Architectural Body (Modern and Contemporary Poetics)

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.

Arts & Photography

Gins, Madeline

Arakawa, Shūsaku

Architecture

University Alabama Press

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.

A creative and dynamic volume by Arakawa and Gins, who have been called the most philosophical of living artists, which collects their writings and art work from a period of nearly 2 decades. They address the essential art query of our time: How does it all fit together? Art and science happens in fragments. They take fragments, and they try, by making linkages to perceiving tactics immediate, to draw these tactics, these ways of construing a demonstrably conceivable whole that are the perceiver-reader, into a unified field that they refer to as "the perceiving field." They propose to re-create and to rejoin fragments, and would-be fragments, so as to make a new whole.

Mechanism of Meaning

Gins, Arakawa

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Abbeville Pr

What the President Will Say and Do

Reference

Station Hill Pr

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

Literature & Fiction

United States

Burning Books

Archer Fields Pr

Continuing the collaboration of over 30 years between the New York-based artists Arakawa and Madeline Gins, this book is a unique and predominantly visual exploration into architecture and its centrality to the project of human self-knowledge and self-formation, carrying philosophical argument into the realm of construction. It asks what is the nature of perception? and how does the human being relate to surrounding space? Recording and documenting what it is actually like for a person to stand within a piece of architecture, this is the first systematic study of the role the body and bodily movement play in the forming of the world. Through a series of computer-generated images of great beauty and intricacy, the reader is presented with ways of reworking the man-made world that is architecture. Going further, the book suggests a revolutionary re-invention of the planet and, by extension, the universe.

Architecture: Sites of Reversible Destiny- Architectural Experiments After Auschwitz-Hiroshima (Art and design monograph)

Arakawa

Academy Editions

Accompanying a unique exhibition at the respected Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York, this book is a remarkable combination of the work of poets and artists, that explores in new ways the relationship between the visual and the verbal. In his preface, Charles Bernstein writes: "Not words and pictures but poems as visual objects. Not poems about pictures but pictures that are poems. Not works closed in a book but hanging on a wall or suspended from the ceiling or rising from the floor or sounding from inside a figure or embedded with paint on a canvas or written in the sky or flickering on a screen." Co-curator Jay Sanders explains in his introduction: "We had a gallery and we wanted to flood it with poetry. Not with "poetic" artwork, but with actual poetry, made by poets. But, we have gallery walls, not pages in a book. So we organized a show of art overrun with poetry and a show of poetry riddled with art."

Poetry Plastique

CAGE, John

Bernstein, Charles

Antin, David

Bök, Christian

Tuttle, Richard

Scalapino, Leslie

Lin, Tan

Hejinian, Lyn

Drucker, Johanna

Goldsmith, Kenneth

Berssenbrugge, Mei-Mei

Grenier, Robert

McCaffery, Steve

McVarish, Emily

CREELEY, Robert

Wershler-Henry, Darren

MacLow, Jackson

Piombino, Nick

Poetry

Granary Books/Marianne Boesky Gallery

Literary Nonfiction. Madeline Gins and Arakawa's book opens with this "Reversible Destiny Statute": "Not making an all-out effort to go on living and the act of dying are from this date on classed first-order felonies. Citizens will need to strive to define the heartiness of their existences and be responsible for astute and timely assessment of negative patterns of events and failed or failing conditions. Choosing to live within a tactically posed surround/tutelary abode will be counted as an all-out effort to go on living." "Equal parts poetry, philosophy, legislation, blueprint, remedy, and demand, this book throws down the gauntlet and calls Dying what it really is--treason against the body"--Joshua Edwards. "Arakawa and Gins' latest book is not just a utopian statement but a ground-breaking quest for new radical thinking which revives the optimistic stance of modernism"--Francoise Kral.

Making Dying Illegal

Roof Books

Product Description 
A revelatory anthology of poems, experimental prose and previously unpublished work by Madeline Gins, the transdisciplinary writer-artist-thinker famed for her “Reversible Destiny” architecture 
Poet, philosopher, speculative architect and transdisciplinary artist, Madeline Gins is well known for her collaborations with her husband, the artist Arakawa, on the experimental architectural project Reversible Destiny, in which they sought to arrest mortality by transforming the built environment. Yet, her own writings―in the form of poetry, essays, experimental prose and philosophical inquiries―represent her most visionary and transformative work. Like Gertrude Stein before her, Gins transfigures grammar and liberates words. Like her contemporaries in conceptual art, her writing is attuned to the energized, collaborative space between reader and page. 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’ 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’ 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 20th century.Born in the Bronx and long a resident of New York City, Madeline Gins (1941–2014) participated in experimental artistic and literary movements of the 1960s and ‘70s before developing a collaborative practice as a philosopher and architect. Alongside her own writing, Gins collaborated with her husband, the artist Arakawa, on a theory of “procedural architecture,” an endeavor to create buildings and environments that would prevent human death. 
 Review 
[A] radical reinvention of fiction. -- Randy Kennedy ― 
Ursula\nStimulating and consistently surprising, this is a treat for those interested in interdisciplinary artists such as John Cage. -- Editors ― 
Publishers Weekly\nThis collection brings to light the literary achievements of conceptual artist and speculative architect Madeline Gins. -- Megan Liberty ― 
Brooklyn Rail\nThis generous selection of texts is an opportunity to engage with the full scope of [Gins's] thinking. -- Steve Zultanski ― 
Frieze\nA startling collection of essays, novels, artist books, and poems. -- Quinn Latimer ― 
4 Columns\nExploratory, playful, participatory: these are the “design-elements” Gins employs to interface with the permeable form of being-human that she imagines for us. To this list I must also add generosity, as she delivers to us a version of ourselves, and of language, that is fluid and abundant. The editing and publishing of The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader reflects this generosity, fluidity, and abundance. I’m hard-pressed to think of any other attributes more crucial to cultivate in our present time. -- Karla Kelsey ― 
Hyperallergic\nThough her style fluctuates, Gins’s keen interest in the embodied relationship between writing and reading remains constant throughout the collection [...] For Gins, words are nothing if not physical... Experiencing Gins’s writing in print ― at long last ― is so necessary. -- Alice Bucknell ― 
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The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader

Siglio

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