Arakawa
Shusaku Arakawa was a Japanese artist and architect. He had a personal and artistic partnership with writer and artist Madeline Gins that spanned more than four decades. Before arriving in New York in 1961, Arakawa had studied mathematics and medicine at the University of Tokyo, and art at the Musashino Art University. He was a member of Tokyo’s Neo-Dada Organizers; in 1958, he exhibited at the 10th Yomiuri Independent exhibition, a watershed event for the postwar Japanese avant-garde. In New York, Arakawa sought out Marcel Duchamp, having the gall to ring him up right from the airport the day he arrived, and the two became close friends. Duchamp found Arakawa’s art so radical that he strongly advised, particularly in light of the mad-house the art-world was, that he get a job. The 1965 Arakawa exhibition at the Dwan Gallery is an important event in the history of conceptual art.
In 1963, he began collaborating with Madeline Gins on the research project The Mechanism of Meaning. In 1987, they founded the ABRF (formerly Containers of the Mind Foundation). They designed and built residences (Reversible Destiny Houses, Bioscleave House, Shidami Resource Recycling Model House) and parks (Site of Reversible Destiny-Yoro). They …
Shusaku Arakawa was a Japanese artist and architect. He had a personal and artistic partnership with writer and artist Madeline Gins that spanned more than four decades. Before arriving in New York in 1961, Arakawa had studied mathematics and medicine at the University of Tokyo, and art at the Musashino Art University. He was a member of Tokyo’s Neo-Dada Organizers; in 1958, he exhibited at the 10th Yomiuri Independent exhibition, a watershed event for the postwar Japanese avant-garde. In New York, Arakawa sought out Marcel Duchamp, having the gall to ring him up right from the airport the day he arrived, and the two became close friends. Duchamp found Arakawa’s art so radical that he strongly advised, particularly in light of the mad-house the art-world was, that he get a job. The 1965 Arakawa exhibition at the Dwan Gallery is an important event in the history of conceptual art.
In 1963, he began collaborating with Madeline Gins on the research project The Mechanism of Meaning. In 1987, they founded the ABRF (formerly Containers of the Mind Foundation). They designed and built residences (Reversible Destiny Houses, Bioscleave House, Shidami Resource Recycling Model House) and parks (Site of Reversible Destiny-Yoro). They developed an original theory and practice of the relation of the human being to the exterior world, elaborated most extensively in their book, Architectural Body. In 2010, Arakawa and Madeline Gins created a new foundation, the Reversible Destiny Foundation, which actively collaborates with a wide-range of disciplines including, experimental biology, neuroscience, quantum physics, experimental phenomenology, and medicine to produce new works of procedural architecture. Together and separately they were the authors of several books and exhibition volumes, most recently, Making Dying Illegal.
Courtesy of the Artist's Site/Reversible Destiny Foundation
