From Eight Hours to the Present: Interview with Miwako Tezuka

ArtAsiaPacific sat down with Miwako Tezuka to discuss her work as consulting curator of New York’s Reversible Destiny Foundation, created by the artist couple Shusaku Arakawa (1936–2010) and Madeline Gins (1941–2014) in 2010.

Formerly the associate curator at the Asia Society in New York, Tezuka played a pivotal role in developing the institution’s program of contemporary Asian and Asian American artists. She oversaw Asia Socety’s “In Focus” series, a platform for solo exhibitions where artists are invited to select objects from Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd Collection of Asian Art at the Asia Society Museum as inspiration for new creations. Through this series, Tezuka presented solo shows by artists such as Yuken Teruya from Okinawa (2/20/07–4/27/07), Suda Yoshihiro from Tokyo (10/6/09–2/7/10) and U-Ram Choe from Seoul (9/9/11–12/31/11).

Immediately before her transition to the Reversible Destiny Foundation, Tezuka was the gallery director of the Japan Society, where she curated the well-received “Garden of Unearthly Delights: Works by Ikeda, Tenmyouya & teamLab” (10/10/14–1/11/15), among others. While the architecture-based practice of the dynamic Arakawa and Gins has largely been under the art world’s radar, the couple has left an extraordinary body of work that blurs the boundaries between genres and lies across the disciplines of philosophy, biology, architecture, poetry, visual art and literature. The Reversible Destiny Foundation preserves the legacy of Arakawa and Gins by supporting various research initiatives.

How were you introduced to the work of Shusaku Arakawa?

I first encountered Arakawa’s work while I was still an art history graduate student at Columbia University. I was initially thinking of writing my dissertation on Marcel Duchamp’s influence on Japanese artists, and Arakawa was one of three artists whom I was interested in. Eventually, I decided to focus on a completely different group of artists, the Jikken Kobo, but I had done some preliminary research on Arakawa, so I’ve known his work for quite some time. Before he moved to New York in 1961 and became close with Duchamp, he was part of the Neo Dadaism Organizers, a short-lived avant-garde art group in Tokyo in 1960 that also included Genpei Akasegawa, Masunobu Yoshimura, Ushio Shinohara and more.

How about the work of Madeline Gins, Arakawa’s wife and collaborator?

In 1997, the Guggenheim Museum SoHo held a major exhibition of the artist couple, entitled “Reversible Destiny: Arakawa/Gins” (6/25/97–9/1/97). This was an eye-opener for me because the works I saw there were starkly different from those of Arakawa’s Neo-Dada years in Japan.

Then in 2002 or 2003, I had a chance encounter with Arakawa and Madeline. At the time, I was assisting the curator Akira Tatehata who was a visiting scholar at Columbia University. One day, we were visiting galleries in SoHo and bumped into the artists on the street, in front of Honmura An, a Japanese restaurant frequented by many artists, critics, and other creative types. Tatehata sensei introduced me to Arakawa and Madeline, and we ended up talking right there on the street for close to an hour! It was becoming ridiculous for us to stand on the street, so I think right then they invited us to their studio on West Houston.

What a great coincidence! What did you do at their studio?

We spent over eight hours there. It’s not an exaggeration to say that it was Arakawa and Madeline’s eight-hour, non-stop “monologue.” They talked about everything—art, philosophy, biology, the universe. It was a hypnotic experience and I was completely mesmerized by their energy and depth of knowledge in such diverse fields of study. I believe I visited their studio on West Houston Street at least twice; each time, what was intended to be a brief studio visit turned into an entire day’s stay, complete with macrobiotic lunch and dinner. I was inspired by their multi-disciplinary approach and that was what most resonated with me. I didn’t understand everything they were talking about though—many topics, like neuroscience, were way beyond my comprehension!

How did you become the consulting curator for the Reversible Destiny Foundation?

I didn’t know that Arakawa and Madeline established this foundation just before Arakawa passed away in 2010, and it was [Samsung senior curator of Asian art at the Guggenheim] Alexandra Munroe who introduced me to its work. Alexandra and [director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art] Michael Govan, who organized the 1997 Guggenheim exhibition, are on the board of the foundation; knowing that my curatorial focus is on post-1945 Japanese art, she recommended that I take a closer look at its mission.

It brought back my memories of Arakawa and Madeline—their impassioned talks during my studio visits felt like space travel with a mission to go where nobody has gone before. Throughout my own career, I have always tried to create meaningful collaborations between curators from different areas of focus, between scholars and artists, between artists and designers, and so forth. It’s very exciting, like chemistry experiments. If the foundation values the importance of collaboration and finds excitement in it, then I thought I could contribute something there.

In your work with the Reversible Destiny Foundation’s collection, what is most striking to you in the duo’s collaboration? How did the artistic practices of Arakawa and Gins overlap or stand distinct from each other?

The idea of a singular artist-creator is very monotheistic and is a remnant of modernism. That kind of ideology certainly did not fit the art and philosophy of Arakawa and Madeline Gins. But the issue of authorship needs careful consideration when it comes to their work. They met in New York in 1962, and it appears that their intellectual connection was immediately formed. In the case of many paintings signed by Arakawa, they are his creations. But for canvases that bear words and phrases in English, I am sure that conversations with Madeline Gins helped him articulate thoughts in a language that was not his mother tongue.

At the same time, we cannot forget that Gins was an autonomously creative author—a poet and writer. In fact, her first book entitled Word Rain or A Discursive Introduction to the Intimate Philosophical Investigations of G,R,E,T,A,G,A,R,B,O, It Says was published in 1969 and has since been the subject of many literature analyses and philosophical studies. The Japanese poet and art critic Shuzo Takiguchi (1903–1979), reading it as poetry, sent a letter from Tokyo to New York to congratulate her and offer his highest commendations. If you flip through the pages of this book, you will see how her conversations with Arakawa had a significant input into this publication.

The central theme here seems to be collaboration and conversation. How did this information exchange play a role in their professional relationship?

The conversation between Arakawa and Gins was bilateral and perpetual throughout their creative lives.

Their formal collaboration, strictly speaking, began in 1963 with the project “Mechanism of Meaning” (1963–73). They considered it an open-ended process of research into the mind, and produced a series of mixed media paintings dated between 1963 and 1996, eventually amounting to 83 canvases. These creations exist as paintings but read like instructions—a truly collaborative body of work between Arakawa and Gins. For the lack of better term, the “Mechanism of Meaning” works like Zen kōan, as questions that cannot entirely be answered with any form of logic.

So they were unhindered thinkers.

In essence, Arakawa and Gins were positive thinkers who believed in the potential of unexplored regions of the human mind, and this project points us to those regions. There is a Buddhist saying that warns us not to mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself. The “Mechanism of Meaning” constantly reminds the viewer—or reader—to think of those paintings not as the art of the end result, but as a trigger or cause leading to some kind of effect that she has never before imagined.

Honestly, I don’t like making the clichéd East-West connection, but this really is the most effective way of explaining their practice. After all, Madeline Gins studied Eastern philosophy, so why not?

How does the Reversible Destiny Foundation carry on the shared legacy of Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins?

Since Arakawa and Gins were trying to go beyond the conventional logic, I imagine having two people constantly questioning each other’s thoughts would have greatly helped each of their works and their collaborative projects. It is challenging for the foundation to face the philosophical question of “conversation and collaboration,” but I think that is one of many avenues of research and investigation for scholars, curators and hopefully many young students and artists.

Learn more about the Reversible Destiny Foundation.

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