The Brooklyn Rail

“Hello… We will no longer throw ourselves into the mortality wastebasket. Shall we put it in the following gentle but firm way? Oh yes, we shall. Enough is enough. We have decided not to die.”

—Reversible Destiny Declaration (2013)
Sound, 37 seconds, Recorded by Léopold Lambert, Courtesy of PennSound

Madeline Gins (1941–2014) is perhaps best known for her collaborative architectural work with husband Shusaku Arakawa: the Reversible Destiny Foundation. The project was conceived under the mandate, “we have decided not to die” with the belief that a mutable built environment, one that required constant attention, could increase longevity and teach the body not to decay.

Infinite Systems, the first solo exhibition dedicated to artist, poet, and “puzzle creature” Madeline Gins at Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art, convincingly argues that the origins of the Reversible Destiny project were evident in Gins’s earliest drawings. Long before she refused the absolutism of death, she’d established a throughline in her independent practice. Or, as curator Charlotte Youkilis suggests, Gins was always “a proponent of tentativeness”.

Taking Gins’s embrace of uncertainty—of groundlessness—seriously, Youkilis makes use of the museum’s concrete floor as a site for exhibition. The gallery space is dimensioned by a floor projection, a reprisal of Gins and Arakawa’s 1969 performance, originally made for zero to nine “Street Works,” organized by John Perreault, Marjorie Strider, and Hannah Weiner to document public performances.

From the ceiling, thin white lines of light project a facsimile of a house as over-sized blueprint. Each element is labeled; as in an architectural rendering, “BEDROOM” or “DOOR” indicate that the recognizable technical shorthand can be interpreted as such. However, Gins complicates these assumptions by adding additional symbols such as a graphic bell labeled “birdcage,” and a circle which is here, “globe”. As people walk through the projection, they block the light, entering the work as they navigate these arbitrary indications.

To be constantly disarmed is one way to inure great sensitivity. In the sixties, Gins enrolled in the Brooklyn Museum Art School, where she began making visual works—paintings and drawings—and in these earliest pieces one already sees a documented obsession with the senses.

Pencil drawings of floating ears, and technical renderings of disembodied eye sockets frequent her chromatic compositions. In vitrines filled with Gins’s early drawings, paintings, pseudo-scientific schema, and ephemera, one sees language and mark-making organized by imagined biological structures. The aesthetics of info-technics are rigorously applied to surreal abstraction.

In one exhibited early piece, a loose paper is scrawled with diachronic schema. From the word “Madeline” and a self-portrait in marker, Gins has extended a line to “Arakawa,” who she labels with a heart and the subcategory “vitamins”.

Elsewhere, a branch leads to the word “catalogue” which stems four unlabeled lines. Her categories are indiscrete, but the instinct to categorize seems consistent. In Gins’s body of work displayed, which includes scrawled graphite drawings of cell structures, a perfume engineered to repel men, and an engrossing attenuation to biology, one sees an attempt to make art science, and science art. There’s something practical and applied underpinning the aesthetic here.

It follows that Gins was extensively concerned with the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In “Eye and Mind,” Merleau-Ponty rejects enlightenment epistemology, which assumes perception is objective, with the simple observation that the world is not in front of us. The world is not in front of us, rather, it atmospherically surrounds us. “Sensory experience is unstable,” Merleau-Ponty reminds, “and alien to natural perception, which we achieve with our whole body all at once.” In tangent, Gins was fascinated by snails, as they represent a kind of being in which sensation is irreducible from its physicality.

Ensconcing snail shells and the tender all-feeling membranes they protect populate her early drawings, seen rendered in charcoal and careful acrylics. Often drawn alongside grappling hooks, both would later reappear in the architectural work of Arakawa+Gins as a way to invite the body to extend in space and clumsily perform a new physicality. While developing the Bioscleave House (Lifespan Extending Villa) on Long Island, they took on the snail as an emblem, imagining a gastropod theology around the “newborn organism-person-environment an Atlas shouldering the world in its entirety”.

A publication titled “Yellow Should Always Follow Blue,” was printed for the exhibition by 1080PRESS with essays by Susan Bee, Lucy Ives, Tausif Noor, Aviva Silverman and a selected reprisal of Gins’s difficult to find What Will The President Say and Do!!. The book, much like much of her works, has tactical aspirations.

Gins’s language — often concrete, structural, interested in form, was an ideological precursor to the architectural projects she and Arakawa undertook. Concrete poetry, after all, was given its moniker by Augusto de Campo and a few other poets who were inspired by architecture’s ability to make the aesthetic physical. Traversing those categories, Tausif Noor proposed a spatial quality to Gins’s concrete poetry, writing that her playful aphorisms “instantiate a dynamic back-and-forth between writer and reader.” This can be seen in her aesthetic use of language, which often works to strip words of their semiotic contents, freeing them to become quixotic images. “QUADRUPLE EVERY SPOKEN WORD!” Or, “AMOEBAS SHOULD ALL FACE IN THE SAME DIRECTION!”

In a curatorial statement, Youkilis writes that this “not knowing” might allow one to “forget pre-existing paradigms, reject the way we are trained to live.” Gins illustrates this, drawing out a multiplicity of senses in her visual work, poetry and architectural projects to destabilize any presumptions of totalizing knowledge. Sensation comes in from everywhere, and often contradicts.