Author: rdfstaff

Distraction Series, 16

Dear Friends,

As a part of a series in which we focus on archival materials revealing “friends of Arakawa and Gins” (tentative title), we are happy to share with you, in Distraction Series 16, a glimpse into the friendship between Arakawa and the animation film director Hayao Miyazaki.

Miyazaki perhaps needs no introduction even to those who are not so keen on animated movies. Just think of the global hits like My Neighbor Totoro (1988) and Spirited Away (2001). However, his friendship with Arakawa is not widely known. They developed kinship after Miyazaki visited the Site of Reversible Destiny—Yoro around late 1997 or early 1998. Thanks to this encounter, they began to appear together in public talk programs and they also frequently visited each other’s office to have private discussions. On many occasions, they became so engaged in their conversation that they both had to cancel their other appointments to continue talking. Seeing them converse with such enthusiasm was like watching two imaginative kids planning their ideal secret fort in their own world.

There is an article from 1998 in a Japanese monthly magazine Gekkan Adovataizingu [Monthly advertising] that captures their passionate dialogue, particularly about architecture:

Miyazaki: Your concept of a city is fascinating. It turns everything about modern architecture on its head. …The moment I saw this plan of yours [Sensorium City, Tokyo Bay], I thought that, if this plan is realized, it will prove that Japan is thinking seriously about the future, towards the 21st century. So, I really want to make it happen.

Arakawa: You are the architect. (laugh) …Creating a landscape and buildings, which people can inhabit. But that in itself is still far away from architecture. “Architecture” is to create new life. You see, in your films, so many things happen. Those happenings create life. In truth, you are already creating life.*

Ultimately, in 2001, Studio Ghibli, Inc. realized Miyazaki’s vision as the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, Tokyo—a place where every visitor can enjoy and experience at their own pace using their whole body and spectrum of senses; in order to be true to this motto, since the museum first opened its doors, admission has been by reservation only.

And four years later, Arakawa, together with Madeline Gins, realized their Reversible Destiny Lofts Mitaka—In Memory of Helen Keller, a visionary architectural work that was a long time in the making. Its core concept is “architecture that prioritizes the body” and is a proposal for “architecture against death.” It is an actual residential building currently being inhabited but is also accessible to visitors through guided tours.

Mitaka, a small corner in the megacity Tokyo, connects Arakawa and Miyazaki through these two buildings that embody their philosophies. It is a curious destiny. Because of their proximity to each other, there is a constant flow of visitors—the general public, scholars, and educators—from all around the world to these two buildings. And the visions and hopes of Arakawa and Miyazaki for the future generations are being transmitted at a ground level.

These two buildings share some unique qualities: a mere look at their exteriors will excite you; then, as soon as you step inside, they will fill you with joy and cause you to smile; and they will energize you. Such seemingly simple changes in our state of being are truly difficult to achieve. What is revived by these changes are the sense of awe toward nature, the childlike sense of wonder, and the awareness that we owe our life to the Earth. The friendship between Arakawa and Miyazaki was formed because they both believed that these are important qualities and changes in our state of being. Today, these changes are most crucial to pursue and to pass on to the future generations.

Mr. Miyazaki continues to create his animations.
We wonder what Arakawa is creating today.

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

[Text by Momoyo Homma]

Special thanks to Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli, Inc.

Top image: Hayao Miyazaki and Arakawa at the Reversible Destiny Lofts Mitaka—In Memory of Helen Keller, photograph by Momoyo Homma, 2005

Follow us on instagram for more content: @reversibledestinyfoundation

Tags Distraction Series, Newsletter

front page Recent Exhibitions

Multiples, Inc.: 1965–1992

Post author By rdfstaff
Post date January 12, 2021
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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.

Tags Arakawa, Exhibition, Marian Goodman Gallery, Prints

Newsletter

Distraction Series, 15

Dear Friends,

For Distraction Series 15 we share with you words from a close friend of Madeline and Arakawa, poet – Don Byrd:

Madeline and Arakawa were the most generous of artists, forever looking for co-conspirators.

I would get phone calls from Madeline. “Hi, are you well enough to talk? How are we not going to not to die?” To Not To Die, as in the title of one of their most important books.

Sometimes I got packages of texts from them. They were signals to expect a call. Sometimes she would put me on hold to talk to Arakawa about what I was saying.

They were in touch with many others. When they wanted to follow an idea, Madeline would call people out of the blue, promise to send their books, and hit them with questions.

We can now see that their collaborative work from the Mechanism of Meaning to the last architectural work is of a piece. It is not an aesthetic or theoretical whole; it is an incomplete and incompletable project, not a work of art but a work of life, inevitably cut short.

Madeline and Arakawa were masters. They filled their vision not with concepts or images but with viable procedures. Their paintings, writings, and buildings require our moving attentions and moving bodies. What the works make possible, not the works themselves, is what is important. The work deals with our tentative and untenable condition. We might fall over.

It is about what is to be done now. “Are you well enough to talk?”

I liked getting the phone calls. They were the real thing. But it was hard to enter the collaboration. They had been together forty years. It required you to think about the hardest things, whilst on your tippy-toes, and the whole Earth trying to knock you over.

After an hour I would be exhausted.

On January 8, 2015, some friends of Madeline’s met at Pascalou restaurant on Madison Avenue in New York to remember the immense energy that she had often loaned us. It was a warm meeting on a cold night, and we decided to meet annually. This year, the year when almost everything is called off, the call to the dinner did not come.

I found myself wondering what Madeline and Arakawa would have said about COVID-19. They would have worn their masks and rigorously observed the distances, probably almost to the point of disappearance. Madeline would have been outraged, Arakawa would have been stoic. Madeline would have been on the phone, as she always was. It would have been consistent for them to say, “Human history is an endless pandemic. Everyone has died.”

How do we pick up from where they left off? There is much to be done. We should remember in the midst of everything, they were playful.

Play Ball!

– Don Byrd

We look forward to the year ahead!

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

front page News Research

Arakawa and Madeline Gins in the 22nd Century: The Body and the Experience in the Reversible Destiny Mode

Post author By rdfstaff
Post date January 4, 2021
No Comments on Arakawa and Madeline Gins in the 22nd Century: The Body and the Experience in the Reversible Destiny Mode

Reversible Destiny Foundation is pleased to announce the new publication Arakawa and Madeline Gins in the 22nd Century: The Body and the Experience in the Reversible Destiny Mode

This book explores the philosophy of Arakawa and Madeline Gins who set out to fight the human destiny of mortality. Ten years after the death of Arakawa (1936–2010) and six years after the death of Madeline Gins (1941–2014), this significant collection of texts rediscovers Arakawa and Gins’s thought, which still continues to inspire and thereby remains in progress.

“Humans don’t die”

Arakawa and Madeline Gins made many unforgettable statements on life and death, and created spaces such as the “Reversible Destiny Lofts Mitaka—In Memory of Helen Keller” and the “Site of Reversible Destiny—Yoro Park”, which rattle our senses and perceptions. In our time of uncertainty, their philosophy paves the way for many discoveries, inspirations, and a heightened awareness and concern for the body.

How did Arakawa and Gins try to overcome the contradiction between not dying and human mortality? This publication provides opportunities to rethink, from multiple perspectives including body theory, philosophy, architecture, art, psychology, education, etc., the philosophical and architectural practices of Arakawa and Gins, not only in retrospect but also as being still in progress. In addition, it introduces recent Arakawa and Gins-related exhibitions, performances, and other projects.

Editors: Mimura, Naohiko and Kadobayashi, Takeshi.

Paperback: 315 pages

Publisher: Film Art, Tokyo, 2019

Language: Japanese

ISBN-10: 4845919176

ISBN-13: 978-4845919178

The book is available for purchase on www.amazon.co.jp

Tags Arakawa and Gins, Kansai University, Naohiko Mimura, Publication, Takeshi Kadobayashi

Newsletter

Distraction Series, 14

Dear Friends,

For Distraction Series 14 we share with you a handful of mail from Arakawa and Madeline Gins’s archives to remind us of the significant role our postal service has in our larger architectural body. Arakawa and Madeline were embedded in a vibrant community of friends from all over the world and their correspondence reveals what a unique and playful relationship they had with many of those around them.

In their book Making Dying Illegal (2006) and Arakawa’s painting Who Is It? No.2 (1970) we see examples of how this intimate letter format is used in their work. As Madeline would say, “Reversible Destiny will be achieved communally or it will not be achieved at all.”

We have selected a small number of letters and cards primarily from the 1960’s and 1970’s to share with you today, including ones from A+G’s friends such as Kate Millett, Ray Johnson, their physical therapist, and a 12-year-old named Martine Rubin. As many of us prepare for the holiday season ahead and begin writing cards to family, friends and loved ones, hopefully something here might inspire you.

Love,
RRRRReversible Destiny Foundation and the ARAKAWA+GINS Tokyo Office

P.S. If you have received any mail from Arakawa and/or Madeline Gins in the past, please do share them with us. We would love to hear from you!

Tags Distraction Series, Newsletter

front page Recent Exhibitions

How to Survive

Arakawa + Gins in group exhibition How to Survive, at the Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany.

Gustav Metzger – Shusaku Arakawa/Madeline Gins – Alina Szapocznikow – Tracey Emin – Valérie Favre – Jean-Pascal Flavien – Elizabeth Jäger – Mike Kelley – An-My Lê – Beatrice Olmedo

On view November 14, 2020 through February 28, 2021.

“Expulsions, disasters and injuries are ruptures in human lives that prompt survivors to question the meaning and nature of survival. Managing to come to terms with this issue is like a creative act, a self-empowerment. The exhibition project will evoke this power of art by presenting three central figures whose work will be shown in depth in combination with individual works by other artists.

Gustav Metzger (1926 – 2017), Shusaku Arakawa (1936 – 2010)/Madeline Gins (1941 – 2014) and Alina Szapocznikow (1926 – 1973) represent three central positions that formulate survival strategies in their artistic work and address existential issues that are particularly urgent today.”

– Carina Plath, curator

For more information please visit:

https://www.sprengel-museum.de/ausstellungen/aktuell/how-to-survive

For Virtual tour please visit:

https://www.sprengel-readymades.de/ausstellungen/how-to-survive/

Tags Architecture, Bioscleave House, Exhibition, Germany, Hannover

Newsletter

Distraction Series, 13

Dear Friends,

Distraction Series 13 brings us to November. In the United States in 2020, this month has started out with the stress of the election in addition to rising numbers of Covid-19 across the country. Madeline Gins’s book What the President Will Say and Do!! (1984) captures this feeling, and moment in time, quite well. In addition to the first essays, which seem eerily prescient of the current events, later in the book Gins brings us a particularly useful text for how to approach or try to maneuver through these times: “How to Breathe”. In order to help us move through November and to celebrate Madeline’s birthday on November 7th, we present a brief discussion of this text. We hope you are all taking good care and we wish you a safe and healthy November.

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

How to Breathe

by Amara Magloughlin

What the President Will Say and Do!! (1984) by Madeline Gins could easily be read as a series of essays written for the present moment. Gins’s short entry on “How to Breathe”, a part of a longer essay entitled “All Men are Sisters”, seems especially poignant when taken as a potential approach to the current socio-political upheaval. This includes the hyper-alert way we are experiencing the physical act of breathing as something essential that now comes with an added sense of danger during an airborne pandemic. As narrator, Gins is instructing her readers on how to best go about breathing against the backdrop of the political primary season before the election in 1984. Gins takes care to advise the reader in the first few sentences not to start breathing until she has explained how to do so properly, lest they “too willingly succumb to the contaminated will engendered by the gay abandon of the societal rot of centuries.” In no less than fifteen steps, she goes on to describe the bodily system of breathing through the mouth or nose and into the lungs using poetic prose, avoiding those banal names for parts of the body. Gins has us focus in on the minutiae of something we do automatically, often without thinking about it, over the next two pages. Possibly without the reader even realizing it, she leads us through something quite common in 2020 – a breathing meditation, in which she eventually begins to question who the subject doing the breathing is. What else is this process of breathing subjected to, Gins asks:

Mother? Money? Memory? Are these fitting [fitted] subjects? Falsehood? Debt? Contradiction? Confession? Honor? Sympathy? To what are these subjected, after all? A subjugation of shapes dominates the impressionism of physiognomy, and what else adheres?

Each breath during inhalation asks a question, perhaps one of the above, and each exhalation provides time and space for an answer, a process Gins suggests starts at birth. We might take in one of the items in Gins’s above list as we hold in our breath, with the option to let some or all of it remain a part of us before releasing it. Gins describes the breath as a “sway”, back and forth or in and out, that now encompasses our dreams. These dreams are “galvanize[d] from within”, by which Gins might mean an electric spark flows through them, igniting them and spurring them on, but by the next sentence they are solidifying into sculptures that they have inspired, perhaps literally. Each breath, then, becomes a dream and a sculpture, in this case if not literally, then as records of sculpture of “ancient origin”, evoking Ovid’s tale of Pygmalion, who breathes life into a statue of his own creation, making Galatea, his dream, come alive. Each breath becomes a “reenactment” of such ancient events, bringing atmosphere in and then pushing it out.

At this point, Gins cautions that the reader is still not ready to breathe. They do not even know yet, for example, that they should take in oxygen, and expel carbon dioxide. Are we able to read this as a metaphor? Before we act, we need to be sure of what precisely it is that we want to keep and make use of from each experience, and what we need to let go. Gins goes into some specific physiological detail at this point: “An 860 square foot surface is to be oxygenated (the path is 1,500 miles long) in less than 1 second” (referring to the lungs, this is a bit alarming to consider if we are thinking of an airborne virus). She asks us to consider carefully whether we can feel this process inside of us or if we think our lungs are useless appendages. We learn here that lungs are asymmetrical, with three lobes on the right and two on the left, for “ghosts too”, and that they can coalesce with other parts of the body in other species. Regardless, lungs are useless unless you use them. They gain “sophistication” and “generate waves” once engaged.

We have not yet taken a breath, if we have followed her instructions carefully, but we now learn that we have been breathing all along, unaware and separated from the experience. In reality, having followed this breathing meditation, we have been preparing ourselves to make a choice: do we remain passive and stay in a relatively painless state, or do we choose to engage, becoming active creators of our own lives?

Breathed. History was. Breathing will be found to be a prerequisite for:

1. Getting a license

2. Finding a job

3. Having children

4. Starting a revolution

5. Being an idiot

6. Laughing

We might rightfully add voting to this list.

The moment to breathe has arrived, but it comes with a warning:

Once you have begun and are breathing, nothing will be the same. You will, however, find yourself gaining weight under this regimen. There will be an accompanying hum which you might find disturbing at first…and a faint, erotic trembling comes with it…one which totally eludes prefiguring (the purest of aporias).

In thinking of our current moment, this weight gain is perhaps the result of being active and engaged in civic life, taking on more worry and responsibility than you would get with just the passive act of taking breath in and out. An anticipatory anxiety appears with no discernible shape that might allow us to puzzle out what comes next. If you are ready for this, Gins suggests it is time to open your mouth and just see what it feels like to let some atmosphere in, but not actually inhaling, maybe practicing by waving it into your ear. Then think of desiring that air, wanting to pull it in with the movement of the diaphragm, up and down. With a slight delay as you grasp that the knowledge of this procedure must be innate within you and is about to happen alongside the first gasp of your earliest ancestor, “[y]ou might breathe now.”

We breathe with Gins for the duration of the next page and she asks us to “determine the instant in which breath first started in [us]” while we were reading her text. We might not have been aware that it was happening, but at some point, if we look back, the text will “appear fogged”, a clear indication that we were indeed breathing. How to move “through” breathing, Gins informs us, is another question best left for the “experts”, but she has now instructed us on “in and out”. She leaves us with a final question: “Never in, one enters, as today, but once put out, how can one ever get back in?” This sentence is a bit curious, since we have just been focusing on breathing in and out in succession. It is true, though, that each breath is composed of a specific sampling of air and is therefore always different from the next. The lungs take it in, use the oxygen, and expel carbon dioxide – something you can never breathe in again. If we take away one thing from this text for our present time, perhaps it should be that each individual moment is unique, and we can choose to either engage or not engage with it, but, regardless, the opportunity will never again present itself in this precise way, except in the larger sense that all time is cyclical. All each moment asks of us is that we breathe it in, let it ask its question, and then consider it and let it go in the time and space of our exhalation. We can choose to feel its weightiness for as long an interval as we wish, but we always release it as we prepare for our subsequent steps with the next breath of fresh air. Hopefully, breathing with Gins has left you inspired.

Tags Distraction Series, Newsletter

Newsletter

Distraction Series, 12

Dear Friends,

In honor of Blindness Awareness Month, Distraction Series 12 focusses on Madeline Gins’s book Helen Keller or Arakawa (1994) and the influence that Helen Keller had on Arakawa and Gins’s architectural practice. While Helen Keller is an extremely well-known figure in both the United States and Japan, Gins’s in-depth meditation on Keller’s thought and experience goes well beyond the usual elementary school focus on Keller’s childhood and tutelage under Annie Sullivan. Gins incorporates direct quotes from Keller along with poetic imaginings of her experience of being both blind and deaf and employs these against a backdrop of Arakawa’s paintings in particular to probe the ways in which we experience the world as well as what it means to inhabit an architectural body.

Her Socialist Smile (2020), a new documentary film on Helen Keller by filmmaker John Gianvito, was available to stream last week as part of the New York Film Festival. With its focus on Helen Keller’s political activism, it highlights Keller as an historical figure who is still very relevant, something Arakawa and Gins felt deeply. From the festival:

“In his new film, Gianvito meditates on a particular moment in early 20th-century history: when Helen Keller began speaking out passionately on behalf of progressive causes. Beginning in 1913, when, at age 32, Keller gave her first public talk before a general audience, Her Socialist Smile is constructed of onscreen text taken from Keller’s speeches, impressionistic images of nature, and newly recorded voiceover by poet Carolyn Forché. The film is a rousing reminder that Keller’s undaunted activism for labor rights, pacifism, and women’s suffrage was philosophically inseparable from her battles for the rights of the disabled.” (https://www.filmlinc.org/nyff2020/films/her-socialist-smile/)

The film is no longer streaming, but we will send a follow-up message once it becomes available to rent.

We hope you enjoy this month’s newsletter and will be in your inbox again on November 6th – the day before Madeline’s birthday – at the end of what is sure to be a very important week.

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

(Top image: Front cover of Madeline Gins’s Heren Kerā matawa Arakawa Shūsaku (Helen Keller or Arakawa). Translated by Momoko Watanabe. Tokyo: Shinshokan, 2010)

On Helen Keller or Arakawa

by Amara Magloughlin

Helen Keller (1880-1968), who became blind and deaf at a very young age, is an extremely well-known figure in the U.S. for her considerable achievements as an activist and advocate on behalf of those with disabilities. Many of us first became acquainted with Keller through a book in elementary school, and, as an adult, Madeline Gins practiced her Japanese by reading an equivalent book included in the Japanese curriculum, writing notes to herself in the margin. Helen Keller was a huge source of inspiration for both Gins and Arakawa, which is especially apparent in their architectural projects. In the mid-1990s, Gins wrote a work of ‘speculative fiction’ entitled Helen Keller or Arakawa (1994).

In this book, Gins weaves together (or ‘cleaves’) quotes and anecdotes from Keller into a narrative that is equally her own and Arakawa’s, one in which Keller’s lack of vision and hearing becomes the ‘blank’ evoked in both Arakawa’s artwork and the pair’s own philosophical praxis. From the very first sentence, Gins communicates to the reader that we are in an experimental world that will follow rules to which we may not be accustomed. In this experiment, she elides the persons of Helen Keller, Arakawa, and herself into an overarching sense of ‘I’ that encompasses these three beings. Throughout the entirety of the book, it is not always clear which of the three is expressing a story or memory at any given moment and this primes the reader to be prepared and more accepting of yet another elision – in this case, between a person and their environment (or ‘surround’ to use Madeline and Arakawa’s term) into an ‘architectural body’, or a ‘puzzle creature’, or an ‘organism that persons’.

Gins makes use of a number of Helen Keller anecdotes that could each be read as a detailed ekphrasis of a painting by Arakawa. This coalescence of thought opens up further avenues of investigation into the philosophy and architectural practice of Gins and Arakawa. Despite the main intent of the book, it has the extra value of offering a very cogent interpretation of Arakawa’s body of work.

A jazz musician, in one story told from Arakawa’s perspective, asked for a portrait of herself and was disappointed with the result. Arakawa had “found” her, and therefore sketched her, in all corners of the room, showing the conceptual beginnings of the architectural body. The room became the frame and everything within was the portrait. This mode of configuring space reminded Arakawa of a blueprint, and in this format, he recognized the way in which his imagination was ordered. For him, it made complete sense to stage or frame identity in this same way. Taken as a ready-made, he saw each blueprint as a “perfect example of the condensed perception of the other.” Diagram of Part of Imagination (1965) is an example of a painting resulting from this line of thought, consisting of a diagram of a living space with each room or area labeled. Dots and lines become loaded symbols that delineate space or situate things within space, but they also embody time and movement across spacetime. At the same time, as the title suggests, what is missing from the canvas is equally present. Part of the imagination is focused on or within this room, but the rest of it is “busy with a great number of other things and events.”

In Talking or Walking (1969) we find dots breaking the body into parts that are then correlated with things found in the environment, further ordering space. The body is clearly in motion as you can see from the specific position of the dots representing arm, forearm, hand, and foot, given their progression, forward in space, from the head. As Gins quotes Karl Marx: “We have sufficiently explained the world, the point is to transform it.” Gins goes so far as to interpret Marx’s ‘point’ as an object, conflating this point with the symbol Arakawa utilized to great effect in his work, and then personifying it as a being named Voluntar. As Voluntar, the dot becomes the “darling of place markers of plasticity, limning character and will.” While Voluntar marks where something is in a given moment, she also represents all potential movements and transformations, which imbues each dot with all the weight of an ‘organism that persons’, as it is always on the verge of initiating any of an infinite number of potential actions. These potentialities can all be understood to be present in Arakawa’s paintings.

From the perspective of Helen Keller, Gins relates a variety of experiences including an anecdote in which rope was used to demarcate an area outdoors, where Keller could then run freely. Gins imagines that Keller must think in diagrammatic terms in order to situate herself in space so that she can move within and between rooms, much like the mapped space of an Arakawa painting. Through another foray into Keller’s lived world, Gins forges a connection between her sense of light – something Keller dreamed of – and Arakawa’s employment of it, in part as something that helps give character to a window and also as something that can fill a space. Keller went through a phase in which she loved to count things, and Annie Sullivan, her teacher, feared she might get the idea to count the hairs on her own head. Arakawa’s painting, Name’s Birthday (1967), brings all of these themes together. A few horizontal lines denote walls, diagrammatic space, as well as the boundaries of objects that are labeled with their names on one half of the painting and numbers corresponding to seemingly different things on the other. Whether these numbers refer to different objects or simply indicate that the objects have moved is open to interpretation. The lines on the right side are broken up into dots. Faint vertical lines further divide the space. Arrows pointing to each word and number stem from a knotted rope, perhaps indicating the connection between these objects, all parts of a whole, unified in a single organism. One open window at the top on the right side allows the light into the room to become almost another object in and of itself. The evidence of this light is really only found around the string and rope, which serve as placeholders for a composite being, and here, to use Gins’s phrase again, we find that the light is “limning character and will” in a more literal way.

This investigation of light reaches its zenith in Arakawa’s installation Ubiquitous Site X (1987-91). Walking under the pink rubber drapery into a dark enclosed space may at first seem to be providing an experience devoid of light, and with the uneven terrain of the base of the structure, one would indeed need to focus in on other senses in order to be able to move around, and, in the process, one might become more aware of their own body in general. The heart beats and breath moves in and out of the dark inside of the body. Since this darkness is now all around you, does the sense of your personal boundary become more indefinite? Does it get pushed outward to find its limit at the external edges of the installation where you know the light was? If the light is not within, it must be without, or does it ring each person like a halo as Keller describes? With Keller’s influence, we find that light, the thing that is excluded, has perhaps become the most important point of focus in this particular setting. The lack of light allows you to engage the space on many levels. When we can see, we can observe limitations; when we can’t see these limits, the space becomes ubiquitous — without clear definition, you could in theory move your body however you want to, as long as you can overcome any trepidation. Gins tried to put her own thoughts on the matter in poem form and came up with two possibilities with which she was comfortable.

Many of the ideas discussed so far are featured prominently in the Reversible Destiny Lofts MITAKA – In Memory of Helen Keller (2005). Archetypal, diagrammatic forms are scaled up and repeated; along with multi-textured surfaces, this allows people to navigate the space using other senses. Tours are sometimes given blindfolded to underscore the fact that this architectural surround teaches you how to exist in the space even without the use of sight, in a matter similar to Ubiquitous Site X (1987-91).

This brief exploration of Helen Keller or Arakawa (1994) has offered a mere taste of what can be found in Gins’s mellifluous prose, which is worth savoring in its full complexity. We have gone from ekphrasis, to the concept of architectural body, to spacetime, to the experience of light within that spacetime. Let’s end on a more lighthearted note with the invocation of a sense thus far ignored – taste. In the book, Gins juxtaposes Keller’s dream of a long string of peeled bananas hanging in her dining room, bunched in such a way that she could easily eat her fill, alongside Arakawa’s painting of a recipe for Banana Cake, Untitled (Banana Cake), 1968. In both instances, boundaries are at play. For Keller, the removal of the peel makes the fruit more accessible and she is able to enjoy them immediately. In Arakawa’s work, the viewer is presented with a boundary they must overcome – the cake is not yet made and gratification is therefore delayed. In this recipe painting, we again see separate objects that come together to form one unique thing, but we can imagine the taste of each separate ingredient, some with more pleasure than others, before imagining the texture and taste of the ingredients coalescing in cake form. As Gins indicates, the banana adds moisture and volume to the cake in addition to its familiar sweet flavor, and in this cake form, the many seeds within a banana are suddenly diffuse and visible. We can only do this, though, if we have had banana cake before. It would be very difficult to simply imagine what the combination of a set of ingredients would taste like and what texture they would have when mixed and baked together had we no previous experience of it, something Gins refers to as the “report of the thinking field in action.” And so, she concludes, why not “[p]ropose a recipe rather than a theory. Another thing to consider is how much preferable it would be to end up with a banana cake than with a weak and misleading metaphysics.”

Sources:

Gins, Madeline. Helen Keller or Arakawa. New York and Santa Fe: Burning Books, 1994.

Gins, Madeline. Heren Kerā matawa Arakawa Shūsaku (Helen Keller or Arakawa). Translated by Momoko Watanabe. Tokyo: Shinshokan, 2010.

Tags Distraction Series, Newsletter

Newsletter

Distraction Series, 11

Dear Friends,

For Distraction Series 11, we are delighted to share an interview Arakawa gave in Tokyo, 1997, at the NTT InterCommunication Center (ICC), available for the first time with English subtitles. You can find the English transcript of the interview in the link below.

In this roughly thirty-minute interview, Arakawa discusses what it means to him to think across two languages as well as the concept of the architectural body. He then waxes philosophical on human-made nature, civilization and architecture, and the relationship between computers and art. Conducted by Yukihiro Hirayoshi (professor of design and architecture at Kyoto Institute of Technology; formerly, curator at the National Museum of Art, Osaka), this interview not only provides insight into Arakawa’s approach to his work and his thoughts on a variety of related subjects, it also offers an interesting snapshot of the late 1990s from the point of a view of an artist.

In the following year, the ICC held an exhibition of Arakawa and Madeline Gins’s work, entitled The City as the Art Form of the Next Millennium ARAKAWA/GINS (January 24th–March 29th, 1998), which featured a large model of a Reversible Destiny city along with large-scale prints of their digital architectural renderings and physical installations. As Arakawa discussed in the interview, the transition from painting to architecture was a necessary step toward realizing their vision of civilization, and the exhibition introduced their further exploration into city planning. During the exhibition, Arakawa and Gins’s experimental films “Why Not (a Serenade of Eschatological Ecology)” (1969, 110min.) and “For Example (A Critique of Never)—A Melodrama” (1971, 95min.) were both screened; they gave an artist talk; Arakawa and architect Arata Isozaki held a symposium; and artist Toshinori Kondo performed a work entitled, Soundscape for the Next Millennium.

We hope you enjoy it!

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

Video Source: ICC Open Video Archive (https://hive.ntticc.or.jp/contents/interview/arakawa)
ARAKAWA Shusaku Interview, at the NTT InterCommunication Center (ICC), Tokyo, 1997. 33 minutes 52 seconds. English subtitles by Reversible Destiny Foundation and ARAKAWA+GINS Tokyo Office, 2020

The contents of this interview are licensed under a Creative Commons: Attribution – NonCommercial – ShareAlike license. Please refer to the Deed for further details.

Tags Distraction Series, Newsletter

Newsletter

Distraction Series, 10

Madeline and Arakawa with Mesoamerican statues in Tula, Mexico

Dear Friends,

Given the current limitations on travel, Distraction Series 10 is here to bring you on a round-the-world armchair vacation with Arakawa and Madeline. From Mesoamerican ruins in Tula, Mexico, to Italy, France, Japan, and various locations in New York state, join us as we travel through time and space from the point of view of our two founders. We’ve pulled around twenty photographs from our archive for your viewing pleasure – scroll down for the images with descriptive captions. Winter, Spring, Summer, and Autumn, you’ll find Arakawa and Madeline posing, taking photographs, examining their environment, and planning their day over breakfast. Enjoy!

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

Arakawa and Madeline posing in front of Japanese buildings in snow (3 Jan 1995)

Arakawa and Madeline on a boat in Venice

Madeline and Arakawa walking on a street near a horse drawn trailer (Sep 1986)

Madeline touching plants on a trail in Japan (1979)

Arakawa and Madeline posing on a Japanese street

Madeline and Arakawa near a smoky campfire

Arakawa walking on stone path near Mayan ruins

Arakawa and Madeline writing at a breakfast table in Japan (1979)

Polaroid of Arakawa in Venice (Jun 1969)

Polaroid of Madeline in Venice (Jun 1969)

Arakawa in front of the leaning tower of Pisa

Polaroid of Madeline on a boat in Venice

Snapshot of a snowy riverbank (26 Jan 1990)

Tags Distraction Series, Newsletter

Newsletter

Distraction Series, 9

Photograph of Madeline Gins (seated in the second row from the front at the far left) in Grade Six, Radcliffe Road Elementary School, Island Park, NY, 1952

Dear Friends,

For the ninth iteration of our Distraction Series, we have pulled a questionnaire from our archive that Madeline had her mother give to her Fifth-Grade class on January 20th, 1969, the day Richard Nixon was sworn in as President of the United States. Lucy Ives, editor of The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader, wrote a lovely piece about this questionnaire for the Poetry Foundation in April of this year. Madeline’s questions focus in on thoughts – where do you feel them, from where do they come, where do they go, what are they made of? And she then has the children conduct a practical exercise (drawing a circle), before asking about their thoughts while carrying out this particular activity. Finally, the questionnaire asks the children to explain the difference between children and adults, state their most interesting thought, share their oldest memory, and come up with an interesting question to ask their teacher.

The fascinating responses from the children have thoughts taking the shape of duck feathers, words, air, gold, nothing, silk, soft tissue, sugar, fur, emerald, steel, fluffy cotton, brain tissue, leather, and marbles. One child, Nancy, explains that “an adult has to be mature, not only in size, but in mind. A person could be six feet tall, 26 years old, and still act like a child, as an 8 year old could act like a professor of Math according to his mind.” So true, Nancy. A few students had some thoughts to share about our planet: Susan has imagined that the world was completely covered by water and asks if her teacher would like to live under the ocean, while Tracy imagined a land where everything was sweets and sodas. Tybert once thought that the middle of the earth was hollow and that you could go inside, and, finally, Peter made the chilling declaration that “the earth is dead.” 13-year-old Zoë, responding in 2020, has a scary thought about her own world: “What if my life is a

game and someone is just controlling me and everyone in my life is fake?” Contrary to the assumption that this would be a frightening scenario, she thinks it would be “cool.”

An interesting thought exercise to try at home for adults and children alike!

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

Tags Distraction Series, Newsletter

Newsletter

Distraction Series, 8

Arakawa, 35’ by 7’ 6” and 126 lbs. No. 2, 1967-68, acrylic and collage on canvas, 7 panels, overall: 420 x 88 1/2 inches Collection of Nagoya City Art Museum, photograph courtesy of the museum

Dear friends,

For Distraction Series 8, we are very pleased to present a ten-minute excerpt of a two-hour lecture by curator Satoshi Yamada on a work by Arakawa entitled 35’ by 7’ 6” and 126 lbs. No. 2, 1967-68. This lecture was given on May 13th, 2012, at the Nagoya City Art Museum, where Mr. Yamada was a curator at the time. NCAM houses sixteen works by Arakawa in its permanent collection, along with an additional five works on long-term loan from the Estate of Madeline Gins. As the museum is located in the artist’s hometown of Nagoya, NCAM has focused on developing a collection that covers a broad range of Arakawa’s artistic experiments: it spans from the sculptures of the late 1950s (his so-called ‘coffin’ series), to sketches revealing his thought-process, and finally to the large-scale paintings of the 1980s that anticipated his move toward architecture in collaboration with Madeline Gins.

Satoshi Yamada, currently the chief curator of the Kyoto City Museum of Art, conducted a 2-year-long study of Arakawa’s work in 2003–2005 with two other fellow curators, forming the organizing committee of the 2005 exhibition “Analyzing the Art of Arakawa Shusaku” at NCAM. This in-depth research project and his years of experience working with the museum’s collection pieces have formed Mr. Yamada’s opinion that Arakawa thought through everything in great detail and created his work with a view to communicating ideas as clearly as possible to the public—an assessment that may bewilder some people who are familiar with the enigmatic works of the artist.

We hope that this lecture will provide another foray into the world of Arakawa and invite you to exercise your own analytical thinking while looking at the artist’s work. For Closed Captioning, please click on the “CC” at the bottom right of the YouTube video.

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

Tags Distraction Series, Newsletter

Newsletter

Distraction Series, 7

Arakawa, <i>Sky No.2</i>, 1968, acrylic and oil on canvas, 48 x 36 in

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

Tags Distraction Series, Newsletter

News

The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words: A MADELINE GINS READER

Post author By rdfstaff
Post date April 21, 2020
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The Reversible Destiny Foundation is excited to announce the publication of The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader, edited by Lucy Ives and published by Siglio Press. The book officially launches on April 21st, 2020.

“For anyone who wants to experience directly the uncharted regions of inner and outer space in which language, perception, thought, and image play freely with our cramped expectations of them, the Madeline Gins Reader is an indispensable guide and a startling discovery.”
— ADRIAN PIPER

The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader is a revelatory anthology, edited and with an introduction by the writer and critic Lucy Ives. It brings never-before-published poems and essays together with a complete facsimile reproduction of Gins’s 1969 masterpiece, WORD RAIN (or A Discursive Introduction to the Intimate Philosophical Investigations of G,R,E,T,A, G,A,R,B,O, It Says), along with substantial excerpts from her two later books What the President Will Say and Do!! (1984) and Helen Keller or Arakawa (1994). Long out of print or unpublished, Gins’s poems and prose form a powerful corpus of experimental literature, one which is sure to upend existing narratives of American poetics at the close of the twentieth century.

Pre-order before April 1st and use our exclusive discount code, WORDRAIN, to receive 25% off: https://sigliopress.com/book/madeline-gins-reader/

“Madeline Gins was marooned here, on Earth, and made the best of it, using what was available to her, like words. This book is a splendid testament to how far she pushed them, and us, to realize what she already knew. That this, all this, is not it. Not. Even. Close.”
— PAUL CHAN

“Gins was a foundational figure. Her work was original and yet also deeply indicative of the transformative activities of conceptualism that performed a tectonic shift in art-making beginning in the late 1960s. These brilliant essays, the incredible novel/artist’s book WORD RAIN, the poems, projects, and thoughts have all been scattered, unavailable, or out of print. Ives frames the collection articulately, giving us a vivid sense of the period in which Gins began and developed her remarkable body of work. This is a welcome publication that will renew our appreciation of Gins’s intellect and wit.”
— JOHANNA DRUCKER

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

Tags Madeline Gins, Poetry, Publication

Events

Neon Dance: Puzzle Creature Island Encounter

Post author By rdfstaff
Post date September 28, 2019
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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

Tags Dance, Neon Dance, Puzzle Creature

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

Tags Arakawa and Gins, Exhibition, The Swiss Institute

News

New York Times’ T Magazine: Could Architecture Help You Live Forever?

Post author By rdfstaff
Post date August 20, 2019
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The New York Times’ T Magazine has published a new article about the work and life of Arakawa and Madeline Gins.

CLICK HERE TO READ ARTICLE

“Could Architecture Help You Live Forever?

For a pair of avant-garde artists, eternal life wasn’t just a dream — it was a possibility. As long, that is, as you were committed to an uncomfortable existence.

The search for immortality has always been a subtext of architecture. From the pyramids, thought to have been designed as massive stairways so the soul of the deceased pharaoh could ascend to the heavens, to the aspirationally named New York Coliseum, the 1956 exhibition space, demolished in 2000, that was Robert Moses’s bid to join the company of the Roman emperors, many structures are created with an eye toward a life everlasting.

But Madeline Gins and her husband, Shusaku Arakawa …had a more literal, if whimsical, take on cheating death: The pair purported to believe that their structures could actually allow their inhabitants eternal life.”

–T Magazine, August 20, 2019

Tags Arakawa and Gins, New York Times, T Magazine

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)

Tags Emily Harvey Foundation, Film, For Example

Events News

Testing the Limits: Arakawa X Isamu Noguchi

Post author By rdfstaff
Post date March 17, 2019
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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.

Recent Exhibitions

Diagrams for the Imagination

Post author By rdfstaff
Post date March 5, 2019
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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/

Tags Arakawa, Exhibition, Gagosian Gallery