Building Sensoriums 1973-1990 – for determining how not to die

09-15-1990〜10-13-1990

At Ronald Feldman Fine Arts

ARAKAWA & GINS

BUILDING SENSORIUMS 1973-1990
-for determining how not to die

September 15 – October 13

The Process in Question/
Reversible DestinyStuttering God
ARAKAWA
MADELINE GINS

Post-Frankensteinian Architecture/
Stuttering God
MADELINE GINS
ARAKAWA
JOHN KNESL

I.
“Did you say something”
“Is that you, body—and talking to yourself?”
(“Is that me, body—and talking to myself?”)
“If I am body, then this must be spacetime.”

II.
“Spacetime: this where I say I am.”
“Spacetime: raw untargeted perceiving.”

III.
“Let everywhere perception falls or lands, or nearly falls or nearly lands, be known as belonging to the class of furniture of perceiving?—suggesting different shapes and positionings for perceptual landing sites.”

“Any instantaneous set of these (the full array of the gaze) may provisionally determine a container of mind.”

“To define a container of mind find something that works as one.”

“G-G-G-G-God seeks “more other of” body, th-th-th-th-th-thought I.”

IV.
Of course body talks to itself—and talks to and through spacetime, whatver that is and isn’t. It has to learn to engineer a listening to itself as other—believe it or not.

What we want to know from body is, what’s it doing here? How could things go otherwise for it, or how other could it get to grow—in a more viable form—without sacrificing what’s most valuable about itself?

This itself. This problematical itself. No itself to be found.

Up until now, the difficulty has been that in a world dominated by verbal discourse, body, the body of the speaker and that of the listener, so narrowly addressed, if addressed at all, was kept forever hidden behind the procession of words being spoken. Similarly, with primarily visual discourse, the viewer (or maker) together with his/her viewing (forming) process, was off to one side, beside the fact, obscured by a series of successive views.

By means of what might be called a parallel constraining, processes previously not accessible to observation can become so. The observer, although never not constrained by his or her inherent limitations, will when standing within a construction built to mimic or parallel the common constraints of human expression and action, be able at least to cease having to sidestep or by-pass his/her own self-same body as a central issue.

Instead of places in which perception finds itself compelled to tour haphazardly a collection of surfaces for a determining of the view (thus keeping body or the process in question in hiding as usual) there shall be constructed places that will afford to perceiving, to the projected array, a set of matching (to it) contact points of potential landing sites for the moulding or containing of it (the act of perceiving) as a whole. These places have the potential to act as reversible sites of phenomena. Any one of these places might be that spot at which the observed could itself become the observer. With this, the great but still frivolous (from the point of view of survival of course) strictly hermeneutical age of Marcel Duchamp, under which an accepted state of affairs is that the spectator or posterity ultimately acts as true maker of the work of art, would come to an end, and a still more collaborative, as-yet-unnamed era would begin, one in which the accepted state of affairs would be for true bodies of spectators to be actually originated through works of art.

The collaboration of Arakawa and Madeline Gins in this direction is one of more than twenty-years standing. They have co-authored two books, The Mechanism of Meaning [(third revised edition) New York: Abbeville Press, 1989] and To Not To Die [Paris: editions de la difference, 1987.] The Process in Question/Bridge of Reversible Destiny is the outcome of many years of thought on these matters. It has been their intention for some time to expand their collaboration. They have formed the Containers of Mind Foundation for this purpose.

The first move toward this projected expansion consists of a uniting of forces with the architect and architectural theorist John Knesl (author of the essays, “From Object to Flesh” and “Body-building for Architects”) for the forming of a Stuttering God.

The viewer is presented here with enough “stuff of the world” so as not to have to take a false step.

There will be a reception for the artists on Saturday, September 15 for 5-7pm. Gallery hours are Tuesday – Saturday, 10-6, Mondays by appointment. For more information, please contact Susan Yung at (212)226-3232.

(quoted from “Official website”)