Helen Keller or Arakawa [Hardcover]

Madeline Gins (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1994

Fiction. Art Theory. HELEN KELLER OR ARAKAWA gives rise to a new form of speculative fiction, conveying the potential for human experience now and here rather than depicting worlds distant in space or time. The novel tracks consciousness and identity through the intermingling paths of its three protangonists: the historical person Helen Keller; the iconoclastic artist Arakawa; and the writer herself, Madeline Gins. At the same time, this innovative work advances and upsets key tenets of contemporary critcal theory. This is a beautifully published book whose author is a participant in the recent show POETRY PLASTIQUE at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York. The catalog for that show, edited by Jay Sanders and Charles Bernstein, is listed in this SPD catalog.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Part aesthetics, part psychology, part time-bending historical fiction, Helen Keller or Arakawa is a romp through language, philosophy of perception, and discourse that demands much of the reader and delivers much as well. For anyone interested in the current direction of avant-garde aesthetics and the postmodern novel, Gins offers up a fiction that is essential reading. -- Jordan Jones, The Los Angeles Reader, October 14, 1994

About the Author

Madeline Gins was born in 1941 in New York City where she lives today. With a keen interest in physics and philosophy, she graduated from Barnard College in 1962. She studied painting at the Brooklyn Museum, where she met the artist Arakawa. In 1963, they entered a long-term collaborative partnership that began initially with an attempt to actively catalogue Arakawas diagrammatic paintings as they were being sold. Together, they plotted out schematically the range of capabilities of a human being, inventing an original lexicon of description, which resulted in The Mechanism of Meaning first published by Bruckmann in Germany, 1971. The work was revised for Harry N. Abrams, Inc. in 1979, and expanded for Abbeville in 1987. Their ongoing collaborative work has also resulted in large-scale architectural installations exhibited throughout Europe and in New York.

Gins created the Containers of Mind Foundation in 1987 to discover the forms of mind which test the limits of the body, galvanizing her long-standing interest in researching the nature and conditions of mortality. Reversible destiny architecture, Gins says, would reveal the site of a person and much of what goes on within to find out what is preservable and on what terms. Construction of specific sites of reversible destiny are planned for Japan in 199495. A practicing poet from the age of thirteen, her first work of prose written in 1960 investigated sunyata, or emptiness. Her published books of poetry and prose include Word Rain (1969), Intend (1973), What the President Will Say and Do!! (1984), and co-authored with Arakawa (1987) To Not to Die.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 307 pages
• Publisher: Burning Books; 1st edition (1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 093605011X
• ISBN-13: 978-0936050119
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 7.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,399,758 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The poet as "a juggler of microdistinctions.", February 16, 1998

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hotshots (france) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Helen Keller or Arakawa (Hardcover)

In her most recent work of "speculative prose" to date, Helen Keller or Arakawa, Madeline Gins weaves a spectrum of philosophical complications and molecular complexities that somehow exceeds the limits of her own unmistakable brand of "multidimensional" discourse. The language is abrasive, porous, corrugated, witty and visionary, lucid and opaque, visceral and analytical, alternately solid and protoplasmic. All this makes for a new form of "post-generic" prose, a search for a new consciousness whose contours Gins sets out to delineate on the basis of Helen Keller's life, the art of New York-based painter and architect Arakawa and the Kirlian vectors of her own prose. Gins' reflections on the trajectories of thought and feeling often result in a kind of verbal choreography--interrupted and complemented by various kinds of typographical and intertextual directions--which seeks to combine the thread of memory with an awareness of the unnamed movements of the waking mind in relation to its physical environment. Physical and metaphysical uncertainty, the dialectics of blindness and insight, the West's misunderstanding of the non-West, transcontinental culture shock, postmodern aesthetics and architectural contigency are themes that compete and combine in Gins' investigation of the mechanisms of meaning and consciousness. Perhaps the best way of approaching Helen Keller or Arakawa is to read it the light of her definition of the poet as "a juggler of microdistinctions." Gins displays a huge intellectual and visionary faculty, both profound and witty, as she sets the terms for a "thinking field" that does justice, among many other things, to the manifold transitivity of her interconnected lines of thought and belief.