荒川修作氏逝去

HanaというARTiTのフレンドのブログ記事から初めてこの悲しいお知らせを知るようになりました。
荒川修作 Shusaku ARAKAWA R.I.P.
ご冥福をお祈りします。


現代美術家の荒川修作さん死去　７３歳、ＮＹで活躍
http://www.asahi.com/obituaries/update/0520/TKY201005190478.html



荒川の感動が与えた作品は横浜美術館で観ながら、日本美術史のcanonに入る事は良く理解できました。

ちなみに、日本語と違って、英語のwikipediaでこのように荒川修作氏について紹介されてあります：

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shusaku_Arakawa

Shusaku Arakawa
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Arakawa

Background information
Born
July 6, 1936
Nagoya, Japan
Died
May 19, 2010
New York City, USA
Website
reversibledestiny.org
Arakawa (荒川 修作 Arakawa?) (July 6, 1936 - May 19, 2010) was a Japanese artist and architect.
Contents [hide]
1 Life
2 Books by Arakawa and Gins
3 References
4 External links
[edit]
Life
Arakawa studied mathematics and medicine at the University of Tokyo, and art at the Musashino Art University.[1] Initially he worked with printmaking, using abstract dada and Neo-Dada styles. He has lived in New York since 1961.
Arakawa met his partner Madeline Gins in 1963. Together, they founded the Architectural Body Research Foundation. They have designed and built residences (Reversible Destiny Houses, Bioscleave House, Shidami Resource Recycling Model House) and parks (Site of Reversible Destiny-Yoro). They have developed an original theory and practice of the relation of the human being to the exterior world, elaborated most extensively in their book, Architectural Body. Arakawa and Gins are, together and separately, the authors of several books and exhibition volumes, most recently Making Dying Illegal (ISBN 1931824223).
Arakawa and Gins were reportedly victims of Bernard Madoff, losing several million dollars when Madoff's Ponzi scheme collapsed.[2]

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Wall Street Journal:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123785033607519075.html

MARCH 24, 2009
Couple's Dreams of Immortality at Death's Door, Thanks to Madoff
Artists Who Design Homes to Prolong Life Lost Their Life Savings; Undulating Floors

By AMIR EFRATI
Arakawa and Madeline Gins's quest to make human beings immortal is at risk of dying.
That's because the couple lost their life savings with Bernard Madoff, the mastermind of a multibillion-dollar fraud.
Of all the dreams that were crushed by Mr. Madoff's crime, perhaps none was more unusual than this duo's of achieving everlasting life through architecture. Mr. Arakawa (he uses only his last name) and Ms. Gins design structures they say can enable inhabitants to "counteract the usual human destiny of having to die."
The income from their investments with Mr. Madoff helped fund their research and experimental work. Now, Mr. Arakawa, 72 years old, and Ms. Gins, 67, are strapped for cash. They closed their Manhattan office and laid off five employees.
The pair's work, based loosely on a movement known as "transhumanism," is premised on the idea that people degenerate and die in part because they live in spaces that are too comfortable. The artists' solution: construct abodes that leave people disoriented, challenged and feeling anything but comfortable.
They build buildings with no doors inside. They place rooms far apart. They put windows near the ceiling or near the floor. Between rooms are sloping, bumpy moonscape-like floors designed to throw occupants off balance. These features, they argue, stimulate the body and mind, thus prolonging life. "You become like a baby," says Mr. Arakawa.
The couple met in 1962 as students at the Brooklyn Museum Art School. She was a native New Yorker; he was already a successful Japanese artist. They later married. In the 1960s and '70s they played a role in the conceptual art movement, based on the philosophy that the artist's idea or concept behind a piece of art is more important than the physical object itself. The Guggenheim Museum SoHo in Manhattan showcased 30 years of their work in 1997, including paintings and architectural models.
"Their research is a milestone in the history of conceptual art," says Alexandra Munroe, senior curator at the main Guggenheim Museum, on Manhattan's Upper East Side, where the couple's work is currently on display. She says many of their supporters don't literally accept the couple's message on immortality but appreciate it in a "metaphorical" way.
To the artists, eternal life is a real possibility. "This is a great chance for the human race," says Ms. Gins.
Things appeared to be going well for the couple before Mr. Madoff's arrest in December. They completed a park, an office building and nine "reversible destiny" lofts in Japan. The lofts, finished in 2005, cost about $6 million to build. Five of the nine lofts, which rent for $1,700 to $2,300 a month, have tenants.
A typical apartment has three or four rooms in the shapes of either a cylinder, a cube, or a sphere. Rooms surround a kitchen-living room combination with bumpy, undulating floors and floor-to-ceiling ladders and poles. Dozens of colors, from school-bus yellow to sky blue, cover the walls, ceilings and other surfaces.
At least one tenant says he feels a little younger already. Nobutaka Yamaoka, who moved in with his wife and two children about two years ago, says he has lost more than 20 pounds and no longer suffers from hay fever, though he isn't sure whether it was cured by the loft.
There is no closet, and Mr. Yamaoka can't buy furniture for the living room or kitchen because the floor is too uneven, but he relishes the lifestyle. "I feel a completely different kind of comfort here," says the 43-year-old video director. His wife, however, complains that the apartment is too cold. Also, the window to the balcony is near the floor, and she keeps bumping her head against the frame when she crawls out to hang up laundry, he says. ("That's one of the exercises," says Ms. Gins.)
Last year, Mr. Arakawa and Ms. Gins's first U.S. home, which resembles the Tokyo lofts, was completed in East Hampton, N.Y. It took $2 million and eight years to construct, and has a listing price of $5.5 million.
Many scientists see the couple's work as part of a futile, age-old human aspiration to live forever. "Longevity salesman is the second-oldest profession," says S. Jay Olshansky, a researcher on aging at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "This would be the worst possible house you could build for an older person," he says. To prolong life, he recommends building spaces that "lower the probability of falls," plus a healthy diet and exercise.
Some transhumanists dismiss the couple's architectural solution. "Human life has enough challenges in terms of our work and daily lives that we don't need to invent new physical challenges for our bodies," says Ray Kurzweil, a leading transhumanist figure in the U.S. In the future, humans will have microscopic robots in their bodies which will be able to regenerate cells, he says.

The couple's destiny intersected with the Madoffs' in 1994, when Ms. Gins met Mr. Madoff's wife, Ruth, at an art gallery. Ms. Gins recalls that she later met the Madoffs at one of her art shows, and Mr. Madoff said he could help her by investing the couple's savings in his firm. Lawyers for Mr. and Mrs. Madoff declined to comment.
The couple initially invested less than $1 million with Mr. Madoff. Over time, they added deposits and had several million dollars in their investment account at the time of his arrest, Ms. Gins says. "We were grateful to him; he was making things possible for us," she says.
Since Mr. Madoff's Ponzi scheme came to light, the couple have been trying to sell their seminal work, the "Mechanism of Meaning," a series of 84 8-foot-tall panels that took them 10 years to complete, for about $17 million.
"Museums in the U.S. and Germany would be the best candidates," says Lisa Dennison, an executive at Sotheby's who is trying to line up a buyer. "It's an amazing work, but there are not many possible customers for it."
Barring a sell-off of their collection, the couple fear they won't realize their dream of building a "reversible destiny" village with homes and parks that would combine their theories of life into one community.
"Here was someone we thought was a supporter of ours," says Ms. Gins of Mr. Madoff, "and he pulled the rug out from under us."
—Miho Inada and Antonio Regalado contributed to this article.


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