Shusaku Arakawa

Shusaku Arakawa, who spoke of himself as an "eternal outsider" and "abstractionist of the distant future", first studied mathematics and medicine at the University of Tokyo, and art at the Musashino Art University.[4][5]

Arakawa was a member of Tokyo's Neo-Dadaism Organizers, a precursor to The Neo-Dada movement.[6] His early works were first displayed in the infamous Yomiuri Independent Exhibition in 1958, a watershed event for postwar Japanese avant-garde art that departed from the strictness of traditional Japanese art exhibitions in favor of a looser structure with an absence of awards and a deciding jury.[7] During this exhibition, Arakawa produced a socio-political installation that criticized the 1945 atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; coffin-like boxes contained lumps of cement with fur and hair attached to recall the violence inflicted upon Japanese citizens by the American military.[8] The utilization of objets - everyday, consumer products transformed into assemblages - permitted Arakawa to convey meaning through items not traditionally associated with the fine arts.[9]

However, Arakawa occasionally pursued non-material based mediums such as performance art to explore the relationship between artistic expression and audience spectatorship. Site Made by the Viewer is an undated work performed at Nihon University in which Arakawa requested the artist Masunobu Yoshimura and five other attendees to climb a ladder that led up to the University Auditorium's balcony. Arakawa removed the ladder from his participants and left them suspended from the balcony for over one hour while he crouched in the dark away from them. Arakawa explained he did not create an artwork but "'manipulated' his audience by turning them into 'actors'".[10]

Arakawa arrived in New York in 1961 with fourteen dollars in his pocket and a telephone number for Marcel Duchamp, whom he phoned from the airport and with whom he eventually formed a close friendship.[11] He began to integrate diagrams within his paintings as philosophical propositions to compel viewers to question the representation of forms and to assess how the diagrams affected one's perception, to which he referred to them as "diagrams of the mind."[12][13] Arakawa's diagrammatic paintings often included text intermixed with charts, arrows, and scales. Moreover, an eclectic range of cultural and historical figures inspired Arakawa's artistic engagement with philosophy, including: Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.[14][15]

Beginning in 1963, he collaborated with fellow artist, architect, and poet Madeline Gins on the research project The Mechanism of Meaning, which was then completed by 1973. This research project and its subsequent architectural projects - both built and unbuilt ones - formed the basis of the 1997 Arakawa + Gins: Reversible Destiny exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum SoHo (The accompanying book of the same title remains the most comprehensive collection of their work, and it incorporates the whole of the Arakawa/Gins book, The Mechanism of Meaning).[16]

The panels appear as a constellation of views concerning the nature of meaning that may be characterized as "holistic" or as entailments of a holistic view concerning meaning. To date, two editions of The Mechanism of Meaning have been made and many of the panels incorporate collaged elements.

In the years since Arakawa and Gins's deaths, there have been multiple legal disputes regarding ownership of The Mechanism of Meaning between the Architectural Body Research Foundation and the Reversible Destiny Foundation.[17]

Arakawa and Madeline Gins are co-founders of the Reversible Destiny Foundation, an organization dedicated to the use of architecture to extend the human lifespan.[18][19] They have co-authored books, including Reversible Destiny, which is the catalogue of their Guggenheim exhibition, Architectural Body (University of Alabama Press, 2002) and Making Dying Illegal (New York: Roof Books, 2006), and have designed and built residences and parks, including the Reversible Destiny Lofts, Bioscleave House, and the Site of Reversible Destiny – Yoro.[20]

The Bioslceave House (Lifespan Extending Villa) (2000 - 2008) in East Hampton, New York encapsulates the philosophies Arakawa and Gins shared toward human mortality. The house's form is characterized by its assymetrical, undulating appearance whose interior and exterior walls are each painted in over four dozen shades of vibrant hues. Ceilings and entranceways extend across varying directions and heights, either along straightened or curved edges. Similarly, windows and light switches are strewn along the walls at inconsistent heights. The floors are designed from hardened soil with rounded bumps atop their surfaces that slope at both slight and steep inclines; freestanding poles are included in multiple rooms to assist occupants to maintain their physical balance.[21] Arakawa and Gins firmly believed it was integral for domestic environments to be constructed in layouts that rendered residents with a sense of instability and discomfort.[22] They argued physical passivity and comfort allows the human body to deteriorate and the solution to reverse one's mortality is to reside in a home that encourages continual bodily movement and reorientation, which is evident in the Bioscleave House's lack of smooth floors and high/low placement of windows.[23][24]

Arakawa and Gins "lost their life savings" in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi Scheme.[25][26]

Arakawa died on March 18, 2010, after a week of hospitalization. Gins would not state the cause of death. "This mortality thing is bad news," she stated. She planned to redouble efforts to prove "aging can be outlawed."[27]

Internationally renowned 20th Century philosophers studied the metaphysical underpinnings behind Arakawa's artworks and valued his synthesis of philosophical theories into a visual medium.[28][29] The French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard praised Arakawa's work for its ability to "makes us [people] think through the eyes", and the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer commended Arakawa for his transformation of "the usual constancies of orientation into a strange, enticing game - a game of continually thinking out."[30] Gadamer included a quote by the German poet Paul Celan to further underscore his comments: "There are songs to sing beyond the human."[31]

The writer Charles Bernstein and artist Susan Bee observe, "Arakawa deals with the visual field as discourse, modal systems that constitute the world rather than being constituted by it."[32] The art critic and philosopher Arthur Danto found Arakawa to be "a genuinely advanced artist" whose accolades he equated to Gins's literary prowess.[33] For his part, Arakawa declared: "Painting is only an exercise, never more than that."[34]

• "UBIQUITOUS SITE, NAGI'S RYOANJI, Architectural Body(Nagi, Okayama, 1994 / Nagi Museum Of Contemporary Art)
• "The Site of Reversible Destiny - Yoro Park (Yōrō, Gifu, 1995)
• "Reversible Destiny Office - (Yōrō, Gifu, 1997)
• "Shidami Resource Recycling Model House (Nagoya, 2005)
• "The Reversible Destiny Lofts MITAKA – In Memory of Helen Keller (Mitaka, Tokyo 2005)
• "Bioscleave house - LIFESPAN EXTENDING VILLA (Northwest Harbor, East Hampton, Long Island, NY, 2008)
• "Biotopological Scale-Juggling Escalator (NY, 2013 : / Dover Street Market New York, Comme des Garçons)

• Word Rain (Gins, 1969)
• The Mechanism of Meaning (Arakawa & Gins, 1971)
• Intend (Gins, 1973)
• What the President Will Say and Do (Gins, 1984)
• To Not to Die (Gins, 1987)
• Architecture: Sites of Reversible Destiny (Arakawa & Gins, 1994)
• Hellen Keller or Arakawa (Gins, 1994)
• Reversible Destiny (Arakawa & Gins, 1997)
• Architectural Body (Arakawa & Gins, 2002)
• Making Dying Illegal (Arakawa & Gins, 2006)

Since the 1950s, Arakawa's artworks have been displayed in over four hundred exhibitions in Asia, North America, Europe, and Australia.[35]

Select Solo Exhibitions

• 1965: Peintures de Arakawa - Galerie Aujourd'hui, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, Belgium
• 1966: Arakawa - Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands
• 1970: Shusaku Arakawa, Japanese Pavillion - XXXV Venice Biennale, Italy
• 1974: Arakawa: Recent Prints - The Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA
• 1979: Arakawa Prints - Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, USA
• 1979: Arakawa: The Mechanism of Meaning - The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan
• 1982: Arakawa, Matrix 72 - Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut, USA
• 1986: Arakawa: Paintings to Read - The Contemporary Art Gallery, Tokyo, Japan
• 1994: Arakawa: Drawings 1961 - 74 - Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan
• 2006: Shusaku Arakawa: Print Works - Gifu Collection of Modern Arts, Gifu, Japan
• 2010: Funeral Bioengineering to Not to Die - Early Works by Arakawa Shusaku - The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan

Select Group Exhibitions

• 1958: Tenth Yomiuri Independents - Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan
• 1959: Eleventh Yomiuri Independents - Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan
• 1960: Twelfth Yomiuri Independents - Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan
• 1961: Thirteenth Yomiuri Independents - Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan
• 1967: Drawing: Recent Acquisitions - The Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA
• 1967: Pictures to Be Read, Poetry to Be Seen - Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois, USA
• 1968: Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture - Museum of Art Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
• 1968: Documenta IV - Kassel, Germany
• 1976: The Golden Door: Artist-Immigrants of America 1876 - 1976 - Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C., USA
• 1976: Thirty Years of American Printmaking - Brooklyn Museum, New York, USA
• 1977: Documenta VI - Kassel, Germany
• 1983: Twentieth Century Acquisitions - The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
• 2009: The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860 - 1989 - Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA
• 2019: American Masters 1940 - 1980 - National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia

Select Arakawa and Gins Exhibitions

• 1990: Building Sensoriums 1973 - 1990 - Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, USA
• 1997: Reversible Destiny - Arakawa/Gins - Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA
• 2004: Arakawa + Gins: Architecture Against Death - Nagoya University of Arts, Art & Design Center, Nagoya, Japan
• 2010: Arakawa + Gins: Reversible Destiny Projects - Kyoto Institute of Technology Museum and Archives, Kyoto, Japan
• 2016: Arakawa and Madeline Gins: Eternal Gradient - Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, Columbia University, New York

Retrospectives

• 2019: Arakawa: Diagrams for the Imagination - Gagosian, New York, USA

Arakawa served as a representative of Japan in the XXXV Venice Biennale (1970), and was a participant in the German-based contemporary art exhibitions Documenta IV (1968) and Documenta VI (1977).[36][37][38]

Additionally, Arakawa was the recipient of multiple awards and honors:[39]

• 1986: Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, French Government
• 1987 - 1988: John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship
• 1988 - 1989: Belgian Critics' Prize
• 1997: College Art Association's Artist Award for Exhibition of the Year/Distinguished Body of Work, Presentation or Performance Award
• 1998: Highest award in the Rainbow Town Urban Design Competition
• 2003: Shijo Housho - Medal with Purple Ribbon
• 2003: Nihon Gendai Shinko Sho - Award for Innovation in Japanese Contemporary Art from Japan Arts Foundation
• 2010: The Order of the Rising Sun - Gold Rays with Rosette

In addition to private and corporate collections, many of Arakawa's artworks are permanently housed in prestigious museums around the world, including: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Sezon Museum of Modern Art, Karuizawa, Japan.[40]

• Madeline Gins
• Reversible Destiny Foundation
• Nagi Museum Of Contemporary Art

• Arakawa and Madeline Gins Tokyo Office
• Shusaku Arakawa collection at the Israel Museum. Retrieved September 2016.
• Shusaku Arakawa works at the National Gallery of Art