Arakawa (Shusaku Arakawa)

Artist, architect & poet (b.1936)

Born in Nagoya, Japan; has lived in New York since 1961.

Artist's web site (Architectural Body Research Foundation)

"Since 1963, artists-architects-poets Arakawa and Madeline Gins have worked in collaboration to produce visionary, boundary-defying art and architecture. Their seminal work, The Mechanism of Meaning, has been exhibited widely throughout the world. In 1987, as a means of financing the design and construction of works of procedural architecture that draw on The Mechanism of Meaning, extending its theoretical implications into the environment, Arakawa and Gins founded the Architectural Body Research Foundation. The Foundation actively collaborates with leading practitioners in a wide-range of disciplines including, but not limited to, experimental biology, neuroscience, quantum physics, experimental phenomenology, and medicine."

Profile (ArtFacts.net)

Gallery profile (Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, Inc.)

Arakawa exhibited in a series of solo and group exhibitions at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts between 1972-2000.

Martin E. Rosenberg, "A Brief Introduction to Arakawa and Madeline Gins"

Introduction to Arakawa and Gins as plenary speakers at the 2000 conference of the Society for Literature and Science, Atlanta, Georgia.

Interfaces: Image Texte Langage no. 21/22 (2004). Volume 1 and Volume 2.

Special issue on Architecture Against Death / Architecture Contre la Mort. Includes contributions by Arakawa and Madeline Gins, as well as full texts of selected articles, and images.

Writings

Arakawa and Madeline Gins, "Marcel Duchamp and the Transhuman". tout-fait: the Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal vol 2, no. 5 (2003)

Exhibitions & Works

"Architecture Against Death" (Philadelphia, Slought Foundation, November 20, 2004-January 31, 2005)

"An installation featuring texts and architectural renderings by Arakawa + Gins, including 'Architecture Against Death,' a manifesto by Arakawa + Gins, and 'The Tense of Architecture,' by philosopher Jean-Jacques Lecercle. 'Architecture Against Death' provides directions for architectural procedure invention and assembly, and encourages, in the words of Arakawa + Gins, the re-arrangement of landing sites so as to cultivate architectural bodies and the transhuman."

Reversible Destiny Lofts (2004)

"The City as the Art Form of the Next Millenium: Arakawa/Gins" (Tokyo, NTT Intercommunications Center, January 24-March 29, 1998)

"Reversible Destiny" (New York, Guggenheim Museum SoHo, June 25-August 31, 1997)

"Over the last three decades, Arakawa and Madeline Gins have created a remarkable body of work that bridges disciplines and seeks to expand the definition of artistic practice. This is their first major museum exhibition in the U.S. and features two important collaborations, The Mechanism of Meaning (1963-73, 1996) and their reversible destiny architecture projects, begun in 1971."

Review: Thomas McEvilley, "Arakawa and Gins at Guggenheim Solo". Art in America (January 1998).

Review: Samira Kawash, "Bodies at risk: the architecture of reversible destiny". PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 59 (vol. 20, no. 2), May 1998.

"Reversible Destiny is the first major U.S. exhibition of the collaborative art of Arakawa and Madeline Gins. Characterized by genre-defying forms and a presentation that makes enormous demands on the viewer, their work has received little attention in the United States, although they have garnered widespread interest in Europe and Japan. Despite the fantastical, almost cartoonish appearance of many of the images in this exhibit, Arakawa/Gins are quite serious, even cerebral, about the philosophical and ethical commitments of their art. It is to the Guggenheim Museum's credit that it has been willing to launch an exhibit which dares, however unfashionably, to be difficult."