Be Very Specific, Or: Some Notes on Some Questions (by Madeline Gins)

In 1969, the poet and artist Madeline Gins (1941–2014) began an exploration of the questionnaire as a means of generating collaborative writing. She created at least two questionnaires: one has survived in her archive, the other appeared in 0 to 9 magazine’s “Street Works,” a supplemental publication documenting a series of happenings that took place on the streets of Manhattan in spring of 1969. I have written about the “Street Works” questionnaire on several occasions before (here and here); it is a sort of Mad Lib-style template designed to elicit responses that are slated for incorporation into a projected “GROUP NOVEL, AN HISTORICAL NOVEL, AND EXPLORATION OF THE NATURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS,” regarding which Gins takes care to note, “MY PUBLISHER HAS EXPRESSED INTEREST IN THIS PROJECT.” Gins lists a PO box number at the top of her mimeographed flyer and requests that the recipient, “Please finish these sentences and return this paper.” I’m not sure if anyone ever did, alas. There is no evidence in Gins’s archive of any completed “GROUP NOVEL” forms—which, as far as I can tell, were not handed out with envelopes or stamps, a high bar for the busy New Yorkers who would have received them as they rushed by—nor is the novel itself extant.

The questionnaire-curious will be happy to learn that there is a trace of responses to an earlier survey, one that was filled out by a class of ten- and eleven-year-old students on January 20th, 1969, the Monday Richard Nixon was sworn in as the 37th President of the United States. Here it is, for your own delectation (and potential use):

The person administering this questionnaire was Gins’s mother, a middle-school teacher in the town of Island Park on Long Island, where Gins had grown up. (Gins was born in the Bronx and the family moved when she was a small girl.) The questionnaire Mrs. Gins kindly conveyed to her fifth graders on her daughter’s behalf—the instruction to “ask the children to try to feel their answers” is apparently written from Gins directly to her mother—would have seemed unusual, perhaps particularly so in the somewhat conservative community of the town. One respondent, Susan, titles her page of answers “Funny Ques.” Another, Joanne Litt, comments, “boy are these questions queer.” But other students seem to take the prompts more seriously, even employing them to explore immense, extra-historical questions about the state of time and the material world. Virginia Kelleher, responding to question 4., regarding “the most interesting thought you have ever had,” writes:

To be the smartest person in the whole world and know when dooms day was coming know the past and future. I still have these thoughts.

Meanwhile, Peter Rosenblum opines, “the earth is dead.” A student who appears to be named simply “Tybert” (perhaps a surname?) responds to question 6. with the query, “is the earths middle hollo and what do you think is inside.” Nancy Grodd wonders, “How it would be if all the world was at peace.”

There are more prosaic enquiries, too, such as, “Was Paul Revere jewish” (Alex Orenstein), “Why Do you think I don’t have very many friends” (again, the unfortunate Joanne Litt), and, “Could you tell me, the answer to the social studies test?” (Gwen, whose last name is illegible). The students reply that their thoughts are made of diverse substances: Gold and silk are popular responses, but there are also those who think in leather, wool, “a fluffy cotton,” “Duck feathers soft,” “soft tissue,” sugar, fur, emerald, steel, marbles, and nothing—while Randy Kerman replies, “They come from words.” No one is satisfied with their circle; everyone thinks about their circle in their “brain” or “head” or “mind,” except for Paul Horowitz, who locates it in “my heart”; everyone seems to feel that adults have all the power and intelligence. Randy Brown puts this final matter succinctly and even a bit tragically: “there size, smartness, strength.”

Looking at the questions Gins poses, one has the sense that she is at once profoundly respectful of the children’s creative capacity and intelligence, even as she wants to encourage them to focus more intently on the ways in which their thoughts move, are located and related to a larger social body, and seem to take on material form. At the top of her questionnaire is a mysterious prompt that may be a short script for her mother to say aloud, “Set up: In how many eyes am I appearing [upside down] at this moment?” I have to admit that I am not quite sure what this question is getting at, although it seems related to the plural-ness of the respondents—as if Gins wants them to notice that they are many, and not merely singular, as well as to attend to the mediated nature of human vision.

This delightfully unusual questionnaire, deployed on the day of Nixon’s swearing-in, is perhaps the earliest evidence of the intersections of research, collaboration, critical aesthetics, and poetry that were to fascinate and obsess Madeline Gins for the rest of her life. In January of 1969, when Gins was 27, she had already been married to her life-long partner and collaborator, the painter Arakawa, for several years. In the fall, she would publish her first book, the experimental novel, WORD RAIN (or A Discursive Introduction to the Intimate Philosophical Investigations of G,R,E,T,A, G,A,R,B,O, It Says). She was still a decade and a half away from founding, in collaboration with Arakawa, the Reversible Destiny architecture firm, under the auspices of which the pair would explore a utopian style of architecture and affect-centric philosophy, hoping to halt human mortality. The winter 1969 questionnaire broaches a number of related matters, interrogating symbolic systems and the human body’s relationship to them, as well as asking the children to consider their own relationships to culture and society. I don’t know how Gins planned to make use, or in fact made use, of the responses she received, but the questionnaire offers a clear link between the self-reflexive experiments Gins was undertaking at this time as a literary writer and the architecture-based philosophical practice she would later pursue. It’s thus a revelatory document in more ways than one.

And it can also provide us with some insight into Gins’s biography. I find myself very interested, for example, to see that our friend Nancy Grodd, she who contemplates world peace, elects to respond to the questionnaire’s final prompt with a question that considers both her teacher and her teacher’s daughter, writing, in an elegant and clearly painstakingly perfected cursive, “When did you first hear about your daughter’s book being published? How did you feel?” It’s a moment of surprising insight and empathy, revealing hints of the complex relationship, as well as the love, that must have motivated Mrs. Gins to share her daughter’s difficult, “queer” art with her funny, fearful, despairing, ambitious, and precocious students.