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front page News Recent Exhibitions

Dead Lecturer/distant relative:
Notes from the Woodshed, 1950-1980

Dead Lecturer/distant relative: Notes from the Woodshed, 1950-1980
 
Exhibition at the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery

Lenfest Center for the Arts, Columbia University
615 West 129th Street
New York, NY 10027

Through Oct 1, 2022
 
Arakawa’s paintings, Who is it? No. 2 (1970) and “No!” says THE SIGNIFIED NO. 2 (1973), are now on view as part of the group exhibition curated by Genji Amino, Dead Lecturer/distant relative: Notes from the Woodshed, 1950–1980, at the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University. The exhibition focuses on works by Asian American and African American artists whose approaches to abstraction provided alternatives to prevailing vocabularies for representation and resistance during the social movements of the 1960s and 70s, and for whom the parameters of visibility continue to remain a problem for thought today.

Image: Arakawa, “No!” says THE SIGNIFIED NO. 2, 1973. Acrylic, oil on canvas, styrofoam.
Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; gift of Mr. and Mrs. Miles Q. Fiterman, 1991

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Events front page News Recent Exhibitions

ARAKAWA: Waiting Voices at Gagosian Gallery in Basel

The exhibition ARAKAWA: Waiting Voices at Gagosian Gallery in Basel will be opening on November 25th, 2021. It will be on view through January 22, 2022.

The exhibition features Arakawa’s paintings and drawings produced between 1964 and 1984, the twenty-year span that saw him experimenting with diagrammatic motifs, language, texture, and space that ultimately led the artist, together with Madeline Gins, to the field of architecture. For further information, please visit the Gagosian website.

In conjunction with the exhibition, the Reversible Destiny Foundation will host a virtual lecture by Dr. Ignacio Adriasola, live from Basel on December 9th, 11 AM EST. Focusing on works featured in the exhibition, his talk will address major developments in Arakawa’s practice through the mid-1980s. This program is approximately 1 hour in length, including Q&A at the end. Click here to register in advance! 

Lecture Précis:

The white on off-white ground of an immense canvas stretches before us, like sand on a beach. Overlapping layers of acrylic varnish divide its surface creating a subtly dark imprint. Thin graphite lines stretch and direct our gaze across the canvas, indicating the shortest distance possible between enigmatic figures and words. Objects leave their mark, like shadows. As we step away from the canvas, we begin to discern a secret geometry: waiting voices, captured right at the moment before thought finds form.

Arakawa’s canvases speak a language that is at once simple, yet hard to understand. It is impossible to access them without poetry: one finds drawn images and words that never meet; instructions that can’t be fulfilled; invitations that remain unopened. Someone’s voice emerges within, everywhere and nowhere at once. The voice traps us in descriptions pointing to non-existing things: “This rectangle is a photograph of this entire painting,” one work claims, but, of course, there is no photograph in the canvas. Another entices us to imagine implausible qualities and actions, such as “sizeless,” “hypostatize,” “to cleave.” The works describe, direct, admonish, and tease the viewer. And like all good teases they are at once sensual and metaphysical, comical and dead-serious.

If painting is traditionally imagined to belong and reflect the constituted world, Arakawa inverts that relationship. This is because, as Duchamp once noted of Arakawa’s diagrams—and Madeline Gins constantly reminded us since—these are not paintings. Where did these post-paintings come from? How do they operate? Focusing on works featured in this exhibition, my talk will address major developments in Arakawa’s practice through the mid-1980s. I will situate Arakawa in relation to the reception and theorization of surrealist practices in Japan, and I will trace the shift his work took since his emigration to New York, and the beginning of his life-long collaboration with his partner, the critic and poet Madeline Gins.

In brief: the post-paintings emerge as a means first of examining the world of objects in their state as a yet-unformed possibility. Madeline Gins noted that the diagrams model, but are not just models. Arakawa found in them a method for examining potentiality, by indexing with a secret geometry a place somewhere beyond existence. Arakawa’s work sparked important critical debates on the nature of the image (Nakahara Yūsuke and Nicolas Calas), of absence and presence (Miyakawa Atsushi and Jean-François Lyotard), and on art’s capability as a “thinking field” (Gins), opening up a line of investigation that eventually led him to the body as the place where possibility resides.

Lecturer:

Dr. Ignacio Adriasola teaches in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on experimental art and culture in postwar Japan. His book Fragment, Image, and Absence in 1960s Japan is forthcoming from PSU Press (Fall 2022).

Top Image: Arakawa, Waiting Voices, 1976–77,
acrylic, graphite, marker, and varnish on canvas and linen (in 2 parts), 70 x 96 in. Photo by Robert McKeever

Bottom Image: Dr. Ignacio Adriasola at the Reversible Destiny Lofts—Mitaka (In Memory of Helen Keller), Tokyo, 2017.
Photo by Takeyoshi Matsuda

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Newsletter

Ambiguous Zones, 5

Dear Friends,

This fifth issue of Ambiguous Zones arrives partway into the holiday season. Like last year, the final few weeks of 2021 may not feel quite the same as previous years, but that is all the more reason to focus on spending time with loved ones, whether in person or online. The RDF archive has no shortage of photographic evidence that Madeline and Arakawa did just that year round. Regardless of how your celebrations shape up this year, we hope these photographs of Madeline and Arakawa dining with friends and family get you into the festive spirit!

We also hope you will join us virtually for Dr. Ignacio Adriasola’s lecture and tour of the exhibition ARAKAWA: Waiting Voices, live from Gagosian Gallery in Basel on December 9th at 11am EST (click here to register in advance). 

In the meantime, we are sending warm wishes for a lovely December!

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

Arakawa and Madeline drink coffee and eat pie inside after their meal outside, ca. 1977.
Madeline calls across the table to a guest at a dinner party at 124 W Houston St.
Arakawa laughs at a dinner with friends at 124 W Houston St.
Arakawa and Madeline eat with a friend at a reception.
Hotpot dinner with friends. Madeline with James Rossant (1928–2009; architect, artist) and another friend, ca. 1978.
Arakawa and Madeline gathered around the table with friends, 1977.
Arakawa and Madeline, post-dinner chat, with fruit and vegetables in a bowl, at 124 W Houston St.
Arakawa, mid-bite
Arakawa, Madeline, friends, and a delicious meal
Madeline and Arakawa relax over what appears to be breakfast.
Arakawa and Madeline at the cabin in Croton-on-Hudson, Westchester County, NY, enjoying what looks like an enticing Autumnal drink
Arakawa or Madeline enjoying a meal at a counter seat of a Japanese restaurant
Arakawa and Madeline with a group of friends, including Yoshiaki Tōno (1930–2005; art critic; on the right at the back), at a restaurant in New York, August 1978
Arakawa celebrates with friends and champagne.
Madeline and Arakawa share dinner at 124 W Houston St. with Colette Rossant (b. 1932; food critic; on the left, foreground), her husband James Rossant (on the left at the back), and their children (on the right).

Top image: Thanksgiving in July, or a heatwave or somewhere warm in November? Madeline Gins, Arakawa, and Madeline’s parents, Evelyn Gins, and Milton Gins enjoy turkey (or duck?)
in the great outdoors, ca. 1977.

Categories
front page Recent Exhibitions

Multiples, Inc.: 1965–1992

Arakawa, Landscape (mistake), 1970

Arakawa’s prints from the late 1960s to the 1970s and published by Multiples, Inc. are now on view at this historical exhibition Multiples, Inc.: 1965–1992 curated by Dieter Schwarz at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York. Founded in 1965 in New York by Marian Goodman, Multiples, Inc. published seminal editions with some of the most important artists of the 20th century over a period of almost three decades between 1966 and 1992. The exhibition gathers for the first time a selection of over 150 editions published by Multiples, Inc. in collaboration with over 70 artists.

 

Multiples, Inc.: 1965–1992

Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

Jan 12 – Feb 27, 2021

 

For more information, visit https://www.mariangoodman.com/exhibitions/multiples-new-york/ for the press release, the list of works, and to explore their online viewing room.

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/

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Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery, 1959–1971

The first major exhibition to explore the storied history of the groundbreaking mid-20th-century Dwan Gallery will premiere at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, from September 30, 2016, through January 29, 2017. Honoring Virginia Dwan’s gift from her extraordinary personal collection to the National Gallery of Art, Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery, 1959–1971 will be on view in Concourse galleries of the newly renovated East Building. The exhibition traces Dwan’s remarkable career as a gallerist and patron through some 100 works drawn from her collection as well as from museums and private collections. The exhibition includes Arakawa’s Untitled, “Stolen”, 1969, collection of Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford.

Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery, 1959–1971 was organized by the National Gallery of Art. The exhibition travels to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where it will be on view from March 19 through September 10, 2017.

 

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