Madeline Gins

Shusaku Arakawa

This manifesto is a verbal articulation of the authors' visionary theory of how the human body, architecture, and creativity define and sustain one another. This revolutionary work by artist-architects Arakawa and Madeline Gins demonstrates the inter-connectedness of innovative architectural design, the poetic process, and philosophical inquiry. Together, they have created an experimental and widely admired body of work--museum installations, landscape and park commissions, home and office designs, avant-garde films, poetry collections--that challenges traditional notions about the built environment. This book promotes a deliberate use of architecture and design in dealing with the blight of the human condition; it recommends that people seek architectural and aesthetic solutions to the dilemma of mortality. In 1997 the Guggenheim Museum presented an Arakawa/Gins retrospective and published a comprehensive volume of their work titled Reversible Destiny: We Have Decided Not to Die. Architectural Body continues the philosophical definition of that project and demands a fundamental rethinking of the terms "human" and "being." When organisms assume full responsibility for inventing themselves, where they live and how they live will merge. The artists believe that a thorough re-visioning of architecture will redefine life and its limitations and render death passe. The authors explain that "Another way to read reversible destiny . . . Is as an open challenge to our species to reinvent itself and to desist from foreclosing on any possibility." Audacious and liberating, this volume will be of interest to students and scholars of 20th-century poetry, postmodern critical theory, conceptual art and architecture, contemporary avant-garde poetics, and to serious readers interested in architecture's influence on imaginative expression.

Architectural Body

Shūsaku Arakawa

"Making Dying Illegal is the latest installment of the ongoing Arakawa and Gins Reversible Destiny Project. By making the on-the-surface absurd proposal to legislate against dying, a strong political and satirical strategy is produced as a series of architectural principles that relate to Arakawa's buildings in Europe and Japan. Having read the book over many times in editing, we feel that MDI can become what the reader wants to make it. This flexible text smacks of Alice in Wonderland, Dada tract, and contemporary self-help political critique--a truly exciting text."--Publisher's website

Architecture Against Death : Original to the 21st Century

Making Dying Illegal

Fiction. Art Theory. HELEN KELLER OR ARAKAWA gives rise to a new form of speculative fiction, conveying the potential for human experience now and here rather than depicting worlds distant in space or time. The novel tracks consciousness and identity through the intermingling paths of its three protangonists: the historical person Helen Keller; the iconoclastic artist Arakawa; and the writer herself, Madeline Gins. At the same time, this innovative work advances and upsets key tenets of contemporary critcal theory. This is a beautifully published book whose author is a participant in the recent show POETRY PLASTIQUE at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York. The catalog for that show, edited by Jay Sanders and Charles Bernstein, is listed in this SPD catalog.

Helen Keller Or Arakawa

Over the last three decades, Arakawa (Shusaku Arakawa, b. 1936) and Madeline Gins (b. 1941) have created a remarkable body of work that bridges disciplines and seeks to expand the definition of artistic practice. This volume, published on the occasion of a major exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum SoHo, features two important collaborations, The Mechanism of Meaning, 1963-73, 1996, and their "reversible destiny" architecture projects, begun in 1971.

Reversible Destiny : Arakawa/Gins

Michael Govan

Andrew E. Benjamin

Guggenheim Museum Soho

Over the last three decades, the artists Arakawa (b 1936) and Madeline Gins (b 1941) have created a body of work which includes The Mechanism of Meaning, a cycle of 83 mixed-media paintings begun in 1963 and completed, for the most part, by 1973. The piece covers a variety of issues, including the nature of perception, how human beings function as persons, and the essential oneness of body and mind.

Madeline Gins

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