The Poetic Jump at Arts and Letters

Is there a circumstance that allows us to escape death?, is the eternal question of avant-garde artist duo Arakawa and Madeline Gins, surveyed in The Poetic Jump showing at the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The exhibit clearly examines the humor and genius central to the question of “reversible destiny” from Arakawa’s early philosophical text-and-diagram works to the interactive spaces he developed alongside his wife and collaborator, Madeline Gins. 

Instead of addressing immortality with reincarnation, Arakawa and Gins create a space that renders us eternal in Ubiquitous Site X (1987-91, 2026). As the central prop of the exhibition, it provides visitors a space of the disorientation and derealization necessary for one to transcend their bodily decay. The curtain of pink robes envelops viewers in disorienting darkness, and the uneven terrain breaks their inherent balance and sense of scale.

Arakawa and Madeline Gins, Ubiquitous Site X, 1987–91/2026. Photo: Steven Probert Studio 

The exhibition also examines the visual philosophy to arrive at an architecture of “reversible destiny.” The early work by Arakawa, NO! Says the Room (1972), examines the conditioning of the body by rigid and conventional spaces. Defined room plans paired with orienting language (“focus here,” “NO!") question how spaces condition us to be complacent in a conventional life, and thus a conventional death.

Arakawa, NO! Says the Room, 1972. Installation view, American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2026. Photo: Steven Probert Studio 

 The Poetic Jump addresses our essential fears: what happens after death, and in life,  what changes that death, all without taking itself too seriously. It calls on viewers to break from the limitations of their earthly bodies and enter a reality of endlessness, an increasingly exciting prospect in a world that feels ever more destined for an end. 

- William Spadoni, Group B