Tag: Madeline Gins

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Madeline Gins: Infinite Systems

Post author By rdfstaff
Post date May 2, 2025
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Madeline Gins: Infinite Systems

Exhibition at Hessel Museum of Art

CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art
33 Garden Rd
Annandale-On-Hudson, NY 12504

On view from April 5, 2025 through May 25, 2025

Public reception: Saturday, April 5, 1-4 PM

“Infinite Systems presents works by the artist-architect-poet Madeline Gins (1941–2014). The exhibition—the first solo presentation on Gins—shifts the focus from her collaborations with her husband, Arakawa, under the moniker Arakawa+Gins, to her rarely shown independent practice. A selection of her writing and visual works from the 1960s to the 2000s, many exhibited for the first time, are displayed alongside archival materials, including ephemera, manuscripts, and photographs drawn from the Reversible Destiny Foundation.” – Charlotte Youkilis, Curator.

We are excited to share that Madeline Gins will have her moment to shine thanks to CCS Bard College. As mentioned above, rarely seen works from her own creative practice will be showcased through drawings, paintings, and poems alongside archival materials. The exhibition will also be accompanied by a publication with contributions from friends; Susan Bee, Lucy Ives, Tausif Noor, and Aviva Silverman.

For more information, please visit https://ccs.bard.edu/museum/exhibitions/1052-madeline-gins-infinite-systems.

Tags Arakawa and Gins, CCS Bard, Exhibition, Madeline Gins, New York City

front page Newsletter

Ambiguous Zones, 16

What is WORD RAIN?

By Daniella Sanader

I ask this question quite literally. What is WORD RAIN? Of course, it is a book-length work of fiction written by Madeline Gins and released by Grossman Publishers in 1969—presenting innocuously as 136 pages of paper and ink, hardcover, and priced at $4.95. If we are to follow the lead of the novel’s dust jacket, it is “a very unusual book,” wherein an unnamed woman sits and reads a manuscript in a friend’s apartment. As the protagonist works through the papers in her hands, Gins narrates the rhythms of her attention and distraction: through the sounds of a birthday party that thrum through the walls; through visitors that enter and exit the room where she reads; through her body that announces itself with hunger, or indigestion, or discomfort; through weather that changes, both outside and in. As an art writer and researcher in the midst of a PhD dissertation centred in large part on this “very unusual book,” I have grown familiar with the clarifying beats of this synopsis. Speaking with colleagues and friends about my research, I use them all the time. Yet I find myself in the midst of a coalescing generation of writers and curators¹ bringing new interpretive frames to Gins’ complex body of work (along with Arakawa) across language, film, conceptual art, architecture, the list goes on—guided in no small part by Lucy Ives’ wonderful anthology of her writing published by Siglio Press.² So, I take this moment to ask the question again: what, exactly, is WORD RAIN?

Spending close time with the text somehow carries me further away from being able to answer this relatively simple question. On any given page, WORD RAIN continually reorients the relationships between reader, author, and text, asking for different methods of approach: some are data-driven, with a system of “oiled geometry, liniment algebra, and creamed mathematics”³ that quantifies semantic meaning on a given page; some are governed by precise instructions for the reader’s intake of breath, like a score for performance; and some eschew human authorship altogether, implying that the words on the page were formed by a swarm of unruly bacteria, that Gins terms “microphytic agents,” somehow imperceptible to the naked eye but emitting a highly distinctive odour. In the final chapter of WORD RAIN, the text accumulates the closing lines from several canonical works of literature—from Mrs. Dalloway, to Crime and Punishment, to The Tale of Genji—as if the novel’s boundaries have begun to lose coherence, soaking up nearby language from the protagonist’s library surroundings, seemingly without end. “Any book which ends,” she writes, “should have its end appended to this one.” ⁴ Crucially, no individual strategy proves to be the most effective for readers to access WORD RAIN’s meaning, but rather, they perpetually transform, prompting us to constantly reconfigure our senses, our relationship to this book-turned-mist-turned-score-turned-swarm. This shifting terrain can seem destabilizing—yet, to anyone familiar with Arakawa & Gins’ lifelong work, destabilization can be cultivated as a welcome, or at the very least generative, feeling. Here, I find myself aligned with an assertion made by the idiosyncratic dance critic Jill Johnston, writing in a 1967 iteration of her longtime column for The Village Voice: “I like things that are certain about not being very sure what they are.”⁵

Having spent time at the Reversible Destiny Foundation, looking through archival material on WORD RAIN—the novel’s production, circulation, and subsequent lives—I’ve had the pleasure of coming across notes and letters that expand upon its ambiguous and mercurial qualities: archival material that further articulates the certainty of WORD RAIN’s uncertainty, to paraphrase Johnston. I’d like to share some of these here. Perhaps WORD RAIN is a novel, and a swarm, and a sticky dataset—perhaps it is also a sculpture, an object, an investigation, or just “bad” writing. Collecting these associations may not get me any closer to answering my central question, but with them, the atmosphere around Gins’ work begins to thicken. It invites my intake of breath.

“I want to squeeze the imagination till dry”

In an April 1970 issue of the New American Review, poet/critic Hayden Carruth wrote briefly, and unfavourably, about WORD RAIN, in a feature covering the changing landscape of American literature. He included Gins’ work in a cluster of writers who, in his view, were “fooling away their talents in endless novelistic puzzles,” enacting a kind of self-contained “formalistic irresponsibility” that was a leftover modernist sensibility.⁶ The Reversible Destiny Foundation has three copies of a letter Gins wrote in response to Carruth’s assessment of WORD RAIN, where she expressed her frustration with the critic, particularly that he situated her novel within a bygone literary tradition: “Know this Mr. Carruth, you are also the enemy of those you admire (Joyce, Eliot etc.). As for me, I have stepped all over them and walk past as each of them has implored me to,” she wrote, continuing later, “The only thing our tradition has done for us is to modify us for further change.”⁷ She also chided both the critic and the journal for their, in her view, limited disciplinary, geographic, and ideological scope: “Try these sources for a fresh start Mr. Carruth, but try too to keep these alive: Rimbaud, Breton, Satie, Eluard, Soupault, Calvino, and these: Foucault, Castro, Planck, Wittgenstein. Not all novelists? So what? Not American? No more token internationalism in literature (anywhere!)!”⁸

Amidst her clear frustration with the critic’s reductive view of her work, Gins uses this letter to articulate her expansive practice with language. In the above quote, she situates her writerly influences as decidedly beyond the scope of (American) literature, naming an idiosyncratic collection of two notable philosophers, a Marxist revolutionary, and a theoretical physicist as influential to her practice. Elsewhere in the letter, she speaks to these commitments more directly:

If writing is to become alive again, words must truly be subordinated to image and idea through art as a systematic though whimsical investigation. We don’t need any more ‘good’ writers, word shufflers. That’s why some of the most interesting writing today is done by ‘bad’ writers in scientific or philosophic journals or artists like Duchamp, Picabia or Arakawa who write with words as objects or vice versa.⁹

The “good” writers of the literary canon simply shuffle words, whereas “bad” writers in the sciences, or artists who work with language—like Arakawa, like Gins herself—have forged a process with language that is spatial and material; they “write with words as objects or vice versa.”¹⁰ Here, Gins is placing her own work into an expansive—and distinctly interdisciplinary—network of others who approach language in service of broader material, spatial, political, or metaphysical goals. “I want to squeeze the imagination till dry, crack it and throw it away for a new system. […],” she writes. “While most interesting works have been on an epistemological-axiological level, those in literature have been limited by the writer’s too easy acceptance of his premises, his attitudes.”¹¹ As Gins bristles against the reductive literary frameworks of Carruth’s review, WORD RAIN’s status-as-novel reaches beyond itself, with language newly enlivened as a collection of transformative objects, a whimsical investigation, a conceptual art form—as, to use her words, radically “bad” writing.

“It is the Utopia.”

In the late 1970s, Gins was communicating regularly with Paris-based poet and publisher François Di Dio, as the two were working to translate WORD RAIN into French. Di Dio was the founder of Éditions Le Soleil Noir, an experimental press operational from 1950 to 1983, known for releasing editions of hybrid book-objects and working primarily with artists and writers from the Surrealist tradition.¹² Based on the archives of their correspondence, Gins and Di Dio worked on this project (titled MOT PLUIE) for several years: it moved slowly through multiple translators—even as Gins herself was practicing the language and communicating with Di Dio bilingually—before the project was dropped, seemingly due to financial issues resulting from the closure of Soleil Noir’s partnering printing house.

There’s one portion of their correspondence that I remain struck by: in May 1978, Di Dio sent a letter addressed to Arakawa (“avec amitié”), describing Soleil Noir’s plans to turn MOT PLUIE into a sculptural object. His notes waver between the whimsical and the logistical:

The book is seen through a transparent altuglass binding filled up of liquid composed by: water + glycerine (density 1,256).

It is the Utopia. The book is perceived as if soaked into water – but remains wholly visible:

– edge treated with gold,
– back with its title, names of author and illustrator,
– boards 1 and 2 of the cover entirely readable.

So, the book becomes a sign wich [sic] displays the presence of poetry. It may be set among others on the shelf of a book-case, or considered as an object and placed anywhere. ¹³

Accompanying Di Dio’s instructions are a series of small sketches that illustrate this vision: a rectangular encasement with an interior sleeve to house the book, along with two curving external layers filled with so-called “heavy water,” to make MOT PLUIE appear as if suspended in a liquidy environment, which transforms the book into a sign that “displays the presence of poetry,” as opposed to functioning as a poetic text in and of itself. (However, in Di Dio’s plan, MOT PLUIE could be removed from the encasement and still read as a book: “According to my theory regarding the object-book, the book must always remain at the very dimension of the hand; it is not only to be read but fliped [sic] through easily.”¹⁴) On the back of the envelope Di Dio sent to Arakawa, he included an additional doodle: an open spread of a book encased under a low dome, also seemingly filled with a mysterious watery substance.

It is unclear to me whether Gins intended to follow through on this eclectic sculptural proposal, although their letters suggest she was making plans to travel to Paris in order to study Di Dio’s maquettes. It’s also worth noting that this thread of their correspondence was addressed to Arakawa directly, not to Gins, implying his involvement in the sculptural component of MOT PLUIE. At any rate, Di Dio’s object-book did not seem to come to fruition,¹⁵ yet I remain enamored by its possibility: WORD RAIN’s semantic capacity as a novel intersecting with its potential as a sculptural object, a watery enclosure, a sign that retains legibility while obscuring and distorting itself, soaked through with its surroundings. Di Dio’s plans, realized or not, work to extend the novel’s misty, watery form, beyond its material reality in paper and ink. In calling attention to the novel’s extended atmospheres, the plans embody a description of WORD RAIN, supplied by Gins in an interview with Martin E. Rosenberg some three decades later, where she described the text as “evok[ing] consciousness (primitive term) a few inches above each of its un-paginated pages.” ¹⁶ The novel acts as a possible catalyst for the energies of the reader that approaches it, and MOT PLUIE encases those transformative energies in plexiglass and glycerine.

François Di Dio, “NOTE ON WORD RAIN,” May 23 1978, Reversible Destiny Foundation Archives.

Front and close-up of backside of the envelope sent by François Di Dio to Arakawa and Madeline Gins in 1978.

So, what is WORD RAIN? As these fragments of the archive imply, it’s both a novel and something else: a sculpture, a score, a poem, a swarm of bacteria, a catalyst, an investigation, an image, an environment, an ongoing uncertainty. As I continue my dissertation research, I’m less and less interested in answering this question with any sense of foreclosing clarity. Instead, like the novel’s protagonist, I keep reorienting myself to its mercurial states. “Everything that is, is pulled towards me,” Gins writes, “[…] The more words, the more combinations, the more portraits, the more negatives to be pushed away, the more positives on which to superimpose. I am so sure, aware, that there is not one word, aware, which can portray me. Instead every word, a confusion of words, may be used to surround me, to isolate me one foot above the page.”¹⁷ Instead of answering the question, I only hope to keep asking it.

¹ See also Charlotte Youkilis’ recent exhibition, Madeline Gins: Infinite Systems, on view April 5-May 25, 2025 at the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College: https://ccs.bard.edu/museum/exhibitions/1052-madeline-gins-infinite-systems.

² Lucy Ives, editor, The Saddest Thing is That I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader (New York: Siglio Press, 2020).

³ Madeline Gins, WORD RAIN or, A Discursive Introduction to the Intimate Philosophical Investigations of G,R,E,T,A, G,A,R,B,O, It Says [New York: Grossman Publishers, 1969] included in Ives, The Saddest Thing is That I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader (New York: Siglio Press, 2020): p. 93. As the original edition of WORD RAIN was printed without page numbers, throughout this article I will cite the facsimile included in Ives’ anthology using the anthology’s pagination, for ease of reference.

⁴ Gins, WORD RAIN, p. 202.

⁵ Jill Johnston, “Take Me Disappearing,” The Village Voice, December 14, 1967, republished in Marmalade Me (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1971 [reprinted 1998]): p. 127. I am indebted to Clare Croft’s recent Jill Johnston in Motion: Dancing, Writing, and Lesbian Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2024) for pointing me towards this specific quotation.

⁶ Hayden Carruth, “Symposium: The Writer’s Situation,” New American Review (April 1970): pp. 68-69.

⁷ Madeline Gins, “Drafts of a letter to the editors of New American Review from Madeline,” August 15 1970, Reversible Destiny Foundation Archives, 2B13_016_002.

⁸ Gins, “Drafts of a letter to the editors of New American Review from Madeline.”

⁹ Gins, “Drafts of a letter to the editors of New American Review from Madeline.”

¹⁰ Gins, “Drafts of a letter to the editors of New American Review from Madeline.” This phrasing echoes the famed line by artist Robert Smithson, describing “Language to be looked at and/or things to be read,” which titled the first of four influential exhibitions at Dwan Gallery in New York, highlighting language-based conceptual art practices from 1967 to 1970. Also note that the three artists Gins referenced in her letter (Duchamp, Picabia, and Arakawa) were all featured in that first exhibition. For more on this, see Liz Kotz, Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007.

¹¹ Gins, “Drafts of a letter to the editors of New American Review from Madeline.”

¹² Jean-Michel Goutier interviewed by Jérôme Duwa, “Des Cahiers à l’enseigne du Soleil Noir,” La Revue des revues 2014:1 (no. 51): pp. 15-24.

¹³ François Di Dio, “NOTE ON WORD RAIN,” May 23 1978, Reversible Destiny Foundation Archives, 2B05_050_011.

¹⁴ François Di Dio, “NOTE ON WORD RAIN.”

¹⁵ However, in 2023, Greylock published a Spanish-language version, LLUVIA DE PALABRAS (o una introducción discursiva a las íntimas investigaciones filosóficas de G,R,E,T,A, G,A,R,B,O, dice), translated by Blanca Gago and Ignacio Caballero. For more on this, read Mónica de la Torre’s review of the Spanish translation in the June 2024 issue of The Brooklyn Rail: https://brooklynrail.org/2024/06/art_books/Madeline-Ginss-LLUVIA-DE-PALABRAS/.

¹⁶ Arakawa and Madeline Gins, interviewed by Martin E. Rosenberg, “An Interview with Arakawa and Gins: February 10, 25; March 12, 2010”: https://www.reversibledestiny.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/MER_Interview-with-Arakawa-and-Gins_FINAL_0.pdf.

¹⁷ Gins, WORD RAIN, p. 152.

Daniella Sanader is a Toronto-based writer, researcher, and PhD candidate in Art History and Visual Culture at York University. With over a decade of experience writing about artists’ practices, her work has been featured in publications like Canadian Art, Artforum, and Art Papers. Her doctoral research explores Madeline Gins’ experimental novel WORD RAIN (1969), examining its impact on contemporary art writing. Daniella holds an MA in Art History and Gender Studies from McGill University, and her research is supported by a SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship. She has curated projects for spaces like Vtape and Oakville Galleries and participated in various art writing residencies, including at the Banff Centre (2018), Rupert in Vilnius, Lithuania (2022), and the Doris McCarthy Artist-in-Residence Program in Scarborough (2024). For more of her work, please visit her website https://desanader.com/.

Tags Ambiguous Zones, Book, Madeline Gins, Newsletter, Word Rain

Events

“For Example (A Critique of Never)” at BAM Rose Cinemas

Post author By rdfstaff
Post date October 25, 2024
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FOR Example (A Critique of Never)

Big Apple’s Littlest Bites: Coming of Age on Film in NYC

BAM Rose Cinemas, Brooklyn Academy of Music

30 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11217

To commence at 3:45 pm on Nov 10, 2024

Purchase Tickets Here

The Reversible Destiny Foundation is happy to announce the screening of the 1971 film For Example (A Critique of Never) at BAM Rose Cinemas, Brooklyn, New York, as part of the series Big Apple’s Littlest Bites: Coming of Age on Film in NYC.

Directed by Arakawa, and written together with Madeline Gins, the feature-length film is a great example of their creative collaboration that gives insight into their early works. It premiered at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971, and bridged the New York conceptual art movement with the radical experimental film community of that period. In his book Film as a Subversive Art, film critic and historian Amos Vogel described it as “unquestionably a major work of the American Avant-Garde of the seventies”.

As Arakawa describes it in a contemporaneous letter, “the young boy searches for ways to be in the world. He is abandoned and so must find out by himself. What he demonstrates after all is poetry of action. The child happens to live on the Bowery. His experiments take place there and in the neighborhood playground.” Through the voice of Madeline Gins and the lens of Arakawa, For Example (A Critique of Never) invites viewers to re-envision the backdrop of NYC as extensions of themselves.

We are excited to share the newly restored version of the 16mm feature-length film for the first time in theaters. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with special guests.

The event is ticketed and open to the public. For more information, visit https://www.bam.org/film/2024/big-apples-littlest-bites-for-example.

Nov 8—14, 2024

Big Apple’s Littlest Bites: Coming of Age on Film in NYC

Programmed by Jessica Green

@ BAM Rose Cinemas (30 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11217)

Growing up in New York City is an experience as distinct as it is varied—and arguably no city on the planet is more imagined or documented in film. The films in Big Apple’s Littlest Bites capture in one way or another, or are in serious conversation with, coming of age in the Big Apple. The experiences, aesthetics, and ideas in these fiction films, documentaries, experimental, and short films range from sweet as apple pie and just what the doctor ordered to rotten to the core. The series includes well-known and new classics about being a kid in the big city, along with forgotten and unknown gems that all have something to say.

The series includes: Old Enough (Dir. Marisa Silver, 1984), Free Time (Dir. Manfred Kirchheimer, 2019), The Central Park Five (Dirs. Ken Burns, Sarah Burns & David McMahon, 2012), Rich Kids (Dir. Robert M. Young, 1979), Juice (Dir. Ernest R. Dickerson, 1992), Just Another Girl on the I.R.T (Dir. Leslie Harris, 1992), For Example: A Critique of Never (Dir. Arakawa, 1971), The Squid and the Whale (Dir. Noah Baumbach, 2005), The Window (Dir. Ted Tetzlaff, 1949), Fame (Dir. Alan Parker, 1980), The Long Night (Dir. Woodie King Jr., 1976), Crooklyn (Dir. Spike Lee, 1994), Aaron Loves Angela (Dir. Gordon Parks Jr., 1975), Punching the Sun (Tanuj Chopra, 2006) and a shorts program.

For more information, visit https://www.bam.org/film/2024/big-apples-littlest-bites.

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

Tags Arakawa, Arakawa and Gins, BAM, Film, Madeline Gins

Newsletter

Ambiguous Zones, 5

Arakawa and Madeline eating turkey with her parents at a picnic table

Dear Friends,

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

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

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

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

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

Tags Ambiguous Zones, Arakawa, Gagosian Gallery, Holiday, Ignacio Adriasola, Madeline Gins, Newsletter

Newsletter

Ambiguous Zones, 4

Dear Friends,

In honor of Madeline Gins’s birthday on November 7^th, the fourth edition of Ambiguous Zones focuses on one of her unpublished books. Madeline considered two possible titles that sum up the content quite well: “Conversations for our time: poet and physician” or “Medically in Our Time.” This book is based on a series of interviews that Madeline carried out with doctors with a variety of specialties, including neurology and psychiatry, an acupuncturist, and patients. Her overarching goal was to provide a course of action for the patient/reader that would help them navigate different approaches to their healthcare, including standard medical care, alternative therapies, vitamin regimens, and care related to their mental health, whether through psychiatry or other mind-body modalities like meditation and hypnosis.

Help us celebrate Madeline’s 80^th birthday by doing whatever mind-body exercise speaks to you the most.

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

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Madeline Gins conducted multiple interviews with a variety of doctors and patients over the course of five years for a book that she would never publish. Her goal was to approach the evidence surrounding various treatments for disease from a poet’s perspective. To Madeline, this meant “keeping intuition in play” while sorting through all of the information. In her proposal, Madeline also makes clear that her approach was not simply “a ‘holistic’ patchwork, but a unified way of knowing.” What she seems to be suggesting is that, as a patient, you would not just go separately to your endocrinologist, acupuncturist, psychiatrist, and another doctor or physical therapist for biofeedback. The poet would make sure all of these approaches were working together in harmony – something you yourself might be able to do after reading Madeline’s book.

In the 2020s, we have even more access to information than Madeline would have been able to dream of in the 1970s/1980s. At the touch of our fingertips, we can find an unending stream of articles and websites that may offer insight into what ails us, otherwise known as “Dr. Google.” We come away with way too much, often contradictory, information, and this was precisely the instance in which Madeline thought a poet could help. In our current time, the wellness industry is in full-swing, which means there is yet more advice available now that may have been considered more esoteric , though available if you sought it out and paid for it, in the last quarter of the twentieth century. A doctor will have their advice, using a scientific approach geared toward physical symptoms, an acupuncturist will look at the problem from a different perspective, and so on. Regardless of the source, a poet can synthesize all the evidence to come up with the best course of treatment, using every avenue available. In Madeline’s words,

When poetry succeeds, through the medium of intuition (a set of suspicions in the process of being confirmed) what is known comes to be easily apparent. In the kind light of poetry, whatever is picked up and brought forward may come to be so bathed in enthusiasm, that it will virtually glow with what it knows, so that what was once difficult to resolve takes place almost effortlessly.

One of her proposed titles for the book, “Medically in Our Time”, was inspired by the eleventh century poet and physician Ibn Sina, or Avicenna as he was known in Latin, who wrote The Poem of Medicine. Ibn Sina also wrote the Canon of Medicine, but he felt that his poem was more easily transmissible—easier to understand and memorize. Ibn Sina reviewed previous scholars on the subject of medicine and well-being, including Hippocrates and Galen. Madeline set out a similar task for herself in writing her own book. On the wellness side of things, Ibn Sina stressed the importance of taking care of the soul, which would include good company and music if someone was sick, and for general preventative care, moderate exercise.

Madeline conducted an extensive search for doctors who would be willing to sit down for an interview. Aside from reading articles and books written by doctors whom she then would track down, Madeline also asked friends and acquaintances for suggestions and collected names and numbers. One of her parents’ friends gave her a number of names of “vitamin” doctors. Another friend gave a list of Japanese doctors with a short description of each. She also received a number of doctor business cards from obliging friends. By including specialists, general practitioners, doctors focused on research, and patients, Madeline’s own research covered as many view points as possible.

While a poet’s response to or opinion about medical treatments is not something people tended to search out at the time, or now for that matter, Madeline invoked Avicenna to remind everyone that there were indeed other periods in time when the ideas of a poet and a physician were intermingled, and she started by asking the same questions, in essence, that he did. For example: “what do you think of the state of medical research today?” “What about diet?”

Madeline’s approach to the interviews sought to engage her conversant on a poetic level and this seems to have allowed some of the doctors the space to speak about certain not obviously medical motivations they may have had that would not have come up in a typical interview session. One neurologist in particular opened up about his interest in Buddhist philosophy as a source of inspiration for one thread of his research. This created a rather productive discussion about some of Madeline’s more philosophical ideas, including topology.

In a conversation with a psychiatrist and Jungian analyst, Madeline is offered another way to address her anger over death: is she able to build a building with the idea and the concept of the building in her mind, but build it just for a short while? Dr. Engel says that “independent of how long [the building] will stay,” you build. A child building a sandcastle understands this clearly.

When in conversation with a patient, Madeline channels her poetic-alchemical voice to offer a way of navigating through difficulties. Through a series of interesting questions, she is able to help a patient visualize her well-being as a space both in and around her, while becoming more aware of what happens to her experience of time during episodes of illness.

In this way we see the poetic voice as one that is highly adaptable. Madeline, as the author, moves from medical researcher, to questioner, to philosopher, to psychologist, to the analyzed patient. It feels quite seamless when reading through her conversations, edited for flow, and even in its incomplete, unpublished form, this book provides not only an interesting look at what was happening “Medically in [Madeline’s] Time”, but also at the human condition and how it responds to and copes with the struggle, in its various manifestations, for wellness. Throughout the interviews, Madeline seems to be circling the idea that the body inherently knows what to do to get better, the struggle becomes access to this knowledge. How do you break past conditioned thought patterns and the mind, which seem designed to keep us from what our body knows? We can look for Madeline and Arakawa’s attempts to answer this question in the vast majority of their projects, both realized and unrealized.

Top image: Madeline Gins on the telephone, ca. late 1980s

Lower images: Correspondence between Madeline Gins and various health professionals and patients

Tags Ambiguous Zones, Madeline Gins, medicine, 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

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Tags Madeline Gins, Poetry, Publication