Every String Everywhere All at Once

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 both members’ individual practices, addresses a true museological lacuna; Shūsaku Arakawa, Gins’s spouse and creative accomplice, has long been afforded such attention, whereas this is the first exhibition to focus solely on Gins.

Sadly, the same gesture largely elided her spatial and theoretical contributions from what was otherwise a comprehensive show. So, too, did it tamp down the critical connections between Gins’s poetry (displayed only in vitrines, rather than, as I kept hoping to find, a perusable gallery copy of the excellent 2020 reader edited by Lucy Ives) and the linguistic operations she imbued in the partnership’s visionary buildings and places, the lot of which totter under her signature unbalanced abundance: “PLACE AN EXTRA STRING ON TOP OF EVERY STRING.” But was the exhibition’s gambit to elicit exactly this—a desire for more? More is sorely needed. There has been no monograph or biography of the solo artist, nor has there even been an English-language monograph on Arakawa+Gins since their two shocking residential projects (the fullest instantiation of their philosophy of “procedural architecture,” which yields environments that train the body to resist death) were constructed in the early millennium. It is the right time for new insights into Gins’s cunning and expansive gameplay, where everything is up for grabs and anything is possible.