Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins

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 (1971), as well as various early writings by Gins, particularly her essay on multidimensional architecture, which I published in 43 Poets (1984) 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 (1994). These works, as well as Arakawa and Gins’s later works share a space with many of the poets and artists with whom I have been most engaged. / Charles Bernstein (More)