When Arakawa and Madeline Gins befriended Marcel Duchamp in the early 1960s, Duchamp carried a scrap of paper in his coat pocket reading "D'ailleurs, c'est toujours les autres qui meurent" (Besides, it's always other people who die) — the phrase that ended up on his grave. The whole of Arakawa and Gins's practice, spanning architecture, art, film, philosophy and writing, lives in the humor of that punchline, and in what both described as one of the most significant events of their lives: meeting one another, falling in love, and discovering death anew.
The Poetic Jump surveys the pair's personal and creative partnership and how it led them to question "the mistaken concept of the unavoidable death." Like many of their peers in the New York avant-garde, Arakawa and Gins probed the workings of human consciousness; by the 1990s their visual-philosophical investigations led to "procedural architecture" — the undulating floors, distorted spaces and bright colors of Reversible Destiny Architecture, designed to destabilize the senses and recompose human vitality. Paintings, poetry, film and an installation offer places to experience what reversible destiny might be, including Ubiquitous Site X (1987–91), an early installation visitors roam in darkness over an uneven floor.
Curated by Noa Wesley, Assistant Curator. Support provided by Castelli Gallery, with special thanks to the Reversible Destiny Foundation. A work of short fiction by Renee Gladman, Love of Houses, accompanies the exhibition as part of the Arts and Letters Reader series.
American Academy of Arts and Letters