A Brief Introduction to Arakawa and Gins

Shusaku Arakawa (b. 1936 in Nagoya, Japan) and Madeline Gins (b. 1941, Long Island, New York)  have collaborated for over forty-six years on artistic, architectural, poetic and theoretical projects that are bewildering in their range and profound in their insight and influence. Established thinkers from diverse intellectual disciplines, including such names as Lawrence Alloway, Robert Creeley, Italo Calvino, Carter Ratcliff, Donald Kuspit, Arthur Danto, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Andrew Benjamin, Ed Keller, Kay Itoi and Nicholas Piombino, Mark C. Taylor, George Lakoff, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Reuben Baron, Hideo Kawamoto, Shuzo Takeguchi and Erin Manning, have all pondered the significance of Arakawa and Gins’ output with reference to philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, visual art and aesthetics, poetry and literary theory, cognitive science, architecture, dance and movement, social and ecological psychology--and many other fields.  With the third international conference on their work about to convene, the array of contributions from scholars, and the variety of their topics and focus, continues to astonish.

Arakawa came to America from Japan in 1961 on invitation from Marcel Duchamp, quickly becoming one of the most influential members of the conceptual art movement of that time. Madeline Gins, after studying creative writing, literature, philosophy and painting at Barnard College, found her initial focus as a poet and artist. The collaboration between Arakawa and Madeline Gins began when they met as Painting Fellows at the Brooklyn Museum in 1963. With Arakawa’s background in continental philosophy (in addition to his university studies in mathematics and medicine), his amazing success as a conceptual artist focusing on the discordances among visual cognition, verbal reasoning and conceptual frames, and Madeline Gins’ studies of Japanese culture and Zen Buddhist philosophy specifically, and her work on post-Wittgenstein linguistics and meaning-making in the context of the emerging domain of language poetry, they found resonance in each other’s strengths as thinkers and artists. Friends of Marcel Duchamp, they quickly developed their own aesthetic that drew on the interstices between eastern and western thought as they took to heart Duchamp's insistence that "you are not as blank as you think you are" in a life-long commitment to make the interior loops of sensory, proprioceptive, memory, as well as conceptual and linguistic cognitive processes the subject of their investigations.

Within a few years, they achieved a global reputation, especially with their initial conceptual art masterpiece The Mechanism of Meaning (1963-71). Exhibited all over the world, reproduced in many translations, and the basis for the first wave of Arakawa and Gins’ many awards, The Mechanism of Meaning involved some eighty-four large-dimensioned panels which explore the dysfunctional relationships among visual cognition, verbal semantics and conceptual models in western culture. The bewildering juxtapositions of cognitive, verbal and conceptual stimuli in the Mechanism of Meaning anticipated by many years the issues addressed by the later schools of post-structuralism, as well as by research in the emerging field of cognitive science. Despite the prolific and varied nature of their output, Arakawa and Gins established a continuity of focus as they search, both individually and collectively, for a poetics, aesthetics, and finally an architecture and concomitant pragmatic and procedural philosophy that might transform the processes of embodied cognition for human beings from “being-in-the-world” to “self-making or becoming” with an urgency befitting their coined term “crisis ethics.”

While initially deferring her own painting career to tackle their collaborative projects, Madeline Gins soon became a leading poet through such works as Word Rain or A Discursive Introduction to the Intimate Philosophical Investigations of G,R,E,T,A, G,A,R,B,O, It Says (1969), What the President Will Say and Do (1984), and Helen Keller or Arakawa (1994). It is a tribute to Madeline Gins’ creative evolution as an artist and as a thinker that she could juggle two careers as a conceptual artist and as one of the leading practitioners of the school of language poetry exemplified by Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Robert Grenier, Susan Howe, and Steve McCaffery. One can see traces of this work in Madeline Gins’ many contributions to their collaboration, especially in the trenchant wit, subversive cognitive confrontations, and intensive word play in their architectural manifestos: Architectural Body (2002) and Making Dying Illegal (2006)

By 1971, they came to the realization that if they intended to effect change in the cognizing habits of westerners, they would have to reframe their confrontations through the field of architectural design. In 1987, they founded the Architectural Body Research Foundation to raise money to actually construct landscapes and buildings that are capable of engaging and transforming the cognitive affect of users. Deploying design features more associated with visionary reach rather than simply avant-garde social critique, installations such as Ubiquitous Site*Nagi’s Ryoanji* Architectural Body (1992-4; Nagi Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan), massive landscapes such as Site of Reversible Destiny—Yoro Park (1993-5; Gifu Prefecture, Japan), individual residences such as Bioscleave House (2007; East Hampton, NY USA), and multifamily residences such as Reversible Destiny Lofts--Mitake (In Memory of Helen Keller) (2005; Mitaka Japan), Arakawa and Gins mean to transform the cognitive processes of users through architectural procedures that confront and reorient the body and its capacity to apprehend the world. Common to all these projects, one can say, is the belief in skewing visual perception, and its intimate link to top-down executive functions that mostly control human thought and behavior, so that users must feel their way through rather than navigate externally from signs, or internally from a map. There is no transcendent, bird’s eye map for the users of their territories. This work achieved immediate attention, and led to a major retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum (Soho) in 1997, which in turn produced a large scale catalogue which won the Outstanding Art Book of the year from the College Art Association. Since then, Arakawa has been honored with the title “Living National Treasure” from the Emperor of Japan, and, for what it’s worth, Arakawa and Gins were named one of Twenty Top Innovators for 2009 by the Harvard Business Review.

In the process of forming a conceptual realm to sustain their architectural output, Arakawa and Gins have produced a number of full-length manifestoes that address a philosophy of living as well as architecture, through a remarkably hermetic and astonishingly sophisticated grappling with the nature of embodiment, cognition and personal action, through the creation of architectural procedures and user procedures, in the form of quixotic manuals meant to enable the most efficacious use of their environments. So not only have these buildings generated ripples of influence throughout the arena of architecture, but their writings have seen fit to find their way by allusion or by quotation to major thinkers of every conceivable intellectual discipline. Terms such as “organism that persons,” “perceptual, imaging and dimensionalizing landing sites,” “procedural architecture,” “Organism-person-environment,” “biotopology” and “biotopological reports,” “terminological junctions,” are now part of a vocabulary that can be found amongst an array of thinkers from many domains who seek, through trans-disciplinary conceptual apparatuses, an understanding of what the world may come to identify as the emergence of “trans-human” thought and behavior.