Charles Bernstein on Just the Station of Gins & Arakawa

Charles Bernstein shares the space once and still inhabited by Madeline Gins and Shusaku Arakawa for Hyperallergic in "What Happens When the Artist Drops Away? The Legacy of Arakawa and Gins."

"Susan Bee and I met Arakawa and Gins through Hannah Weiner in the late 1970s. Indeed, Susan and I wrote our only collaborative essay, in 1981, 'Meaning the Meaning: Arakawa’s Critique of Space' in which we looked at Arakawa’s early painting and The Mechanism of Meaning in terms of a critique of Euclidean and Cartesian conception of space-time, what Robin Blaser — thinking of Olson and Whitehead, called the Western Box, but which also relates to Donald Ault’s work on Blake, Visionary Physics." Interestingly, Bernstein goes on to situate the pair within pataphysics:

Like the essay on multidimensional architecture, I consider...[their] related work not to be theory, philosophy, or science, but rather to be a conceptual poem or more precisely pata-conceptual, for I see Alfred Jarry, as much as Duchamp, as the presiding angel of these works. If we read Arakawa and Gins as philosophy than they will seem, like so many Sancho Panzas, and come out short. But as pataphysics, Arakawa/Gins enter into a still active set of swerving quests.

Arakawa and Gins’s swerve to architecture and the folly of their assertion of efficacy was not only a turn from poetry and art but also from pataphysics. Yet it is the refusal of that turn, returning their procedural architecture to the realm of imaginary solutions, which reclaims their most significant work for poetry and art.

In his 1860 William Blake: A Critical Essay Critical Essay [sic], Swinburne writes, “All that was accepted for art, all that was taken for poetry, [Blake] rejected as barren symbols, and would fain have broken up as mendacious idols.” Arakawa and Gins have resisted, with increasing scale, the ability of readers/viewers to absorb their work as painting or poetry — or indeed as art. While they may be described as architects of the “Reversible Destiny” projects, the point is not to make aesthetic objects to be appreciated but to construct “stations” that will transform perception. The temporal modeling of Arakawa and Gins’s visual and architectural projects is configured to warp and reform the space-time continuum. Language is embedded into these works not as something to be read, as on a page or even a screen, but as something to interact with in an unfolding/enfolding web. The constructed “landing sites” of Reversible Destiny challenge rote perceptual patterns and activate underutilized cognitive paths.

Later: "We used to say the artist would drop away and there would just be the work. With Reversible Destiny, can we go further and say the work drops away and there is just the station, a nonplace or point blank of radical metamorphosis?"

Great piece. Read it all at Hyperallergic.

Speaking of Gins: If you're in Los Angeles, drop by the May 17 tribute to the artist, "A Landing Site for Madeline Gins," hosted by Matias Viegener, LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director Michael Govan, and the Poetic Research Bureau. RSVP on Facebook.