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.