.jp

 

Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art
Dates: September 18 – December 8, 2019

Location:
1-1 Hijiyamakoen, Minami Ward, Hiroshima, 732-0815, Japan
Tel: +81-82-264-1121 

https://www.hiroshima-moca.jp

 

The National Museum of Art, Osaka
Dates: January 7 – March 15, 2020

Location: 4-2-55 Nakanoshima, Kita-ku, Osaka, 530-0005, Japan
Tel: +81-6-6447-4680

https://www.nmao.go.jp/en/

 

This exhibition is organized by The Museum of Modern Art, Satama, Niigata City Art Museum, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, The Ntaional Museum of Art, Osaka, The Yomiuri Shimbun and the Japan Association of Art Museums.

Categories
Newsletter Research

Distraction Series, 6: documenta 4

Dear friends,

The subject of Distraction Series 6 is documenta 4, which took place in Kassel, Germany, from June 27th to October 6th, 1968.. Arakawa was invited to participate in this recurring international art exhibition in that year as well as in 1977.

documenta began in 1955 as a way to bring West Germany back into the international art scene and modernist art, which had been labeled ‘degenerate art’ under the Nazi regime, back into Kassel’s local purview. 1968, a pivotal year that saw protests across the globe, marked a serious shift in content for documenta, moving from essentially retrospectives of modernist art to an exhibition of more current artwork, signaled by the slogan, “The Youngest documenta Ever”, although the official title was, “Art is what artists make”. Artistic Director, Arnold Bode, though still largely responsible for the exhibition, stepped down, opting for a more democratic process with many of the final decisions left to a particularly youthful advisory board who selected very recent works. Indeed, much of the art by the 149 featured artists was made that year and at times even specifically for the exhibition. While this was seen as a positive move as it presented a broader concept of art to the audience, criticism was levied at the board for a heavily American roster of supposedly international artists. 51 of the 149 artists were from the United States, earning documenta 4 the nickname “Americana.” From a historical perspective, it is interesting to note that these works did not overtly reflect the political situation unfolding in the United States at the time. These American artists represented pop art, minimal art, color field art, op art, post-painterly abstraction, and, to some degree, conceptual art. Artists from Germany and elsewhere with conceptual and performance-based practices (for example Fluxus and Happenings) were not included, leading to protests at the opening ceremonies. Four German artists led a disturbance action called the “Honey Blind”, in which they poured honey on microphones and furniture and went around hugging and kissing those who were meant to give speeches. Students waving red flags joined in the protest.

While we have not yet found any materials in the RDF archive about what Arakawa and Madeline’s thoughts were on documenta 4 and the civil rights protests in the U.S., we do know that throughout their lives, from Arakawa’s early involvement in the anti-establishment Neo-Dadaism Organizers’ group in Tokyo, to their joint interest in Code Pink, to Madeline’s support of the Occupy Wall Street movement, their work was about the breaking of fixed boundaries, whether mental, physical, or institutional. The six works by Arakawa included in documenta 4 all explore these ideas. See below for more in-depth information about some of these works.

Yours in the reversible destiny mode,
Reversible Destiny Foundation and ARAKAWA+GINS Tokyo Office

Arakawa, Name's Birthday (a couple), 1967, oil on canvas

In Name’s Birthday (a couple), 1967, Arakawa offers a bird’s eye view into the plan of a room with a window on one of the walls. This room is represented in slightly different ways on two canvasses. On the left panel, lines and brackets denote the boundaries of objects that are represented by words and placed within the room. Reminiscent of a blueprint, the objects exist as surfaces rather than volumes. An arrow leads to each word/object from the shadow of a loose knot of string, perhaps a physical demonstration of the interaction between objects as they move through and exist within space. The rope shadow, achieved by spray-painting over an actual rope held against the canvas, is a clear indication of a poly-dimensional space. On the right panel, numbers have replaced the words, as if to stress the language of a blueprint to a greater extent than on the left panel. We also find that the window is open, and light, represented by a dense yellow color-field, fills the cracks and we might imagine it pouring into the room, and down to the bottom space of both canvasses, where it is extracted into its spectral form in a zone separated from the main body of the canvas. The fact that the two panels do not perfectly line up also shows a slight shift in perspective and highlights movement in general, reinforced by the circle at the top of the painting with an arrow indicating motion from right to left, with the object’s path traced in a series of after-images. The label of ‘mistake’ on the right panel brings us back into the canvas’s lived dimension.

Arakawa, Separated Continuums, 1966

In Separated Continuums, 1966, we find words standing in again for the everyday objects they name, this time within a grid and along a line presumably representing a time-space continuum. Rather than any kind of perspective, Arakawa has used the temporal dimension to order our understanding of space. In this case, the numbers along a separate continuum might indicate the difference between our lived and perceived experience, or alternatively the space between the concept or existence of an object and our perception of it.

Arakawa, Unknown Blood, 1965, graphite, ink, and spray paint on paper

Unknown Blood, 1965, is the only drawing by Arakawa included in documenta 4. Here, a picture field has been drawn in over a diagram of an apartment or house. This picture field has been stabbed in the top right corner by a flat painted knife that has two shadows indicating at least two sources of light. The first shadow maintains the shape of object, while the second shadow transforms the knife into the shape of a screw driver. The other three corners of what we might imagine is a canvas or piece of paper have been folded back, revealing space behind the image. The bottom right fold includes a splash of paint that is most likely the unknown blood referred to by the title. The knife has stabbed through the picture and this yellow blood, that looks like a splash of ectoplasm, has dripped down seemingly from another, unknown, dimension located behind the picture plane.

documenta 4, catalog, pp.20-21, Druck + Verlag, GmbH, Kassel, 1968. At right: Arakawa, Untitled, 1964-65, ink, tempera, pencil, marker on canvas

In Untitled, 1964-65, a series of models lead one from another. If we take what we have learned about Arakawa’s language of signs, symbols, and ways of representing space, then we might interpret this work in the following way. The rope or string motif is again present. Perhaps we start there, understanding the strings as objects that are interrelated and moving through time into a specific fold of gridded dimensional space as we saw in Separated Continuums, 1966. What we might call a prism at the left, give off light of different colors that also move into the fold, as indicated by an arrow. This canvas does not offer up a clear point of reference through which the viewer might be able to enter or engage with a created space or reality, but it does stimulate the intellect, ensuring that the viewer is reading and thinking and not just looking. 

documenta 4, catalog, pp.20-21, Druck + Verlag, GmbH, Kassel, 1968. At left: Arakawa, Alphabet Skin No.3, 1966-67, oil on canvas. At right: Arakawa, Fifty two, 1966, oil on canvas

Alphabet Skin No.3, 1966-67, and Fifty two, 1966, function in similar ways to Name’s Birthday (a couple), 1967, and Separated Continuums, 1966, but the worlds of numbers and words, while both semiotic, do not collide within these paintings.

Arakawa, Fifty two, 1966, oil on canvas
Categories
Newsletter Research

Distraction Series, 5: a tour of the Reversible Destiny Lofts – MITAKA (In Memory of Helen Keller)

Dear friends,

For Distraction Series 5, our Director, Momoyo Homma, leads us on a tour of the Reversible Destiny Lofts MITAKA – In Memory of Helen Keller, in Tokyo, Japan. We are very grateful to Nobu Yamaoka, the director of the two documentary films presented in Distraction Series 1 and 2, “Children Who Won’t Die” (2010) and “We” (2011), for filming this experience. Follow along as Momoyo guides us from the building entrance up to one of the lofts, where she walks us through how this unique living environment affords ample opportunity to stretch and move the body in new ways. Special guests Yuma and Sono, two of the children who appeared in “Children Who Won’t Die”, speak about their experiences from their time living in one of the lofts. Speculating about what it would be like to live in a Reversible Destiny City, Yuma imagines that there would be no war in the future, an observation that Arakawa himself frequently made. Rokka, a two-year-old who currently lives in one of the lofts, also demonstrates fun ways to use the space.

In addition to this private tour, we want to bring to your attention a 15-minute episode of the NHK World program “Close to ART”, which features the Reversible Destiny Lofts MITAKA. With some background on the history and philosophy of the lofts, including footage of Madeline and Arakawa, this episode provides a great complement to Momoyo’s tour and we highly recommend it: 
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/ondemand/video/3019110/ (available through April 15th, 2021)

We hope to one day welcome you all to the lofts in person! Until then, we remain:

Yours in the reversible destiny mode,
Reversible Destiny Foundation and ARAKAWA+GINS Tokyo Office

Categories
Newsletter Research

Distraction Series, 4: Segue Series Reading at Double Happiness

Dear friends,

With the launch of The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader, edited by Lucy Ives, we wanted to take the opportunity to share with everyone more of Madeline’s poetry and other writings. Some of you may already be aware that a number of audio recordings of Madeline’s public readings and lectures are available on PennSound, a wonderful UPenn project that produces new audio recordings and preserves existing audio archives related to poetry. Thanks to this incredible resource, we can all listen to Madeline read some of her writing aloud, which adds considerably to the experience of engaging with her poetry in particular. 

For Distraction Series 4, we are highlighting Madeline Gins’s Segue Series reading at Double Happiness, NYC, that took place roughly 19 years ago on May 19, 2001. We especially loved this set of readings that beautifully shows Madeline’s profound ability to be serious while maintaining a sense of play. In this selection, she begins with a series of poems on the Krebs Cycle, which she states she “does not want any biochemist to declare as cute,” and intersperses them with poems about eating Spaghetti, seemingly lighthearted but deeply related, and rich with a touch of melancholy and a soupçon of joy. Please immerse yourself and move on to other readings!

Yours in the reversible destiny mode,
Reversible Destiny Foundation and ARAKAWA+GINS Tokyo office

 

Top image: Madeline Gins, 2009, photographed by Maurice Mikkers
Bottom image: Storefront display of What the President will Say and Do!! by Madeline GIns, 1984

Categories
Newsletter Research

Distraction Series, 3: the world premiere performance of Neon Dance’s Puzzle Creature,

Dear friends,

For the third iteration of our Distraction Series, we are pleased to share a full-length recording of the world premiere performance of Neon Dance’s Puzzle Creature, which took place at Kamigo Clove Theatre during the Echigo-Tsumari Triennale, Niigata Prefecture, Japan, on September 15th, 2018. This immersive, multi-disciplinary dance work was inspired by the architecture and philosophy of Arakawa and Madeline Gins. 

Since 2017, London-based group Neon Dance has been studying and exploring the “architectural body”, a concept elaborated by Arakawa and Madeline Gins in their 2002 book of the same name. Research assistance was provided by the ARAKAWA+GINS Tokyo office, Japan, and the Reversible Destiny Foundation, New York. Neon Dance Artistic Director and Choreographer Adrienne Hart’s archival research and site visits to the build works of Arakawa+Gins in both New York and Japan came together in the creation of Puzzle Creature

Three exquisite dance artists drive this 60-minute performance with wearable artefacts created by the award-winning artist Ana Rajcevic forming curious imprints of choreographed action. Puzzle Creature is accompanied by a newly commissioned score for 8 speakers by Oxford based composer Sebastian Reynolds, the work features integrated British and Japanese Sign Language and audio description from Louise Fryer. Organisms that person (you and I) are invited to step inside an inflatable set design by Numen / For Use as the black box theatre is transformed into a unique immersive space shared by both audience and performer. – Neon Dance

Thanks to the generosity of Neon Dance, Puzzle Creature will be available to stream through the end of June, 2020. We hope this enriches your experience of your own “architectural body”!

Yours in the reversible destiny mode,
Reversible Destiny Foundation and ARAKAWA+GINS Tokyo office
 

(image: Neon Dance live at Colston Hall, photographed by Miles Hart)

Categories
Newsletter Research

Distraction Series, 2: We

Dear friends,

In this second installment of our Distraction Series, we are sharing Nobu Yamaoka’s documentary film, WE (2011), featuring Madeline Gins. This film follows Madeline from her studio at 124 West Houston Street to the Bioscleave House in East Hampton, NY, offering another opportunity to spend time with Arakawa+Gins’s reversible destiny architecture. Throughout the film, Madeline provides an intimate look into her extensive, decades-long study of the body, undertaken with Arakawa, as we watch a family explore, navigate, and react to the challenging terrain of Bioscleave House. Thanks to the director’s generosity, this 60 minute film will be available through the end of June, 2020. In case you haven’t had a chance to watch it yet, Children Who Won’t Die (2010) is also available through June via our website.

We hope you enjoy WE (2011) and will be in touch again with another distraction in two weeks’ time! 

Yours in the reversible destiny mode,
Reversible Destiny Foundation and Arakawa+Gins Tokyo office


(Image: Madeline Gins at 124 W Houston Street, New York, 2002)

Categories
Newsletter Research

Distraction Series, 1: Children Who Won’t Die

Dear Friends,

In these uncertain times, strength and solace can be found in belonging to a community and we wanted to take the opportunity to thank you for being a part of ours. At this time, we are all discovering new ways to access and explore art and its potential. As our contribution, the Reversible Destiny Foundation along with ARAKAWA+GINS Tokyo office is pleased to introduce our Distraction Series, a biweekly newsletter with links to a variety of A+G projects.

Today, we are sharing Nobu Yamaoka’s 2010 documentary film, Children Who Won’t Die, which introduces the utopian vision of Arakawa and Gins with a focus on the Reversible Destiny Lofts Mitaka in Tokyo, a culmination of their research into the way the body interacts with the architectural space that surrounds it. With extensive footage of Arakawa speaking about the project, along with first-hand accounts from residents of the Lofts, Children Who Won’t Die offers a look into how the challenging environment of the lofts shifted each person’s experience of daily life, opening up into a more general meditation on life and death. We hope you enjoy it!

Wishing you all the best in the (remote) reversible destiny mode,
Reversible Destiny Foundation and ARAKAWA+GINS Tokyo office

Categories
Programs Recent Exhibitions

The Future Starts Here

Arakawa + Gins is in The Future Starts Here at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, United Kingdom.

The exhibition will highlight “100 Projects shaping the world of tomorrow” – groundbreaking technologies and designs currently in development in studios and laboratories around the world. Visitors will be guided by a series of ethical and speculative questions to connect the subject matter to the choices that we all face in our everyday lives. 

On view May 12 through November 4, 2018.

Victoria & Albert Museum
Cromwell Road, Knightsbridge 
London SW7 2RL
United Kingdom

T. +44 20 7942 2000

For more information please visit the exhibition website

Categories
Programs Recent Exhibitions

Arakawa and Madeline Gins: Eternal Gradient

Drawing for ‘Container of Perceiving’, 1984. © 2018 Estate of Madeline Gins. Reproduced with permission of the Estate of Madeline Gins. Photographed by Nicholas Knight

Columbia GSAPP’s Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery presents an exhibition of architectural drawings, writings, and research by Arakawa and Madeline Gins.

The exhibition Arakawa and Madeline Gins: Eternal Gradient traces the emergence of architecture as a wellspring of creativity and theoretical exploration for the artist Arakawa (1936-2010) and poet and philosopher Madeline Gins (1941-2014). 

In the early 1960s, Arakawa and Madeline Gins began a remarkably original and prolific collaboration that spanned nearly five decades and encompassed painting, installations, poetry, literature, architecture, urbanism, philosophy, and scientific research. Complementing their independent artistic and literary practices, Arakawa and Gins’ creative partnership launched with visual, semiotic, and tactile experiments that questioned the limits and possibilities of human perception and consciousness. During the 1980s—a critical juncture in their careers—this line of inquiry became increasingly spatial as Arakawa and Gins together developed a series of speculative architectural projects that sought to challenge the bodily and psychological experience of users. Through these investigations, the artists began to articulate their concept of reversible destiny, arguing for the transformative capacity of architecture to empower humans to resist their own deaths.

The exhibition examines this pivotal exploratory period through a stunning array of original drawings—many exhibited for the first time—as well as archival material and writings that illuminate the working methods and wide-ranging research interests of Arakawa and Gins. It uncovers a little-known body of visionary work that anticipated the artists’ subsequent commitment to architecture and their realization of various “sites of reversible destiny,” including Ubiquitous Site-Nagi’s Ryoanji (1994, Okayama, Japan); Yoro Park (1995, Gifu, Japan); Reversible Destiny Lofts Mitaka (2005, Tokyo, Japan); and Bioscleave House (2008, East Hampton, New York).

Arakawa and Madeline Gins: Eternal Gradient features over 40 hand drawings, an architectural model, and archival material including ephemera, research materials, poetry, manuscripts, photographs, slides, and other items drawn from the Estate of Madeline Gins.

Arakawa and Madeline Gins: Eternal Gradient is organized by GSAPP Exhibitions. It is made possible in part by the Estate of Madeline Gins, and is organized in partnership with the Reversible Destiny Foundation. 

Curators: Irene Sunwoo, Director of Exhibitions, and Tiffany Lambert, Assistant Director of Exhibitions
Exhibition Design: Norman Kelley (Carrie Norman & Thomas Kelley)

 

Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery
Columbia University 
Buell Hall
1172 Amsterdam Avenue
New York, NY 10027

Opening Reception: Friday, March 30, 6:30 – 8.30pm

Gallery hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 12 – 6pm

For more information please visit: www.arch.columbia.edu

Categories
Programs Recent Exhibitions

Shonky: the Aesthetics of Awkwardness

Artist John Walter curates the new Hayward Touring exhibition Shonky: The Aesthetics of Awkwardness​, ​opening at the MAC in Belfast before embarking on a national tour to Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) and Bury Art Museum and Sculpture Centre. The exhibition aims to explore the nature of visual awkwardness through the work of artists and architects Arakawa and Gins; Cosima von Bonin; Niki de Saint Phalle; Benedict Drew; Justin Favela; Duggie Fields; Louise Fishman; Friedensreich Hundertwasser; Kate Lepper; Andrew Logan; Plastique Fantastique; Jacolby Satterwhite; Tim Spooner ​and John Walter. 

Shonky is a slang term meaning corrupt or bent, shoddy or unreliable, standing here for a particular type of visual aesthetic that is hand-made, deliberately clumsy and lo-fi, against the slick production values of much contemporary art. The exhibition proposes a more celebratory definition of ‘shonkiness’ and showing how it can be used for critical purposes in the visual arts to explore issues including gender, identity, beauty and the body. By drawing together artists and architects whose work has not previously been exhibited together or discussed within the same context, Shonky will allow for new ways of thinking that privilege shonkiness over other aesthetic forms that have dominated recent visual culture. 

In a series of conceptual rooms, Shonky explores this aesthetic across a range of media including paintings, sculpture, video, architecture and performance. These are shown alongside the architectural model and drawings of Inflected Arcade House by experimental architectural duo Arakawa and Gins​, ​who believed that their unusually designed houses with features such as sloping floors, curiously shaped rooms and functionless doors could have life-extending effects on their residents. 

The exhibition is accompanied by a new illustrated catalogue, featuring an essay by John Walter and a contribution by Zoë Strachan & Louise Welsh.

 

Tour details:

The MAC, Belfast, October 20, 2017 – January 14, 2018

Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee, March 10 – May 27, 2018

Bury Art Museum & Sculpture Centre, Bury, June 23 – September 15, 2018

 

For more information:

https://themaclive.com/exhibition/shonky-the-aesthetics-of-awkwardness

Categories
Events Programs

Encounters with Arakawa and Madeline Gins

A half-day conference on the occasion of the opening of the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery exhibition Arakawa and Madeline Gins: Eternal Gradient. The event convenes architects, artists, historians and writers to offer fresh interpretations of Arakawa and Gins’ work and theories in the context of contemporary practices and scholarship.

Time: 1PM

Date: Friday March 30, 2018

Location:
Wood Auditorium
Avery Hall
Columbia University
1172 Amsterdam Avenue
New York, NY 10027

For more information please visit: www.arch.columbia.edu

 

Among the conference participants are:


Amale Andraos, Dean of Columbia GSAPP and co-founder of WORKac;
Adrienne Hart, Artistic Director/Choreographer of Neon Dance (London), who is developing a new dance piece that draws on the life and work of Arakawa and Gins;
Momoyo Homma (Tokyo), Director Arakawa + Gins Tokyo Office (Coordinologist, Inc.);
Lucy Ives (New York), an author who is currently editing a collection of writings by Gins;
Andrés Jaque (Madrid/New York), founder of Office for Political Innovation;
Ed Keller (New York), Assoc Prof of Design Strategies & Director of the Center for Tranformative Media, Parsons The New School for Design;
Thomas Kelley and Carrie Norman (Chicago/New York), founders of architectural and design office Norman Kelley and exhibition designers of Arakawa and Madeline Gins: Eternal Gradient;
Léopold Lambert (Paris), The Funambulist editor and architect, who has written extensively on Arakawa and Gins’ partnership and worked closely with Gins in her later years;
Spyros Papapetros (New York), Associate Professor, History and Theory of Architecture, Princeton University;
Julian Rose (New York), formlessfinder;
Jenna Sutela (Berlin), Visual Artist;
Miwako Tezuka (New York), art historian who is Consulting Curator at Reversible Destiny Foundation/Estate of Madeline Gins;
Troy Conrad Therrien (New York), Curator, Architecture and Digital Initiatives, Guggenheim Museum

 

Organized by Columbia GSAPP Exhibitions.
Free and open to the public.

 

The exhibition Arakawa and Madeline Gins: Eternal Gradient is on view from March 30 – June 16 2018 at Columbia GSAPP’s Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery.

Gallery hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 12 – 6pm

Portrait of Arakawa and Madeline Gins, Office 124 West Houston Street, New York, 2000, photographed by Dimitris Yeros
Categories
Programs Recent Exhibitions

Invisible Cities: Architecture of Line

Study for Blank No.2, 1981. © 2018 Estate of Madeline Gins. Reproduced with permission of the Estate of Madeline Gins. Photograph: Nicholas Knight

Waddington Custot is pleased to present Invisible Cities, curated by Flavia Frigeri. Taking its title from Italo Calvino’s novel, Le città invisibili, this exhibition brings together an international group of artists who, in different ways, explore concepts of the ideal city and discover the necessary coexistence of the real and the imagined. The exhibition includes drawing, painting and sculpture by Giorgio de ChiricoFausto MelottiMaria Helena Vieira da SilvaGegoArakawaGiulio Paolini and Tomás Saraceno.

Calvino’s Le città invisibili, published in 1972, imagines a fictional conversation between the Venetian explorer, Marco Polo, and Kublai Khan, the 13th century ruler of the Mongol Empire. Polo describes a series of wondrous cities which are geographically unspecific, yet imbued with glimpses of reality.

In the exhibition, the closest literal reference to a city is found in the ‘metaphysical’ cityscapes of Giorgio de Chirico (b. 1888, Volos, Greece; d. 1978, Rome, Italy). Calvino described de Chirico’s dream-like setting as a ‘city of the mind’; the steep perspective of an Italianate portico becomes surreal, surrounded by awkward shadows and melancholic skies.

Alternately, the lyrical, metal sculptures of Fausto Melotti (b. 1901, Rovereto, Italy; d. 1986, Milan, Italy) embodied, for Calvino, his most abstract cities. Calvino met Melotti while writing Le città invisibili and Melotti’s sculpture became central to Calvino’s description of his ‘thin city’. The writer saw in these sculptures the stripped back, essential core of modernist architecture. In Calvino’s words, Melotti’s sculptures realised what a utopian city could be: ‘cities on stilts, spider web cities’. The artist was presented with a copy of Invisible Cities, inscribed by the author, ‘For Fausto Melotti, the thin cities and all the others in this book, which [are] also yours….’

In the paintings of Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (b. 1908, Lisbon, Portugal; d. 1992, Paris, France) the physical architecture of the cityscape is splintered. She used ‘floating’ lines to draught architectural skeletons and achieved a profound illusion of space. She noted, ‘I want to paint what is not there as though it existed.’ As Polo recalled cities from memory, so Vieira da Silva’s imagined structures and landscapes were constantly shifting, as distant recollections.

Gego (b. 1912, Hamburg, Germany; d. 1994, Caracas, Venezuela), in a series of Drawings without Paper, ‘liberated’ line from the constraints of two-dimensions. Her drawings describe true volume and space. Gego trained and worked as an architect, but her sculpture went beyond prescribed ideas of structure and the urban to more ethereal and abstract forms, linear environments hanging in space.

Structure described through a reduction to the essential line is central to Calvino’s thought and this exhibition. Of the work of Arakawa (b. 1936, Nagoya, Japan; d. 2010, New York City, USA), Calvino wrote, ‘…lines belong to bundles of lines which may have a common point of departure or else may converge in a point, in which case they create perspectives.’ Maps, floorplans, and diagrams of three- dimensional structures feature prominently in Arakawa’s painting from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s. Then, working with poet and philosopher Madeline Gins, he redirected his energies to ‘reversible destiny architecture’, a term coined by them to describe an idealistic, utopian architecture. Arakawa’s drawings in this exhibition are from his transitional period, when he was beginning to think about the potential of architecture.

Giulio Paolini (b. 1940, Genoa, Italy) and Calvino maintained a close relationship. The two were united by a common interest in the space of the mind and its representation. While Calvino approached it from a narrative perspective Paolini questioned it visually. Their exchange was premised on conceptual grounds and it brought to the fore how space could be envisioned and mapped. In this exhibition the notion of mental space will be explored in connection with the idea of imagined city.

Calvino’s ‘spider web’ city swings over an abyss, tied with ropes to two mountain tops, its precarious situation opposing gravity. Parallels can be drawn with Tomás Saraceno’s (b. 1973, San Miguel de Tucumán, Argentina) prototypes for floating cities. His hanging sculptures, including ‘IC 4970/M+W’ (2016) in the exhibition, are part of his long-term research project, Cloud Cities, which aims to develop a ‘modular and transnational city in the clouds’ that represents a model for sustainable and emancipatory building practices.

Flavia Frigeri is an Art Historian and Curator, currently Teaching Fellow in the History of Art department at University College London. Previously she served as a Curator, International Art (2014–16) and Assistant Curator (2011–14) at Tate Modern, where she worked on exhibitions, acquisitions and permanent collection displays. She co-curated (with Jessica Morgan) The World Goes Pop, a reassessment of pop art from a global perspective. Previous projects include Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs, Paul Klee: Making Visible and Ruins in Reverse. From 2010 to 2011 she was the Solomon R Guggenheim Foundation’s Hilla Rebay International Fellow. She has written widely on: Post-war Italian Art, Pop Art, exhibition histories and contemporary art.


Waddington Custot, 11 Cork Street, London W1S 3LT
Dates: 7 March–4 May 2018
Opening Hours: Monday to Friday, 10am to 6pm Saturday: 10am to 4pm

For more information please visit: www.waddingtoncustot.com

Categories
Programs Recent Exhibitions

Multiple Modernisms

The Chrysler Museum of Art is pleased to announce Multiple Modernisms – an exhibition of modern and contemporary art that features the work by Arakawa, Untitled, 1963 (Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.). 

This reinstallation of the Chrysler Museum’s McKinnon Galleries highlights pieces in the Museum’s permanent collection through an examination of differing narratives about the history of modern and contemporary art. The exhibition shows similar approaches between artists, many who worked simultaneously or successively. It also explores contradictory ideas influenced by politics and socioeconomics. “Multiple Modernisms takes as its thesis that art history is messy. It is not one art practice progressing into another in a clear, straight manner. Instead, artists had different theories about what modern and contemporary was, what art should present to society and what impacts it could have. The exhibition also emphasizes that certain trends in art practice, such as representing the body or abstraction, were repeated in various manners throughout the 20th and 21st centuries,” said Kimberli Gant, Chrysler Museum’s McKinnon Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art.

Multiple Modernisms pairs internationally renowned artists like Jackson Pollock and Georgia O’Keeffe with those of local or regional acclaim like Norfolk artist Vic Pickett. The exhibition also showcases work by female artists, artists of color and artists from other countries. “I wanted this presentation to show the breadth and depth of the Museum’s collection. It was important to show there are alternate narratives to the history of contemporary art because not all artists or genres were or are embraced within the canon. Art history is fluid and constantly being revised. I want to highlight that,” said Gant.

Multiple Modernisms is guided by six themes including Sculpted Figures, The Gesture, Invoking Geometry, Refined Dynamism, Layered Perspectives and (Hyper) Reality. Sculpted Figures features three-dimensional interpretations of the human body. The Gesture presents works that emphasize the artist’s expressive mark on the canvas. In Invoking Geometry, viewers see images of shapes and patterns. Refined Dynamism focuses on works about movement within a restrained color palette, while Layered Perspectives presents artistic interpretations of major events, symbols, mythology and society.  (Hyper) Reality includes works presenting an extreme version of reality. “In organizing the exhibition by themes, viewers will see how artists were influenced by each other, created similar or conflicting perspectives on the same event and experimented with the same techniques or ideas across time and geography,” said Gant.

The modern and contemporary art exhibition opens November 16 at 6 p.m. with a 1960s-themed reception. The opening reception is free for members, $5 for all others.

For more information please visit: www.chrysler.org

Alexander Calder (American, 1898-1976), Totem, ca. 1970. Painted metal Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., 71.784 ©Alexander Calder Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York