was a Japanese conceptual artist and architect. He had a personal and artistic partnership with the writer and artist Madeline Gins that spanned more than four decades in which they collaborated on a diverse range of visual mediums, including: painting & printmaking, experimental filmmaking, performance art, and architectural & landscape design.
Throughout his life, Arakawa frequently infused his works with philosophical ideas that considered art's intrinsic functions, human perceptions of the physical world, and the language of signs, symbols, and visual meanings. These thematic elements were based on the writings and theories authored by key figures in Science, Philosophy, and Art History: Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Beginning in the 1960s, Arakawa's work attracted positive responses from the Western art world and led to his representation at numerous esteemed galleries and museums: the Dwan Gallery, Gagosian, The National Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou, David Barnett Gallery, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Arakawa and Gins founded The Reversible Destiny Foundation in which they designed architectural sites that were aimed toward the longevity of human life expectancy.Keane, J. (2013). Initiating Change: Architecting the Body-Environment with Arkawa and Gins. In The innovation Imperative: Architectures of Vitality (pp. 76-83). John Wiley & Sons. Retrieved January 18, 2021, from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ad.1528 Moreover, they established the Architectural Body Research Foundation in 1987 as a non-profit research group that stimulated multidisciplinary studies with renowned biologists, neuroscientists, quantum physicists, and medical doctors on the nature of life and death.“About ABRF.” Architectural Body Research Foundation, January 20, 2021. https://www.architecturalbodyresearchfoundation.com/gallery.
Arakawa usually referred to himself by his surname only, which eventually came to be more commonly practiced by him during his career in the United States and Europe.The Guardian, Shusaku Arakawa obituary
Early life Shusaku Arakawa was born in Nagoya on July 6, 1936. His family ran an udon shop. Arakawa spoke of himself as an "eternal outsider" and "abstractionist of the future", and was interested in a variety of disciplines including art, mathematics, and medicine. The convergence of his interests in multiple, seemingly disparate subjects originated during childhood. One of Arakawa's neighbors was a doctor who offered the young Arakawa professional advice on proper training for a career in medicine. According to Arakawa, the doctor's wife, an artist, advised him to "draw" which led him to refine his skills in both drawing and painting.
Arakawa briefly attended Musashino Art University to study art.artnet.com: Resource Library: Arakawa, Shusaku
Early career (1950s – 1960s) Arakawa's early works were first displayed in the infamous Yomiuri Indépendant Exhibition in 1958, a watershed event for postwar Japanese avant-garde art that departed from the strictness of traditional Japanese art exhibitions in favor of a looser structure with an absence of awards and a deciding jury.Erber, Pedro (2015). ARTMargins. Introduction to Akasegawa Genpei's “The Objet After Stalin", 103. Retrieved January 25, 2021, from https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/ARTM_a_00125 Published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology During this exhibition, Arakawa produced a socio-political installation that criticized the 1945 atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; coffin-like boxes contained lumps of cement with fur and hair attached to recall the violence inflicted upon Japanese citizens by the American military.Rawlings, Ashley (2010). Shusaku Arakawa (1936 - 2010). ArtAsiaPacific, (69), Jul/Aug. Retrieved January 18, 2021, from http://artasiapacific.com/Magazine/69/ShusakuArakawa19362010 The utilization of objets – everyday, consumer products transformed into assemblages – permitted Arakawa to convey meaning through items not traditionally associated with the fine arts.
In 1960, at the height of the massive Anpo protests against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, Arakawa became involved with the avant-garde art collective Neo-Dada Organizers, along with Genpei Akasegawa, Ushio Shinohara, Shō Kazakura, Kinpei Masuzawa, and group founder Masanobu Yoshimura. The group engaged in a series of bizarre "events" and "happenings" that blended visual and performance art, which the art critic Yoshiaki Tōno labeled “anti-art” (han-geijutsu) and the critic Hariu Ichirō deemed "savagely meaningless".
One of Arakawa's stunts as a member of Neo-Dada was a work titled Site Made by the Viewer performed at Nihon University, in which Arakawa invited 400 spectators to an auditorium but refused to allow them inside. When Yoshimura and five other attendees, at Arakawa's urging, climbed a ladder that led up to the auditorium's balcony, Arakawa removed the ladder, trapping them on the balcony for over one hour while he silently crouched in the darkness. Arakawa explained he did not create an artwork but "manipulated" his audience by turning them into "actors".
Arakawa was eventually expelled from the Neo-Dada Organizers collective because he was deemed "too much of an aesthete", and for chaotically disrupting group events.
Paintings and printmaking (1960s – 2010) Arakawa arrived in New York in 1961 with fourteen dollars in his pocket and a telephone number for Marcel Duchamp, whom he phoned from the airport and with whom he eventually formed a close friendship.Erkan, Ekin (2019). Severe Ascesis: Arakawa's Object-Oriented Ontologies and the Spectral Event. AEQAI, (April 30). Retrieved January 29, 2021, from https://aeqai.com/main/2019/04/severe-ascesis-shusaku-arakawas-object-oriented-ontologies-and-the-spectral-event/ Inspired by Duchamp's conceptual approach to artistic production, he began to integrate diagrams within his paintings as philosophical propositions to compel viewers to question the representation of forms and to assess how the diagrams affected one's perception. He referred to them as "diagrams of the mind". Arakawa's diagrammatic paintings often included text intermixed with charts, arrows, and scales. Moreover, an eclectic range of cultural and historical figures informed Arakawa's artistic engagement with philosophy, including Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Thematically, these works are enmeshed with theoretical ideas grounded in phenomenology, physics, metaphysics, semiotics, and epistemology.
In terms of meaning, these works were endowed with complex messages that interrogated the precise nature of art's function and how art is meant to be perceived. Hard or Soft No. 3 (1969) is a painting in which numbers, letters, arrows, and lines are sparsely positioned from one another among large expanses of white negative space, and the following text frames the bottom tier of the work: "These arrows indicate almost nothing/Re-arrange the numbers anyway you like." Paintings like Hard or Soft No. 3 were meant to stimulate critical thinking among viewers to discern how language can be constructed from basic visual elements (line, shape, color, form, etc.).
During The Mechanism of Meaning exhibition at the Guggenheim in 1997, art critic Roberta Smith described Arakawa's paintings and prints as "a bridge between Dada and Fluxus and the soon-to-be-Conceptual Art" and added that they operate as "philosophical or linguistic puzzles" that are open to countless interpretations and visual readings. Moreover, art historians, critics, and curators note that the diagrammatic, blueprint-like appearances of Arakawa's paintings and prints foreshadow his and Gins's later architectural projects.
The versatility of Arakawa's printmaking abilities is evident in the range of printing techniques he pursued: silkscreen, lithography, embossing, etching, and aquatint.
Film (1960s – 1970s) Arakawa's partnership with Gins led to their creation of films in the late-1960s and early-1970s that further expounded upon the philosophical ideas Arakawa explored in his paintings and prints.“August Membership Feature: Arakawa & Gins.” Collaborative Cataloging Japan. Accessed September 19, 2021. https://www.collabjapan.org/events/2020/10/1/members-feature-arakawa-gins . Although it comprised a short segment of his career, his involvement in experimental filmmaking was another avenue through which he could question and alter viewers' understanding of perception, evident in his philosophically laden Why Not: A Serenade of Eschatological Ecology (1969).
For Example (1971) features a young homeless boy who wanders the streets of New York City in a drunken stupor while a male narrator recites a text. The film's documentary-style camerawork was intended to visualize and articulate the theories espoused in Arakawa and Gins's long-term architectural project The Mechanism of Meaning, which specifically aims to "deconstruct meaning and construct non-meaning".
The Mechanism of Meaning (1960s – 1980s) Beginning in 1963, he collaborated with fellow artist, architect, and poet Madeline Gins on the research project The Mechanism of Meaning, which was completed by 1973. This research project and its subsequent architectural projects – both built and unbuilt ones – formed the basis of the 1997 Arakawa + Gins: Reversible Destiny exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum SoHo (the accompanying book of the same title remains the most comprehensive collection of their work, and it incorporates the whole of the Arakawa/Gins book, The Mechanism of Meaning).
The panels appear as a constellation of views concerning the nature of meaning that may be characterized as "holistic" or as entailments of a holistic view concerning meaning. To date, two editions of The Mechanism of Meaning have been made and many of the panels fuse collaged elements.
In the years since Arakawa's and Gins's deaths, there has been a legal dispute regarding ownership of The Mechanism of Meaning between the Architectural Body Research Foundation and the Reversible Destiny Foundation.
Reversible Destiny Foundation (1980s – 2010) Arakawa and Madeline Gins co-founded the Reversible Destiny Foundation in 2010, an organization dedicated to the use of architecture to extend the human lifespan. They have co-authored books, including Reversible Destiny, which is the catalogue of their Guggenheim exhibition, Architectural Body (University of Alabama Press, 2002) and Making Dying Illegal (New York: Roof Books, 2006), and have designed and built residences and parks, including the Reversible Destiny Lofts-Mitaka (In Memory of Helen Keller), Bioscleave House (Lifespan Extending Villa), and the Site of Reversible Destiny-Yoro.
Designed in 1995, "The Site of Reversible Destiny - Yoro Park" was conceived as an "experience park" to reorient and transform visitors' understanding of their bodily relationship to the physical world. Flat, planar surface were removed entirely from the park, and instead Arakawa and Gins placed great emphasis on hilly, bulging surfaces that complicated how one walked around the park; spectators were encouraged to interact with the site as if they were toddlers learning to walk for the first time.“Site of Reversible Destiny - Yoro Park.” Yoro Park. Accessed September 12, 2021. https://www.yoro-park.com/sp/en/facility-map/hantenchi/.