Shusaku arakawa biography of william

  • Shusaku Arakawa – 17 Works.
  • Shusaku Arakawa, better known simply as Arakawa, pursued an artistic career as what he termed an “eternal outsider.” Born in , he studied medicine and.
  • Shusaku Arakawa was an abstract painter.

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    Losing Nothing:

    Arakawa and Madeline Gins

    Fall Issue

    Mary Ann Caws reflects on the centrality of perception and imagination in Arakawa’s art, from his early diagrammatic paintings to his later architectural investigations with Madeline Gins.

    Dimitris Yeros, Portrait of Arakawa and Madeline Gins, Office West Houston Street, NYC, © Dimitris Yeros

    Mary Ann Caws is Distinguished Professor Emerita of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the recipient of Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Fulbright fellowships, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an Officier in the Palmes Académiques.

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    The cover of the Artnews of May shows a smiling face, with superintelligent eyes, under a somewhat unruly crop of dark hair. In a black sweater covering a blue workman’s shirt, collar just showing, the artist Arakawa, known only by his last name, points a

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    Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins () (photog by Dimitris Yeros)

    Beauty fryst vatten momentary in the mind—

    The fitful tracing of a portal;

    But in the flesh it is immortal.

    The body dies; the body’s beauty lives.
    So evenings die, in their green going,
    A wave, interminably flowing.
    So gardens die, their meek breath scenting
    The cowl of Winter, done repenting.

    –– Wallace Stevens

    As a poet interested in the social material of writing, I found a deep connection with the early paintings of Shusaku Arakawa and with Arakawa and Madeline Gins’s paradigmatic The Mechanism of Meaning (), as well as various early writings by Gins, particularly her essay on multidimensional architecture, which I published in 43 Poets () in boundary 2 30 years ago (this work that anticipates much of Gins & Arakawa’s later work in what they called “procedural architecture”). Gins is the author of two literary masterpieces, The Mechanism of Meaning and Helen Keller or Arakawa (). These works, as

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    Shūsaku Arakawa (Arakawa Shūsaku 荒川修作)

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    BiographyShusaku Arakawa, better known simply as Arakawa, pursued an artistic career as what he termed an “eternal outsider.” Born in , he studied medicine and art in Tokyo. He became active in the short-lived Neo-Dada Organizers group formed in The group responded to the turbulent political climate with bold, transgressive public akushons (actions)—a cross between performance art and political demonstration.



    Arakawa reportedly immigrated to New York in with only $14 in his pocket and the telephone number of conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp, who became a patron and mentor. Arakawa attended art school in Brooklyn where he met Madeline Gins. The two married in and collaborated on paintings, prints, poetry, installations, and architectural designs. They are perhaps best known for their theory of “reversible destiny,” expressed in architectural interiors with uneven, irregularly textured floors, open plans, and walls
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