The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989 Solomon R
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Michael Hatch The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum January 30–April 19, 2009 Outside In: Chinese x American x Contemporary Art Princeton University Art Museum March 7–June 7, 2009 wo exhibitions of the past year indicate a trend in the American display of Asian art. The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate TAsia, 860–989, at the Guggenheim in New York City, and Outside In: Chinese x American x Contemporary Art, at the Princeton University Art Museum, each have different central theses, but they overlap in their motivation to re-examine the ways in which Asian themes are approached within exhibitions of contemporary and modern artists. These two shows often succeed in, but occasionally fall short of, redefining narratives, genres, and acceptable exhibition formats for Asian art. They also stand in contrast to the accepted narratives of modernism and contemporary Chinese art that have previously been exhibited. The Third Mind The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 860–989, was organized by Guggenheim Senior Curator of Asian Art Alexandra Munroe with assistance from Vivien Greene, Curator of Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Art. The exhibition challenges the accepted story that American modernists were only looking to Europe, and instead shows that American artists also drew from Asian art, literature, music, and philosophy. This is a bold move for such a large-scale exhibition, and one that was necessary. While it is generally understood and often foot-noted that artists from James McNeill Whistler to Yoko Ono had deep and sustained relationships with artistic, religious, and philosophical traditions from Asia, until now there has been no broad attempt to describe the nature of these relationships over the span of American pre-modernism through to post-modernism. Simply by virtue of its super-sized scale, this exhibition convincingly drives home its point. The work of artists and writers appears in the exhibition, and mediums vary from a sculpture by Augustus Saint- Gaudens to a sound installation with a live musical performance by La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. There are photographs by Alvin Langdon Coburn of early twentieth-century Noh plays and texts such as Jack Kerouac’s copy of the 938 Buddhist Bible by Dwight Goddard—a striking diversity of American artists and writers affected by the particulars of their own experience with Asian art and thought. Aside from teaser installations such as Paul Kos’s Sound of Ice Melting (970) on the ground floor, the first artwork in the show was a small, fifteenth-century Tibetan sutra painting, Four Mandalas of the Vajravali Cycle. Wall text informs us that Carl Jung thought of mandalas as an archetype of wholeness. I took this inclusion of actual Asian artwork to represent a touchstone idea as a good 74 Paul Kos, Sound of Ice Melting, sign that the dialogues between American artists and Asian materials would 1970, two twenty-five-pound blocks of ice, eight boom undergo some scrutiny in the rest of the exhibition. But this was followed microphone stands, eight microphones, mixer, amplifier, by a drastic transition to works by James Lee Byars, beginning with The two large speakers, and cables, dimensions variable. Death of James Lee Byars (982/94). In this massive, room-sized installation Installation view: Museum furnished with a bench, all surfaces are coated with loosely applied gold of Contemporary Art, San Francisco, 1970. © Paul Kos. leaf that flutters with variations in air currents. The effect is mesmerizing, but what this has to do with archetypes of wholeness I’m not sure. Why are these works juxtaposed? 75 James Lee Byars, The Death of James Lee Byars, 1982/1994, gold leaf, crystals, and Plexiglas, dimensions variable. Vanhaerents Art Collection, Brussels. Courtesy of Marie- Puck Broodthaers, Brussels. Photo: Courtesy of Michael Werner Gallery, New York and Cologne, and the Estate of James Lee Byars. © Estate of James Lee Byars. The exhibition then moves suddenly back in time from the 980s to the 860s, to a sideroom removed from the main rotunda where the first section of the exhibition’s chronological sequence, curated by Vivien Greene and titled Aestheticism and Japan: The Cult of the Orient, begins. The selection of artworks in this sideroom could exist as a separate exhibition. In both its conceptual and physical relationship to the rest of the artworks in the exhibition, which are placed along the walls of the central rotunda space, it seems disconnected. Awkwardly sharing the space of this room is the second section of the exhibition, titled Landscapes of the Mind: New Conceptions of Nature. Here, one can’t help but feel that the nineteenth century Aestheticism of John La Farge and Mary Cassatt in the first section doesn’t relate especially well to the early and mid-twentieth century mind-landscapes of Marsden Hartley and Arthur Dove in the second. More than sixty years separate many of these artworks, and their creators’ reactions to Asia were affected by very different conditions and perceptions of what Asia was. What’s more, it is in this room that we find our only experience of anything representational in the exhibition. This leaves the impression that these artists were less interesting forbearers to those who make up the thrust of the show’s content, the modernism of abstract expressionism and beyond. In addition, while this section constitutes the majority of the time period laid out in the title, it accounts for only about ten percent of the exhibition floor space. 76 Mary Cassatt, The Letter, 1890–91, drypoint and aquatint on cream laid paper, 34.4 x 21.1 cm. S. P. Avery Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. Arthur Dove, Fog Horns, 1929, oil on canvas, 54.6 x 72.4 cm. Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, anonymous gift. © The Estate of Arthur G. Dove. Once we move back to the rotunda’s spiral, we encounter the bulk of the show, which generally reflects the ways in which Buddhism, particularly Zen Buddhism from Japan, was received by American artists in the mid- twentieth century. But does it tell us anything about what Zen is or what kind of Zen it was that Americans were responding to? We start with 77 calligraphic canvasses by Mark Mark Tobey, Crystallizations, 1944, tempera on board, 45.7 Tobey and spiral up through x 33 cm. Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts Jackson Pollock, Jack Kerouac, at Stanford University, Mabel Ashley Kizer Fund, gift of Allen Ginsberg, Jasper Johns, Dan Melitta and Rex Vaughan, and Modern and Contemporary Flavin, Linda Montano, and Bill Acquisitions Fund. Photo: M. Lee Fatherree Photography. Viola, and end with Tehching © Mark Tobey Estate/Seattle Hsieh. The works are grouped in Art Museum. this progression into conceptual categories that also follow each other chronologically: from Ezra Pound, Modern Poetry and Dance Theatre; to Abstract Art, Calligraphy and Metaphysics; to Buddhism and the Neo-Avant-Garde; then Art of Perceptual Experience: Pure Abstraction and Ecstatic Minimalism; and, lastly, Experiential Performance Art: The Aesthetics of Time. Moving from the central spiral, side galleries present Fluxus, John Cage, and Yoko Ono, as well as the sound installation room by La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. But, increasingly, as we ascend, there is less of a sense of why we’re progressing in this way. The conceptual categories and the chronological sequence merge in such a way that the viewer is uncertain about the relevance of either time or theme as organizing mechanism. One of the key points found in the wall texts is that modernist understandings of Asia were “selective,” meaning that what American artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries considered Asian, or Japanese, or Chinese, or Indian, was influenced by their biases. To illustrate this point, there are a small number of images on wall texts that show actual moments of contact between the artists and things Asian. There are pictures of Allen Ginsberg and company bumming through Japan, from which we can assume, but are not told, the primary experience of Japan made an impact upon the writers. Alongside Cassatt prints and Whistler paintings are placed a few Japanese prints, from which it is well known both artists appropriated compositional and textural tricks such as elevated perspective or foreshortening of space. But in most cases, the actual points of connectivity, be they translated texts, essays, artworks, or even people, are mentioned only briefly in the wall texts and are rarely fully explained. This creates a problem, because if these are the means of “selective” understanding by which the artworks of this exhibition were influenced, why do they seem so silent in the exhibition? When a wall panel for Jasper Johns’s Dancer on a Plane (980–8) shows a fifteenth-century Tantric Tibetan painting, Chakra Samra and Vajravaki Embracing, and tells us that this homage to Merce Cunningham is a reinvented system of Tantric imagery, I would like to know how, not simply that there is a connection. At times the show also slips dangerously close to an essentializing of the Asia its artists indulged in. For example, in the opening to a section on the influences of Japanese and Chinese calligraphy, we are told, “Calligraphy is the ancient art of writing ideographs.” Not quite. While the writing systems 78 Allen Ginsberg, Sea of Japan, of China and Japan were developed over 5,000 years ago from pictographic 1963, gelatin silver print, with inscription in ink by Allen symbols, in the following millennia the art of calligraphy, done with ink and Ginsberg, 27.9 x 35.6 cm.