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, 1860–1989, 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, 1860–1989, 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 111 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 1938 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 (1970) 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 (1982/94). 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 1980s to the 1860s, 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 (1980–81) 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. Howard Greenberg Gallery, brush, rarely had any direct relationship to these origins. For instance, the New York, Courtesy of the Allen Ginsberg Trust, New calligraphic traditions developed over millennia in China and Japan to write York. © Allen Ginsberg Estate 2008. the word “dog” are not based on an image of a floppy-eared companion. They are based on the ways in which past calligraphers had composed this already-abstracted sign. An English approximation to this argument may be to argue that every time the name “Peter” is written, it is a reference to “stone”-like qualities. This is the same type of wilful (“selective”) misunderstanding that writers like Ezra Pound indulged in. To serve that indulgence back to audiences of today rather than explaining the means by which that indulgence operated is not productive.
Such confusions are due to that fact that in this exhibition it is precisely the diversity and number of interesting moments within American-Asian artistic and literary dialogue that sometimes cripples the show and prevents it from a clear presentation of the narratives it sets out to create—or, rather, it is the difficulty of making sense of these interactions between American and Asian materials. For instance, if David Smith’s reverence for the Japanese “power stroke” was something he absorbed through the translated writings of Chinese painters found in The Spirit of the Brush (Shio Sakanishi, 1939), it is those layers of translating and essentializing that are exactly what is interesting, but these are not expanded upon. This is largely a problem of organization.
79 Each of these artworks is conditioned by its place in the broader histories John Cage, New River Watercolor Series I, #5, of interaction with Asia, and, particularly, by access to what might be 1988, watercolor on parchment paper, 45.7 x termed liminal texts or nodal texts—those works in translation (Goddard’s 91.4 cm. Collection of Ray Kass. Photo: The Mountain Buddhist Bible) or works based on works in translation (Ezra Pound’s Lake Workshop, Virginia Tech Photographic Service. Cathay) or people who translated (D. T. Suzuki’s classes on Zen held at © The John Cage Trust at Columbia of the 1950s) from which artists absorbed Asian concepts. It is Bard College. these texts that directly informed most of the artwork presented, but the functional role they played is the least emphasized part of the exhibition.
Ann Hamilton’s commissioned installation, human carriage (2009), makes a gesture towards these connecting liminal texts. The work comprises a small gauze-shrouded carriage put on a track to spiral downwards through the rotunda. The metallic carriage box, carrying a payload of shredded texts, whirrs along, and as it hits programmed bumps along the way, a set of chimes in the carriage sounds. When the carriage reaches the base
80 floor, it drops the text and is reset to the top by a pulley system. Whereas the intention is to remind viewers of the unifying nature of texts, the machine mainly serves to draw viewers away from the rest of the exhibition. The overly regularized chiming sounds do not create epiphanies, and the selected shredded texts, meant in this context to represent texts that facilitate interaction, are largely irrelevant pulp fiction romance and sci-fi novels. In short, it is a distraction.
While thus far this has been a critical review, I think that only points to the fact that there is a wealth of material here to be sorted through, perhaps too much, and that in presenting this material, Munroe has opened a trove of potential. The show does many things very well. The Fluxus room is beautifully curated, particularly the installation of John Cage drawings, which are arranged on the wall according to Cage’s computer-generated chance formula, which, in turn, is based on the Book of Changes (I Ching).
81 The rhythm of these high and low, densely and widely spaced drawings Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance 1980–1981, and prints forces the viewer to adjust their viewing height and stride April 11, 1980–April 11, 1981, installation of documentary accordingly, creating a very interactive viewing program, and one with photographs and original relevance to the rhythms of Cage’s compositions. In this same room are performance relics, including poster, documents, 366 time Dick Higgens’s A Thousand Symphonies, sheet music punctuated by bullet cards, 366 24-hour images, 16mm film, time clock, 16mm holes and spray paint, and Nam Jun Paik’s Zen for Film (1964), about movie camera, uniform, shoes, and footprints. Photo: Michael which Paik said, “I react to Zen the same way I react to Johann Sebastian Shen. © 1981 Tehching Hsieh, Bach.” Such moments of genre and classification bending within the overall New York. program of modernist canon reformation add depth to the show.
The plentiful incorporation of non-mainstream modern artists is a fantastic opportunity for the viewer to expand their notion of the American canon as well. Natvar Bhavsar’s sieve painting Delwara (1982), Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins’s The Mechanism of Meaning (1963–71), and Teching Hsieh’s One Year Performance 1980–1981 were all delightful new material, at least to my viewing experience, and ones that succeeded in drawing out worthwhile connections to modernist narratives in general and to the Asian thesis that The Third Mind presented.
To some degree the exhibition’s faults are the result of the constraints of the Guggenheim space itself. Although the continuous wall of the Guggenheim New York is ideal for a show of chronological structure, it does not serve a non-linear show well at all. The teleological implications of the continuously rising, progressing exhibition space are difficult to counteract. Whereas Fenollosian ideas of the Orient in the twentieth century did come before New York encounters with Zen Buddhism in the 1950s via Suzuki, and thus one understanding of Asian thought precedes a later one, perhaps conditioning it slightly, the implication that one is a progression from the other is misleading.
The confusion that permeates this show could have been curtailed by editing out the nineteenth-century content and a renaming of the show something along the lines of American Modernism and Zen. A different venue would also have helped, one that facilitated a “nodes of interaction” layout. Instead this show ends up adopting the chronological progression of modernism, so that Abstract Expressionism turns to Minimalism turns to Pop, just with Asian influences. Such a story is a good one, but the artworks shown here illustrate only a subordinate narrative of Asian contacts within modernist movements. It rarely elucidates these interactions.
Outside In Outside In: Chinese x American x Contemporary Art was curated by Jerome Silbergeld, Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, with Cary Y. Liu, Curator of Asian Art at the Princeton Museum, and Dora C. Y. Ching, Associate Director of Princeton’s P. Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Center. It asks a very different question from the Guggenheim exhibition, one that could be paraphrased as: Is what is currently exhibited under the banner contemporary Chinese art adequately categorized as such? If not (and it is assumed not), how do we describe this art?
The exhibition includes the work of six contemporary artists who are American citizens but who might also be categorized as Chinese— ethnically, nationally, or by other tangential affiliation. They work in diverse styles and mediums and were certainly chosen because of their inability
82 83 Zhang Hongtu, Ping-pong Mao, 1995, mixed media installation, 76 cm. x 274 cm. x 152 cm. Collection of Ethan Cohen Fine Arts and the artist. Photo: Bruce M. White.
to appear homogenous. In contrast to many of the artists in Third Mind, these artists are not household names, nor are they names canonical to “contemporary Chinese art” as it has been defined recently in larger blockbuster shows or by auction house prices.
As an example, Arnold Chang, who has been called a contemporary classicist, paints landscapes in “Chinese” ink on “Chinese” paper in a “Chinese” manner, but he was born and raised an American. To place the delicate drawing of his landscape works such as Landscape after Dong Yuan (2007) tangential to Zhang Hongtu’s Ping-Ping Mao (1995), a Ping- Pong table made dysfunctional by two Mao silhouette-sized holes, creates questions of connectivity. What can one possibly have to do with the other? Such juxtapositions are statements by the curators about the differences that separate work called “contemporary Chinese” and are meant to call into question the commonalities that “contemporary Chinese” exhibitions of the past have implied.
Michael Cherney, The Northern Song Spirit Road, S2, from the series Bounded by Mountains, 2005, photographic album, open: 26 x 415.8 cm, edition of 18. Princeton University Art Museum, gift of the P. Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Center for East Asian Art. Photo: Bruce M. White.
The other four artists are equally diverse in medium and intent. Michael Cherney is a landscape photographer based in China. His photographs are cropped in evocative ways and are then blown up to the point of pixelization, after which they are printed onto “Chinese” paper in a folding album style that is also the distinct cultural property of China.
Zhi Lin and Liu Dan appear the most similar to one another. The former draws and paints meticulously planned scenes of social history on an epic scale and with a certain baroque attention to the gestures and dimensions
84 Top: Installation view of human interaction. The latter of Outside In, Zhi Lin, Starvation, from the series is equally meticulous in his ink Five Capital Punishments in China, 1999. Photo: Bruce M. paintings, but he prefers finely White. Courtesy of Princeton University Art Museum, drawn objects and rhythmic Princeton, New Jersey. formalist landscapes to the world of social narratives. Middle: Liu Dan, Ink Handscroll (detail), 1990, handscroll; ink and color on paper, 95.6 cm x 1700.8 cm. With this selection of artists, Courtesy of the San Diego Museum of Art. one sometimes wonders if their intentionally contrarian appearance Bottom: Installation view in relation to one another isn’t a of Vannessa Tran, Untitled, 2004, oil on canvas, 26.7 x little forced. The last artist, Vannessa 15.2 cm. Photo: Bruce M. White. Courtesy of Princeton Tran, as an American of Vietnamese University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey. descent who paints in oils, does not fit into the rest of the group presented in this show as far as medium or ethnicity are concerned. At best, the curators can say she has a Zen-inspired approach, one in which form and ground dissolve into one another in a process of defining and erasing. But is this Zen-like quality an appropriate one for contemporary Chinese art? If not, how far off are the other artists from being similarly excluded because they do not belong materially or contextually? The only one who lives in China is Cherney, a non-Chinese photographer who grew up in Queens.
85 However, this weakness is also the show’s greatest strength. Being driven to ask what these artworks have to do with one another naturally leads the viewer to question the category “contemporary Chinese art” as well as “contemporary American art.” How and why do we separate things based on national or cultural or even temporal bases, and what does that do to the artworks? What narratives are these objects forced into, and which ones are they then excluded from? There is the impression that any artwork can be put into a variety of stories successfully, whether it be the story of American- born Chinese artists, or of Chinese émigré artists, or even of contemporary art. This exhibition doesn’t tell a grand narrative or a sub-narrative, but it encourages the questioning of every narrative as subject to a purpose.
In an interesting counterpoint to the issue of exhibition installation in The Third Mind, Outside In’s pluralist goal is carried out principally in the layout of the exhibition. The first room presents a conventional arrangement of artworks under the heading of Diversity, with wall texts that describe each artist’s background. This conservative biographical approach tells the viewer an artwork is related to who the artist is. As such, it is like any group show at any gallery, and despite their lack of relation to one another in style, the works appear not to be in conflict in this first room.
Installation view of Outside In, (from left to right) Claude Monet, Meadow at Giverney, 1894; Zhang Hongtu, Ni Zan- Monet, 2000; Ni Zan, Twin Trees by the South, 1353; Arnold Chang, Landscape After Ni Zan 2000.8, 2000. Photo: Bruce M. White. Courtesy of Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey.
But in the second room, the seeming order of this multi-artist show turns in another direction. Organized under the wall text header Stylistic Influences, works of classical Chinese painting, Impressionist art, and Baroque drawing are juxtaposed with contemporary artworks to create new narratives. These are no longer works that tell us something about the artist, but works that tell us something about the history of art and style and the anachronistic manipulation of these elements to the advantage of contemporary artists. One particularly nice grouping of artworks is Arnold Chang’s ink on paper Landscape After Ni Zan 2000.8 (2000), alongside an authentic Ni Zan painting in ink on paper, Twin Trees by the South (1353), followed by Zhang Hongtu’s oil painting of a Ni Zan composition in the colours and brushwork of Claude Monet, Ni Zan-Monet (2000), and lastly by Monet’s Meadow at Giverny (1894). This game of “three degrees of separation” (from Ni Zan to Monet, or “four degrees,” from Chang to Monet) is at once unifying and diversifying.
The same effect is achieved when the bronze sculptures by Zhang Hongtu, Mai Dang Lao (McDonald’s) (2002), take-out boxes and utensils decorated with Zhou dynasty ornament, sit in a vitrine kitty-corner to Zhi Lin’s epic mixed-media hanging scroll Starvation (1999). In these contrasts, the generic labelling of this work or that as “contemporary Chinese art” seems arbitrary.
86 While Outside In is successful in its needling of the viewer to be more critical of genres and in its presentation of lesser-known contemporary artists, it would fall apart as an exhibition on the scale of the Guggenheim’s. Fortunately, its aims are not historical, and the questions it inspires are the kind of questions that are portable.
Both of these exhibitions stand in strong contrast to the types of shows that have represented contemporary Asian art in America up to this point. Such recent shows of Chinese art, in particular Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection (Peabody Essex Museum, 2009, Berkeley Art Museum, 2009, Kunstmuseum Bern, 2005), Half-Life of a Dream (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2008), to name just two, have shown a type of contemporary Chinese art dominated by installations and Cynical Realist school painting, a type of art that has also dominated the market in contemporary Chinese art. Such shows tend to carry the same roster of about a dozen artists from mainland China whose work is palatable to American ideas of what Chinese Contemporary ought to be—“red”, political, sensational, exotic, and illustrative of a certain American understanding of the contemporary Chinese condition. The other type of show has been the solo artist show (Cai Guo-qiang, Huang Yong-Ping), which is in many ways an equally conservative take on presenting art of Asia—conservative because they elevate already well-known artists into canonical figures.
This tried and true method of presenting contemporary Chinese (and perhaps Asian) art, and the roster of artists that accompanied it, was set by the then path-breaking Inside Out: New Chinese Art (Asia Society, 1998, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1999, National Gallery of Australia, 2000), the show that introduced to American and Australian audiences what would become the canon of contemporary Chinese art. Outside In is obviously is a response to this touchstone show, and it asks us to be critical of the now-established genre of contemporary Chinese art. The Third Mind is less directly a response to this now typical presentation of contemporary Chinese art, but it is equally symbolic of a will among forward-minded curators to diversify entrenched narratives of modern and Asian art.
In many ways, Outside In and The Third Mind are searching out the same thing: a new way to talk about issues of the hybridity and Asian influences that are included in and inherent to American art by now. But the two exhibitions stand in strong counterpoint to one another in terms of style and method of presentation. By grafting itself to the overall narrative of American modernism, The Third Mind loses track of the moments that are most intriguing in the wonderful array of material it brings together. By presenting a deliberately definition-defying group of “Chinese x American x Contemporary Art,” Outside In may appear difficult for viewers to connect with because of its questioning of comfortable narratives, but all the better that viewers should realize the discomfort these narratives can cause.
These exhibitions both make it part of their aim to show audiences that for each narrative into which an artwork can be placed, there are just as many alternative stories. Artists rarely create with a clear mission to insert their work into a single narrative or genre. The Third Mind and Outside In show that when it comes to modern and contemporary Asian art, such diversification of narratives is finally occurring in the register of public exhibitions.
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