R.U. Sirius says: “This must be a prank. The Wall Street Journal today reports on a couple of “immortalists” whose dreams of living forever were wrecked by Best Scammer Ever Bernard Madoff.”
From the WSJ:
[Arakawa and Madeline Gins‘] 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…
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.
But as R.U. points out, “This is conceptual art folks, not someone’s actual dream of immortality. The WSJ simply did a poor job of framing the story.”
Here’s the WSJ’s slideshow of Arakawa and Madeline Gins’ whimsical work.
Artists who design intentionally difficult buildings were victims of Madoff