ARAKAWA & GINS: ARCHITECTURAL BODY

PRECIS - Madeline Gins and Arakawa's recent re-launch of their decades-old attempt to transcend boundaries complicit with artificial limits 'placed' both on/by so-called environmental and biological necessity has extraordinary potential to upset the architectural applecart insofar as this always-incomplete project portends the production of environments that fuse subject and entourage (surroundings) in such a way that one is no longer distinguishable from the other. Architectural Body (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2002) re-ignites old controversies, the same that found their retrospective 1997 Guggenheim exhibition, "Reversible Destiny", rattling the cage of acceptable art-world provocations by way of the structuralization of a possible immortality, by design, traceable to 1981 and their first excursions into the territory of a transformational architecture that fuses being and time into one subtended 'chord' under the sign of eternity as infinity, a long-term agenda nonetheless.(1)

CRITIQUE - "Let our species cease being stunned into silence and passivity [...]". It is the concept of the architectural surround that, in turn, sets the subject on a new trajectory toward re-inhabiting space. "Preexisting those who enter them, architectural surrounds stand as elaborately structured pretexts for action." Here the possibility of altering or creating wholly new surrounds registers an extreme ambient force in all constructed environments -- and it is an always-open question as to whether existing surrounds are intentionally conditional or unintentionally conditional insofar as instrumentalized environments exist simply by the addition of a single item (echoing Wallace Stevens): "Putting only a single artifact into an environment will -- if someone is around to happen on the scene -- turn it into an architectural surround."

"Architectural surrounds stage architectural procedures. A surround constructed to constrain a sequence of actions presents a procedure to be followed; and as soon as someone sets foot into an architectural surround that constrains action, the architectural procedure it stages gets going." For this reason alone, perhaps, the de-populated scenes of modern architectural photography are proforma gestures toward a preliminary unfolding of space, in that whoever looks at the image emptied of human presence always-already is its first inhabitant (reading that space through projection).

For this reason, too, the procedures for the construction of an architectural body (the experiencing subject as architecture) includes suggestions for constructing multiple vectors within normative perspectival space (something Deconstruction has already undertaken in both literature and architecture) while producing at the same time a second (third, fourth) space within space. This tilting toward multiple horizons also represents the presence in the archaic self (subject) of multiple senses of time (multiple experiences of time) that automatically de-stabilize the architectural programme of built spaces.

In Architectural Body this im/possible (im/probable, immanent) agenda takes the form of fabricating "tentative constructings toward holding in place". As such, "Everywhere one turns: tentative constructings toward a holding in place; many tentative constructings -- and holdings within holdings as latencies and phases -- toward holdings in place." The tautological aura of these statements, in fact, is part and parcel of the deconstruction of tautological (so-called 'autonomous') architectural space already underway (here, in Architectural Body, and elsewhere, if you look around/away).

"The set of characteristic features for an immensely large architectural surround such as a city will be everything that makes it a city, including all those bustling or ambling through it." The surround is not amorphous, in-and-of-itself, but bounded and formed by its inhabitants and informed by inhabitation. Such readings of already-existing architectural surrounds, as well as prescriptive measures for new sites, set in motion the forces usually suspended in the formal logic of architectural representation and architectural objectification. The present-day wager on surface-as-expressive-skin (architecture as half-sublimated information flows), plus the indelicate nihilism associated with landscape urbanism, begs the question no one seems to want to ask: What is the purpose of too much information?

"Were nothing being apportioned out, no world could form. What is being apportioned out, no one is able to say. That which is being apportioned out is in the process of landing. To be apportioned out involves being cognizant of landing." The proposition that the world is constructed of a vast array of differential landing sites (and nothing more) leads to the reduction of sentience as organism-person-environment, a complex that prefigures the re-configuration of subject-object dialectics (Descartes' worldview), or its total elimination. Yet Arakawa & Gins admit we do not know enough about the technical aspects of this constructive complex to stage completely new landings. Both narrow (perceptual) and wide (imaging) landing sites imbricate one another, as varieties of indexing phenomena, perhaps only almost landing, while a dimensioning landing site actually "hooks onto the environment to gain traction on it." It is this plethora of types and conditions ("Landing sites dissolve into each other, or abut, or overlap, or nest within one another") that constitutes the perceived complexity of the world.

The initial critical engagement of this mapping of the world represents "a heuristic device with which to leaf through the universe, never mind that it is unpaginated." It would seem that once an inventory has been taken of specific sites, here and there, it is the dimensioning landing site that registers most keenly the energetic specificity of conceiving a world as a mutually-imbricated affair of given and constructed. It is the given that is ultimately unreadable in this equation, always remaining but a factor or background function within the mathesis underwriting the re-configuration of the three types of sites. These three 'places' -- which are never isolatable (and therefore not quite real in an empirical sense) -- present architecture with a phenomenologically-intensified possible future insofar as the architectural body (subject) returns by way of "sited awareness" (i.e., as architectural body).

And, finally, if the unearthing/unveiling of the architectural body does seem to be a case of returning (going forward into the past, or backward into the future), it is due to the inexhaustible foundations of the world -- to 'ontological questions' -- versus any technocratic juggernaut launching a brave new world atop the world we always-already have been given. Elective utopias aside, the re-configuration of subjectivity suggested in Architectural Body implies (to borrow/re-write a page from Zizek's Ticklish Subject) that the spectre haunting present-day architecture is not the Cartesian cogito so much as the absence of some-thing else altogether -- that is, an unapproachable-sublime excess (always offered up as the redoubtable 'Other'). This some-thing else seems to look back at us from within the shadowy background of the half-illumined "extended field" defined by Rosalind Krauss sometime ago, an affective unknown (perhaps a repressed memory, something we have forgotten to remember). In turn, this 'extended field' continues to haunt present-day art and architecture as the quintessential map of operational strategies underwriting the complex otherwise known as environmental art.

Yes, echoes of Benjamin's conceptualization of aura may yet be heard (at this late date). This unnamed non-thing, lurking in the background so to speak, is synonymous/ coterminous with passion (Lacanian jouissance, even); and it is, after all, first and foremost, the performative poetic lashings of language that animate / put flesh on architectural-literary events of the order of Architectural Body. Language almost always returns to the poetic/topological foundation of things out of necessity. Architectural language almost always returns to poetic language (the ultimate site of figuration/rupture) when received/authorized forms of architectural expression (and discourse) have instrumentalized/painted themselves into the proverbial corner. It is for this reason that the passages in Architectural Body that seem to be 'pregnant' with significance have to do with semantic/syntactic correlations between architectural surround and discourse. "Discursive sequences of tactically posed surrounds, constructed as built propositions, marshal existing logical connectives [cognates] and position newly invented ones into the 'real,' steering, regulating, and guiding interactions between body and bioscleave [shell/architectural surround] through three-dimensional THEREFORES, BUTS, ORS, ANDS, and built-up WHATEVERS." This language on the ground delivers the ultimatum within the tentativeness of the performative architectural surround -- the body is no longer separated from the commandments that form its linguistic-ethical environment. The Other has come home? This Nietzschean ultimatum is explicit. To free one's self, one must declare one's freedom. Whether such a declaration amounts to anything substantive, leads out of the labyrinth, is the ultimate wager contained/framed within/by the construction of new subjectivities, architectural or otherwise.

“Historically, the uncertainty and confusion as to how extensive an unknown quantity one is has been a tremendous handicap to an organism that persons seeking to be precise on her or his own behalf. It is exactly because of this confusion (and other related ones) that gods and God succeeded in invading our territory (as us in disguise?).”(2)

And yet … and with Dostoievski, all revolutions will fail that fail to address, undress, and redress the sickly spectre of metaphysics today … As such, what needs to be examined in the critical apparatus supporting Arakawa & Gins’ Architectural Body is whether or not therein lies buried a re-configured concept of self, or a nominal return to an ‘archaic’ Self (the self-same Self found in anti-modernist demolition projects from Nietzsche to Heidegger to, today, Jean-Luc Marion). This nominal ‘archaic’ self is, after all, not a return but a turn toward an always-existing state of things (things within their milieux, or a state in things) versus an abstracted, fractured, and alienated self (thing) problematized since Descartes as cognizing Subject over and against the Object. It is perhaps pages 45-47 of Making Dying Illegal (Arakawa and Gins’ recent 2004 manuscript renewing the procedural measures within Architectural Body) that needs to be analyzed line by line, insofar as this passage within the manifesto-like manuscript sings and singes in ways that all other forms of deconstructing subjectivity merely feign.

Gavin Keeney (November 2003 / April 2005)

ENDNOTES

1 - See Arakawa/Gins, Reversible Destiny (New York: Guggenheim/Abrams, 1997), catalogue for the exhibition, June 25 through August 31, 1997 - Frontis: "To what extent do architectural surrounds guide behaviour? Can architectural inflection of thought and feeling be calibrated precisely?" - The projects surveyed at the Guggenheim were in many respects traceable to "The Mechanism of Meaning" (1963-1973), a series of 83 semiologically unsettling, mixed-media panels (collages) of a neo-Dada nature (Arakawa x Duchamp) instilling a theoretical trajectory for thought from sense to non-sense to sense by way of inducing the subject (viewer) to respond and re-configure, within the space of the installation, body-mind correlates. These architectural 'events' sought to reveal the implicit (repressed) concept of person as mechanism of meaning. - In the catalogue essay "Saving Not" Mark C. Taylor suggests that the ensemble, the installation taken as a whole, is "a philosophico-aesthetic workbook that formulates questions, poses paradoxes, and explores conundrums" (p. 126). This assault on the mind-body takes the form of a deconstruction of concept-figure and word-image complexes through a strange commingling of aspects of concrete poetics and almost-paranoid semiosis. Taylor's critique focuses on the project "Bridge of Reversible Destiny/The Process in Question", a structure that involves the negotiation of a structured elevated terrain -- with obstructions, diversions, implosions -- oddly similar to Jean Nouvel's 2002 Guggenheim museum in Rio de Janeiro. "Bridge of Reversible Destiny" has been around in one form or another for quite awhile. It was part of an exhibition at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts (New York), "Building Sensoriums" (September-October 1990), as a set of floor plans (dated 1973-1989), and appeared in model form as early as 1990. Taylor notes the extreme phenomenological nature of this project: "The place of the bridge is the nonplace of the between where here and now are suspended" (p. 125). Furthermore, Radovan Ivsic and Annie Le Brun's essay "Sites of Reversible Destiny" indicate that this particular project (originally intended for Epinal, France) teeters on the edge of an existentialist abyss: "The site of cleaving is the bridge that gathers together what it holds apart and holds apart what it gathers together. The pain of cleaving is a symptom of the rending caused by reversing destiny. To reroute perception is to re-form the subject" (p. 135). This essay notably references the legendary Mannerist garden at Bomarzo, Italy indicating that much of this architectural agitation resides in a synchronic space within an a-historical dimension denotable, in turn, as the critical-poetic sublime. - Two long-term projects that seem to best illustrate what the self-described "heuristic" installations wish to provoke are: 1/ Isle of Reversible Destiny, La Certosa, Venice (1979), with its 365 gardens situated within "articulated terrains" as "a training ground for the architectural body" or a "calendar that perpetuates life"; and 2/ Sensorium City, Tokyo Bay (original concept 1995-1996), a proposed new city on reclaimed land constructed of self-imbricating modular units of architectural and landscape-architectural forms that auto-complexify, over time, to produce an intensely inter-woven fabric fully embodying the initial urges and desires of the re-configured subject Arakawa and Gins have pursued since the first neo-Dada gestures of the late 1960s. - A second book-long treatment of these projects is Arakawa and Madeline Gins, Architecture: Sites of Reversible Destiny (London: Academy, 1994) / Regarding Jean Nouvel's Guggenheim, Rio de Janeiro (2002), inclusive of Patrick Blanc's "Vertical Garden" ("In ancient times the garden was the place of best-kept secrets." --J.N.), see A+U 395 (2003:08), pp. 44-50
2 - Madeline Gins & Arakawa, Making Dying Illegal (Unpublished manuscript, 2005), p. 47

*All running quotations except 2 (as above) from Architectural Body (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2002), passim …

PROVISIONAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arakawa and Madeline Gins, Architecture: Sites of Reversible Destiny (London: Academy, 1994)
__________, Reversible Destiny (New York: Guggenheim/Abrams, 1997)
__________, Architectural Body (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2002)
__________, Making Dying Illegal (Manuscript, 2005)
Loredana Mascheroni (ed.),  “Arakawa & Gins: Living Bodies”, Domus 879 (March 2005), pp. 100-107 - Includes Lisa Licitra, “Arakawa, the Architect”, (English text, p. 106; Italian text, p. 102) - Projects: Reversible Destiny Hotel (New York and/or Atlanta); Reversible Destiny Lofts (Tokyo); Museum of Living Bodies (Nowhere); Yoro Park (Gifu Prefecture, Japan) - On the occasion of the exhibition “Arakawa and Madeline Gins” at the Galleria Milano (March 9 through April 10; April 20 through May 15, 2005)
Maria Eugenia Diaz Sanchez and Craig Douglas Dworkin (eds.), Architectures of Poetry (Amsterdam: Rodopi, ????)
Frédéric Ogee, Maurice A. Géracht (eds.), “Architecture Against Death” (“Architecture Contre la Mort’), Interfaces 21/22 (Worcester, MA/Paris: College of the Holy Cross/ Université Paris VII, 2003)