Madeline Gins

Continuing the collaboration of over 30 years between the New York-based artists Arakawa and Madeline Gins, this book is a unique and predominantly visual exploration into architecture and its centrality to the project of human self-knowledge and self-formation, carrying philosophical argument into the realm of construction. It asks what is the nature of perception? and how does the human being relate to surrounding space? Recording and documenting what it is actually like for a person to stand within a piece of architecture, this is the first systematic study of the role the body and bodily movement play in the forming of the world. Through a series of computer-generated images of great beauty and intricacy, the reader is presented with ways of reworking the man-made world that is architecture. Going further, the book suggests a revolutionary re-invention of the planet and, by extension, the universe.

"Helen Keller or Arakawa gives rise to a new form of "speculative" fiction, conveying the potential for human experience now and here rather than depicting worlds distant in space or time. The novel tracks consciousness and identity through the intermingling paths of its three protagonists: the historical person Helen Keller; the iconoclastic artist Arakawa; and the writer herself, Madeline Gins. At the same time, this innovative work advances and upsets key tenets of contemporary critical theory.". "The book takes off from Helen Keller's evocative journal entries, exemplifying a unique female intelligence in concert with recognizable masculine varieties. On the deck of an ocean liner, Helen and Niels Bohr discuss color, olfaction, and the compulsion inside protoplasm, speaking with their hands. The shinnyu episode offers a discursive look at the japanese mark that in its origin denotes both "going" and "pausing." One chapter thickly examines the disappearing phoneme "th" leading through feathers to birds - with an addendum on the vocabulary of the Scots. The novel is peopled with unlikely characters. Voluntar, the size of a dot ("found lounging in the figurative, sword in hand") travels in an instant from zero to top speed. In Critical Beach, the terrain itself comes alive, as a critically active sensibility, to help devise new modes of perceiving.". "Gins says: "When Helen Keller tries to explain the world, she often ends up describing an Arakawa painting." The novel narrates how the artist utilizes visual abstraction to outline forms of the world that otherwise remain hidden. Helen Keller does it with her body, aided by an incisive verbal intelligence and boundless curiosity. Throughout the unfolding, Gins pilots a kind of "mute" speech - natural and sensual, intensely pleasurable - which subsumes great heuristic constructions in its wake."--BOOK JACKET.

"Poet, philosopher, architect and transdisciplinary artist, Madeline Gins (1941-2014) is well known for her collaborations with her husband, the artist Arakawa, on the experimental architectural project Reversible Destiny, via which they sought to arrest mortality by transforming the built environment. Yet, her own writings--in the form of poetry, essays, experimental prose, and philosophical inquiries--represent her most visionary and transformative work. Expansive and playful, Gin's vigorous and often ecstatic exploration of the physicality of language challenges us to sense more acutely the ways in which we can--and could--write and read. Like Gertrude Stein before her, Gins transfigures grammar and liberates words. Like her contemporaries in conceptual art, her writing is attuned to the energized, collaborative space between reader and page. She invites the reader into a field of infinite, ever-multiplying possibility. This revelatory anthology, edited and with an introduction by the writer and critic Lucy Ives brings never-before-published poems and essays together with a complete facsimile reproduction of Gins' 1969 masterpiece, WORD RAIN (or A Discursive Introduction to the Intimate Philosophical Investigations of G,R,E,T,A, G,A,R,B,O, It Says), along with substantial excerpts from her two later books What the President Will Say and Do!! (1984) and Helen Keller or Arakawa (1994). Long out of print or unpublished, Gins' poems and prose form a powerful corpus of experimental literature, one which is sure to upend existing narratives of American poetics at the close of the twentieth century."--inside book cover.