DIY: Biopolitics: The Deregulated Self

Shuzaku Arakawa’s early paintings (1961-73) (many of which were produced with Madeline Gins, though she took no authorial credit for them) represent what appear to be semi-finished sketches that sometimes look like technical drawings against backgrounds of white and varying shades of brown. The purpose of these two-dimensional representations is to signify ‘blankness’ as a “neutral positing”, in the sense that blank is a ‘holding open’ of the compulsion toward the standard artistic practice of conceptual and cognitive coloniza-tion toward a predetermined end.1 As they state: “it is what is there but undifferentiated, so it is nothing ... It is what fills emptiness.”2Another way of understanding blank is through the French blanc, meaning white, which is, of course, the congealing of all the colors in the spectrum (as opposed to black, the absence of color). In this sense, blank (or blanc) is overabundance, the reservoir of potential-ity from which anything can come forth. The concept of blank draws our attention to the multiple points of interpretation contained within open-endedness, as opposed to the definitive teleological fixity for which strives much (not all) creative practice. The visual argument in these artworks is that painting as an activity abstracts from nature, narrowing down and essentializing experience. Abstract thought is the frame that apprehends the open-endedness of meaning, defin-ing and positioning a text in exclusive, unequivocal terms. In this respect, much of Arakawa’s early work remains untitled (acting as the actual title of the work), which itself is an act of resistance to the etymological determinism that comes with labels that posit in explicit terms what it is we are meant to understand and experience from artistic productions