Born in Japan in 1936, Arakawa has lived as a painter in New York since 1961. The earliest panels of his project, "The Mechanism of Meaning," were begun in 1963, and a group of them was first shown at the Venice Biennale in 1970. New ones are still in progress. Meanwhile, a volume of selected reproduction has just been published, together with additional text and photographs conceived especially for presentation in book form.
Arakawa views the whole undertaking as a form of research and experimentation, a way of integrating information from many unrelated fields of knowledge. He believes there are other uses for art than museums and walls, that art can be used as an investigative tool. It is this attitude, perhaps, which gives to the works their air of being more like intelligence examinations — provocative devices to stimulate problem-solving, or tests in pattern-recognition — than like paintings. Since Arakawa wishes to illustrate thinking, one problem a writer takes in relation to his art, claims Madeline Gins, his wife and collaborators, is "how to explain that the paintings in question are not primarily paintings." Another is "how to give an impression of the subject matter without peremptorily naming it."
Beginning, then, where Wittgenstein left off — with what cannot be said but nevertheless reveals itself — Arakawa sets out to construct models of thought. But without language, according to Saussure, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula resistant to analysis. "The Mechanism of Meaning" takes hold of this amorphous mass and gives it form by means of charts, perceptual exercises, pictographic diagrams and stenciled texts, all designed to uncover whatever it is that makes possible the relationship of one thing to another (principles of similarity and homology, for instance, or of divergence and convergence) — the whole mechanical substratum of meaning that is normally hidden from view. The only space to be found in these works is semantic "depth." Arakawa's intention, states Miss Gins, has never been to isolate abstractions arbitrarily, but rather "to give the layout of the field in which they occur."
The canvases shift back and forth between verbal and visual presentations: anything may be added, from a netted basketball to a noose for a cockroach, usually conjoined with some prankish text that reads like a page from the "Journal of Irreproducible Results." That Arakawa intends his paintings as a movement toward meaning doesn't imply, however, that they proceed according to any causal logic. They don't. Sometimes jocular, sometimes metaphysical, often incomprehensible, they teeter on the edge between sense and nonsense. So much is intentionally contradictory that we are left with an ill-defined sense of topological wrongness: "Turn left as you turn right." Arakawa is like the Red Queen in "Alice in Wonderland," who, after a little practice, manages to believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast. Wherever we look, absurd commands materialize, like rungless ladders that cannot be grasped: "Find the limit of error." "Laugh only along your left side."
"The Mechanism of Meaning" is intelligent, witty and seductively elegant. Its outlandish ambition — to make the thought process "mirror" itself — sets it apart from the work of other contemporary artists. For Arakawa, bewilderment is instructive, as in a Zen koan; it leads the mind to enlightenment and keeps us mentally agile. "Make this line more abstract," he orders. In the good old days of classical art, a line was a line; it stuck to its task of describing the contours of objects, or it acted as the horizon. Lines for Arakawa are haggard with self-consciousness: they are much more than a way of getting the measure of things right. They represent the possibility of going off the tracks (or of indicating a new track.) A line may be a crack, a clothesline or a guideline. It may be the run of events, a connection between ambiguous zones or a point of balance sliding rapidly backward and forward. So anyone planning to spend time with this book should have, at the least, a strongly developed taste for the preposterous, a good magnifying glass and a desire to hear the sound of one hand clapping.
Suzi Gablik is the author of "Magritte" and "Progress in Art."