Some Place Enormously Moveable

8/2/2019 Some Place Enormously Moveable

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/some-place-enormously-moveable 1/9

"Some Place Enormously Moveable":

The Collaboration of Arakawa and Madeline H. Gins

We wanted some place enormously moveable, started from that. I cannot make a map for

you but . . .

ARAKAWA , in conversation

There seem endlessly those situations of particular experience wherein one knows anddoesn't know, all at the same instant—which is to say, the information is inherent, actual,

in the given system, but (itself a word of this qualification) we cannot step out of its

context to see "what it is" we thus "know." As it happened then, Arakawa had been asked

by the city of Hannover to design some ennobling "monument," an artifact which woulddignify that city, enhance its self-respect, etc. His first question, of course, concerned the

seriousness of the city's commitment to their choice of artist and whether or not they

would permit him to exercise a determining choice of artifact. Therefore, at an earlymeeting with the city officials, he took a large sheet of drawing paper, signed it, and said,

that's it—pay me. And as one of the officials began, in fact, to make out the check in

payment, Arakawa stopped him, asking for two months' time to complete the design, etc.,

etc.

So far, so good—one wants to say. That is, "who they are" and "who he is" would seem

to have come to some sort of resolution and/or reassurance. But a person, no less (or more) a city, is not so simply to be known or, more accurately, to be presumed as a "this"

or "that." So in two months the same people regathered, to consider the now completed

design. First there was the question

Artforum , Summer 1980.

― 420―

of materials, which in this case was a sizeable amount of Carrara marble—in short, the

most precious marble we, as a history of peoples, have actualized. Somewhat abashed but

amenable, the city officials agreed to its purchase; it would be used to make a block of impressive steps within the city's park, an approach to the crucial "point" of information.

But what then would "it" say? Very simply, on the face of the top step, incised with

appropriate care, this: the words, in German, Welcome to Berlin . . . . But this is not Berlin, said the officials. This is Hannover . In fact, Berlin was their rival and in all

respects a most odious object of comparison. All of which one might presume Arakawa

to have known. Or not to have known—since he is Japanese, an artist living primarily in New York, whose factually indispensable collaborator comes from the Bronx, is a poet,

etc., etc., etc. So that was the end of that.



If it were only a question of some misappropriation of names, we could no doubt move to

resolve any number of human conflicts by the mere shifting of names themselves, e.g.,calling New York Moscow , and vice versa. And men women , women men . That would

certainly be a step in the "right" direction (or left, up, down, backwards, forwards).

Consider the heart-breaking wistfulness of Hart Crane's "A Name for All":

Moonmoth and grasshopper that flee our pageAnd still wing on, untarnished of the name

We pinion to your bodies to assuage

Our envy of your freedom—we must maim

Because we are usurpers, and chagrined—

And take the wing and scar it in the hand.

Names we have, even, to clap on the wind;

But we must die, as you, to understand . . .[1]

Such dependence on nominalism, sadly enough, leads only to the least attractive possibilities regarding Hannover/Berlin , whichever is which. And more, it cannot be that

living has as its primary definition only the physical resolution of death. I know that

Arakawa and Madeline Gins met at a time when both felt a harshly flat despair, hardlyuncommon in this world as we presently think it. Yet (to paraphrase Arakawa's recent

conversation) Life has to have choice . . . Yes, an extreme beginning . . . There were hard

times in the war . . . dreary . . .

― 421―

having to check the physical body all the time . . . like a potato . . . cut, slice,disappear . . . so, above all, first we must study how not to die . . .[2]

In the preface to their collaboration, The Mechanism of Meaning: Work in Progress

(1963–1971, 1978 ), Arakawa and Madeline Gins write:

If we had not been so desperate at that time, we might not have chosen such an ambitious

title for this work. Yet what else would we have called it? After all, the phenomena we

were studying were not simply images, percepts, or thoughts alone. Our subject is more

nearly all given conditions brought together in one place.

Death is old-fashioned. We had come to think this way, strangely enough. Essentially, thehuman condition remains prehistoric as long as such a change from the Given, a

distinction as fundamental as this, has not yet been firmly established.

If thought were meant to accomplish anything, surely it was meant to do this. Yet why

had history been so slow? Was there something wrong with the way the problem was being pictured? What if thinking had been vitiated by having become lost in thought, for

example? What is emitted point-blank at a moment of thought anyway? Let's take a



second look at these comic figures, we decided. There did not yet exist even the most

rudimentary compendium of what takes place or of the elements involved when anythingis "thought through." Why not picture some of these moments ourselves, we thought, just

a few?[3]

In like sense Arakawa said, we don't know what it is that is mind, what it could look like.From Plato to the present so many different maps have been tried, but we still don't have

a model. This is because probably all our language is one-sided. Nothing is left to hold

the "form." We have not yet formed even a profile. So far, using only one or two senses at

a time mind has been felt out a bit, but that's all, so, so far only it has been a question of

singing a song .

One dilemma apparent is that "mind" has been used primarily as

― 422―

a means of significant association, humanly, and that the usual scientific understanding of the term meaning would be the context described by "association" itself. One can

recognize the resourceful power of this mode of "tracking"—and also the inherent

confounding of phenomena that cannot be "associated," for which a "ratio" or reasoncannot be found. Therefore, these are "meaningless," however determinant they prove in

the actual fact of living. Moreover, a present commonplace would be the fact that "facts

accumulate at a far higher rate than does the understanding of them," which"understanding" or "rational thought" " . . . depends literally on ratio, on the proportions

and relations between things. As facts are collected, the number of possible relations

between them increases at an enormous rate."[4]

A small instance of this would be the

present monitoring of "signals" from "outer space" (or "inner," for that matter), whichconstitute such an immense bulk of possibly significant data that the mind boggles at the

idea of "containment" or "subject" implied.

Thinking elsewhere, here is a sequence of "things said" by Arakawa and Madeline Gins

(roughly, directly), noted during conversation:

A : First, Leibniz's proposal for an amusement park to be based on scientific principles

may be considered a coherent precursor to what we are preparing to do. Yes, as you

suggest, also, Hegel's absolute world is of course related. . . . But language, any language,always runs parallel to the world, so is consequently a representation of only one side.

With such a tool you cannot pinpoint, always only point out generally. What you arrive at

is always only some sort of agreement. All art depends on agreement, of course. If you

don't play the game of this agreement it all becomes abstraction.

G : About fifteen years to do the book—how to do art without being seduced by doing it.

Through desperation, we chose: 19 subdivisions [cf. The Mechanism of Meaning , p. 3].

A : Forget about meaning after all. . . .



G : Old book requires you use everything you have as you have before—(interesting, but

no new moves . . .).

[reads preface, The Mechanism of Meaning ]

― 423―

A : In 1971, our book was published in Munich. At that time we were lucky enough to

meet some physicists, some of whom were using our book in their work—in a verystrange way, I guess. At an international, but informal, meeting of 29 quantum physicists,

we were the only non-physicists. We are working on something so small, beyond

description, they told us. But, we said, we know something smaller than that. These

particles are so split, there is nothing whatsoever to see, they are that small, we can't evenimagine how small they are, we were told. After we heard that we said: But your thought

about that (or this) is a quantum which is even smaller. To which they replied: What is

your field? The answer was: Nonsense.

By the way, later on in his life, Heisenberg, interestingly enough, began to write what on

the surface appear to be rather high-school-like poems, yet I find these to be often

ingenious descriptions of what cannot be seen or said in ordinary physics. To paraphrase

one of these:

When I wake up at 7

I drink coffee

I look at the windowI see blue, brown, grey

Then after lunchThe next time I look There is light blue, light brown, light grey

At night

At the window

Dark grey is modulated.

One window changes that much "in time." He's trying to say to us, don't focus, if you

want to see anything. As for intention, you have to spread intention—a single 'I' does not

exist . . .

G : Thought itself is a blind spot . . . Have to look at that again.

A : 'I' is always forming something, disembodied. . . . Rimbaud's "I is an other"—but how

so? is the question—this peculiar distance from and within time. . . .

Alchemists, very much looking for/had intentions very close to ours (present). . . . Whenresearch is divided into subjects such as art, philosophy and science, at that moment we

tend to lose the Subject. The Subject such as: we are here . . . .



G : Lenin: Best title I know for a book is, Lenin's What Is to Be Done . . . .

― 424―

A : We have to go as far as possible. Shakespeare's "To be or not to be" is no longer thequestion—in our time we must only consider to be! Nothing is too much in this world.

Remember always to consider more than 360 degrees. One more thing is that for all our

talk of "there" and "here" it is always in the same place.

G : Localization and Transference [cf. The Mechanism of Meaning , pp. 11–14]—how

would you make any interchangeable point or location into something?—this is

demonstrated here. And then, once we know we do that, we can relax and just know we

do it—and not rely on it and believe into it, mindlessly for 100 years.

So many conveniences we don't have, that we should have—such as a helium belt. . . .We wanted to make a helium belt that everyone could wear, so that whenever you'd walk,

you'd be just a few inches off the ground all the time.

A : Wearing this would alter your sense of balance, you might find a new kind of

center. . . .

We are not talking about "artificial intelligence"—far from it—I should say—a new

nature (nature, I hate this word!)—a new given . . . .

G : And to develop a new nature. . . .

A : How will you recognize a new nature anyway? That's another problem. That problem

is not a problem.

Albeit a layman in all respects, I am impressed by these preoccupations as increasingly,

often brilliantly, explored in a diversity of informational "fields." For example, Paul

Kugler, himself a Jungian analyst particularly involved with consciousness and languagestructure, had previously given me information of Ilya Prigogine, the Belgian physical

chemist who was awarded the Nobel prize in chemistry in 1977 for his theory of dissipative structures. Simply put, Prigogine's theory demonstrates that order "emergesbecause of entropy, not despite it. . . . The new state occurs as a sudden shift, much as a

kaleidoscope shifts into a new pattern. It is a nonlinear event; that is, multiple factors acton each other at once. . . . With each new state, there is greater potential for change. Withnew levels of complexity, there are new rules." As Prigogine puts it, "there is a change in

the nature of the 'laws' of nature. . . ."[5]

― 425―



The same friend referred me as well to René Thom's catastrophe theory as presented in

Stabilité Structurelle et Morphogénèse: Essai d'une théorie générale des modèles (1972),

[6]and here again the parallels are most interesting for an apprehension of the

range and significance of The Mechanism of Meaning as a continuing collaboration. As

Dr. Kugler has suggested, this work too has much to do with semantic "catastrophe," and

lest that aspect of it be too simply "understood" as either a convenient surrealism or aspeciously engaging humor, one might well consider Dr. Thom's proposal of "les

signifiants abusifs": "Le comique apparaît donc comme la manifestation d'une

obstruction á la signification globale d'un message localement signifiant ."[7]

Further, one must recognize the absolute necessity of collaboration insofar as the

information will not resolve itself as a linear and/or "singular" pattern. Prigogine, for

example, refers to "a book, a crystal, a cup of cold coffee" as equilibrium structure,"closed and finished, not taking in and dissipating energy. . . ."

[8]In like sense, William

Carlos Williams attacks a presumed "containment" in Paterson: Book Three, II:[9]

We read: not the flames but the ruin left

by the conflagration . . .

Dig in—and you have

a nothing, surrounded by

a surface, an inverted

bell resounding, a

― 426―

white-hot man becomea book, the emptiness of

a cavern resounding

If presently our world is experienced as a vast and insistently conflicting spectrum of "special languages," of locked and crippling conceptual patterns, clearly the human need

becomes unavoidably explicit: change . Williams' "The Orchestra":[10]

Say to them:

"Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant to

know how to realize his wishes. Now that he can realize them,he must either change them or perish."

Now is the time

in spite of the "wrong note"I love you. My heart is

innocent.



And this the first

(and last) day of the world.

The intense self-preoccupation of the arts in our time has usually been thought of as a

defensive and socially hostile conduct, insofar as the presumed audience has been, for the

most part, significantly ignored. In short, there are no publicly evident institutions— either religious, as in the past, or widely political—that serve as sponsors or patrons for acollective information. There is, therefore, no "center" in that respect. Even more to the

point, however, is the intellectual self-consciousness of this period in which "humanness"

would seem not only the most dominant but the altogether determinant factor in its

powers to appropriate "reality."

Therefore Arakawa's and Madeline Gins' emphasis upon "escape routes,"[11]

however

wryly the term may echo civic plans to evacuate various urban populations out of citiesunder nuclear attack, is entirely appropriate for the "place" our conceptual patterns and

modes of conduct have made. "Meaning" is again the crisis:

The vagueness of the term was suitable. Meaning might be thought of as the desire to

think something—anything—through; the will to make sense out of the ever-present fog

of not-quite-knowing; the recognition of nonsense. As such it may be associated with any

human

― 427―

faculty. Since each occurrence of meaning takes place along one or another of these paths, we roughly derived our list of subdivisions from them. The list as a whole is not

intended to be any less inconsistent, clumsy, or redundant than the original on which itwas based, that is, the composite mechanism of meaning in daily living viewed point-

blank from moment to moment.[12]

The list itself follows:

1. Neutralization of Subjectivity

2. Localization and Transference

3. Presentation of Ambiguous Zones

4. The Energy of Meaning (Biochemical, Physical, and Psychophysical Aspects)

5. Degrees of Meaning

6. Expansion and Reduction—Meaning of Scale

7. Splitting of Meaning



8. Reassembling

9. Reversibility

10. Texture of Meaning

11. Mapping of Meaning

12. Feeling of Meaning

13. Logic of Meaning

14. Construction of the Memory of Meaning

15. Meaning of Intelligence

16. Review and Self-Criticism

[13]

One will note the topological nature of their procedure here, that is, its primary concern

with the function of meaning as a process of mind. Presuming meaning to be the crisis of consciousness, whether collective or one's own (if that is possible as a thought), the

visual/verbal materials of the text itself effect an intensive place , in Wittgenstein's sense

that "a point in space is a place for an argument." Because—the experience of the mind'sresponse to verbal imperatives in relation to visual context is a sharp and displacing body

of information. Thus one begins to know , as a differentiating response, how it is that one

has both presumed to know , and is knowing . Here is the response of one astute "reader,"

Arthur Danto:

Here is a panel that commands us to count the lines in a ragged grid. We are not to point.

But counting is successive pointing, associating the set of numbers with the set of things.

There is no counting without

― 428―

pointing. But then there, in the next area, is a single line. If it made sense to count a

single thing, we could count this easily, there being nothing else to count. But is thiscounting? If there is one person in the audience, does the discouraged manager inform his

actors of the fact and expect them to ask him to count "them" again? Do we see there isone or do we have to count if we are to use the word "one" in its cardinal sense? If there

is only one item, is it a list? How many items are then needed before it is a list? Two,

three, four, five? So the game continues—or it is a new game, silly and serious, dumb and

sharp, inane and profound, at once playful and lethal, a samurai slash at the throat of

Reason.[14]



Apropos the situation here evident, Madeline Gins said to another "reader": "We are

making a 'text' between you and this text. You're making that text. You are the ostensive

'definition.' It's going to keep going back and forth, echoing . . ."[15]

To which Arakawa added:

Because functions can be repeated, we can say that they are somewhat stable. This is

better than to really think of a stable "you" or a stable "I." But the reader is the one who

functions according to the subdivisions we propose, so, even if you never get a "right"

answer, that's the answer—you're getting it constantly.[16]

At present Arakawa and Madeline Gins are at work upon the invention of a "situation," a

construct which will embody (texturalize ) the modes of mind with which they have been

engaged.[17]

Obviously

―

429―

their work thus far has been a remarkable service to anyone whose mind has beensomewhat less to him or her than that once proposed "kingdom" of stable assumption. In

short, it is not that any one of us is going anywhere. Very simply, we are here. Think of

that.

[]

Documents

Some Place Enormously Moveable