Throughout her wondrous life, Madeline Gins tried to rewrite the rules of the ultimate game. Wild stealth and flamboyant prestidigitation were her chosen tactics, whether in poetry, drawing, film, or architecture: How else to outwit the unbeaten chess master? “I feel enormous disgust,” she told a Jungian analyst in an undated interview, “against death as part of the given.… That’s why I can do anything to become more intelligent.” Her catholic wielding of mediums in this quixotic ploy to “increase lifespan, possibly indefinitely”—Kierkegaardian resolve in every move—was showcased earlier this summer in Madeline Gins: Infinite Systems, curated by Charlotte Youkilis at Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art.
Gathering writings and artworks from six decades, the elegantly arranged one-room exhibition attempted to frame Gins’s sinuous solo output as a cohesive endeavor. This recuperative gesture to establish Gins as a thinker and artist outside of Arakawa+Gins, the architectural partnership whose phenomenally provocative body of built and speculative work is greater than the sum of…