Category: Programs

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

Events

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
No Comments on 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

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

Events

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

Post author By rdfstaff
Post date August 20, 2019
No Comments on New York Times’ T Magazine: Could Architecture Help You Live Forever?

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

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

Events Recent Exhibitions

Arakawa and Madeline Gins: Eternal Gradient

Post author By rdfstaff
Post date February 7, 2019
No Comments on 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/

Tags Charles Bernstein, Graham Foundation, Leopold Lambert

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.

Tags Arakawa and Gins, Architecture, Exhibition

Newsletter Research

Distraction Series, 6: documenta 4

Post author By matsuda
Post date June 12, 2020
No Comments on Distraction Series, 6: documenta 4

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Newsletter Research

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

Post author By matsuda
Post date May 29, 2020
No Comments on Distraction Series, 5: a tour of the Reversible Destiny Lofts – MITAKA (In Memory of Helen Keller)

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

Newsletter Research

Distraction Series, 4: Segue Series Reading at Double Happiness

Post author By matsuda
Post date May 15, 2020
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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

Segue Series Reading at Double Happiness, May 19, 2001:

1. Poetics or Architectonics (3:43)

2. Electron Transport Chain One (5:58)

3. Spaghetti A (3:40)

4. Spaghetti A’ (1:40)

5. Krebs Cycle (7:42)

6. Complete Reading (29:23)

Click here for more of Madeline Gins’s poetry on Pennsound

Newsletter Research

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

Post author By matsuda
Post date May 1, 2020
No Comments on Distraction Series, 3: the world premiere performance of Neon Dance’s Puzzle Creature,

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)

Newsletter Research

Distraction Series, 2: We

Post author By matsuda
Post date April 17, 2020
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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)

Newsletter Research

Distraction Series, 1: Children Who Won’t Die

Post author By matsuda
Post date April 3, 2020
No Comments on 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

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

Programs Recent Exhibitions

Arakawa and Madeline Gins: Eternal Gradient

Post author By matsuda
Post date March 12, 2018
No Comments on Arakawa and Madeline Gins: Eternal Gradient

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