CCJ Prototype

Arakawa (Shūsaku Arakawa; b. 1936, Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture, Japan – d. 2010, New York) was an artist and architect who had a personal and artistic partnership with Madeline Gins that spanned more than four decades. He was one of the founding members of the Japanese avant-garde art collective Neo Dadaism Organizers and exhibited at the Yomiuri Independent exhibition from 1958 to 1961, an annual watershed event for postwar Japanese art. Arakawa arrived in New York in the end of 1961 and quickly rose to fame as one of the earliest practitioners of the international conceptual art movement of the 1960s. He represented Japan in XXXV Venice Biennale (1970) and was included in Documenta IV (1968) and Documenta VI (1977). His work has been shown extensively around the world and is held by numerous museum collections world-wide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. Madeline Gins (b. 1941, New York – d. 2014, New York) was a poet, writer, and architect. She was a prescient thinker who foresaw the ways in which changes in popular media and technologies would collapse traditional disciplinary and social boundaries and transform everyday life. Much of her intellectual and artistic exploration focused on the body’s relationship to acts of expression as something transformative, rather than merely representational. Her published books include the experimental novel 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), an excursion into identity, language and free speech using the devices of political rhetoric; and the speculative fiction Helen Keller or Arakawa (1994). From the early 1960s, Arakawa and Gins began collaborating on rigorous, philosophical study The Mechanism of Meaning that culminated in the 1997 exhibition Reversible Destiny - Arakawa/Gins at the Guggenheim Museum, SoHo, New York. The project demonstrated a constellation of views concerning the nature and representation of meaning, alongside numerous architectural projects that stemmed from their investigations. With the inception of their theory of reversible destiny—the provocation that through radical forms of architecture mortality itself can be undone —they dedicated themselves to rethinking the relationships between our bodies and their architectural environments. They built six architectural works in Japan and New York, notably: the Site of Reversible Destiny—Yoro Park, 1993–95, a 4.5 acre landscape in the mountains of Gifu Prefecture, Japan; Reversible Destiny Lofts Mitaka—In Memory of Helen Keller, 2005, a multi-residential development in Tokyo, Japan; Bioscleave House (Lifespan Extending Villa), a residence in East Hampton, New York. Although Arakawa and Madeline Gins are known primarily for their work in painting, poetry, and architecture, they created two experimental films: Why Not (A Serenade of Eschatological Ecology) (1969) and For Example (A Critique of Never) (1971). Both films premiered at the Whitney Museum of American Art and have been described by film critic and historian Amos Vogel in Film as a Subversive Art as “unquestionably a major work of the American Avant-Garde of the seventies”. The films have been screened at the Sogetsu Art Center (1969), Tokyo, Japan; the Venice Biennale 1978, Venice, Italy; Onnasch Galerie (1971), Cologne, Germany; NTT InterCommunication Center (1998), Tokyo, Japan; Aichi Arts Center (2001), Nagoya, Japan; Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (2011), Yamaguchi, Japan; Park Tower Hall Image Forum Festival 2014, Tokyo, Japan; Forum Lenteng (2016), Jakarta, Indonesia; Toyo University (2017), Tokyo, Japan; Kansai University (2018), Osaka, Japan; among other venues.