The Solomon R.Guggenheim Museum presents 'The Third Mind ~ American Artists Contemplate Asia'

Written by Mark Rahn Thursday, 09 December 2010 22:46

NEW YORK, NY –  The Solomon R.Guggenheim Museum presents The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989, an exhibition that illuminates the dynamic and complex impact of Asian art, literature, music, and philosophical concepts on American art. The exhibition features approximately 250 works by more than100 artists across a broad range of media—including painting, sculpture, video art, installations, works on paper, film, live performance, literary works, and ephemera—and draws from over 100 major museumand private collections in North America, Europe, and Japan. On exhibition to April 19, 2009.

The exhibition was conceived and organized by Alexandra Munroe, Senior Curator of Asian Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and a leading authority on Asian art. In commenting on the show, Munroe said, “It is my hope that The Third Mind will be a revelatory exhibition, enabling visitors to see 130 years of American creative culture through an entirely new lens––a lens that reveals the transformative influences of Asian art and ideas on the formal and conceptual achievements of American modern and contemporary art.”

Richard Armstrong, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Museum, remarked, “It is always exciting when an exhibition invites us to contemplate an historic span of creative culture from an entirely new perspective.” Armstrong continued, “Everyone at the Guggenheim is looking forward to this stimulating exhibition and series of programs, and we are honored by the recognition of its scholarly and educational merits by the National Endowment for the Humanities.”

Exhibition Overview
The Third Mind proposes a new art-historical construct––one that challenges the widely accepted view that American modern art developed simply as a dialogue with Europe––by focusing on the myriad ways in which vanguard American artists’ engagement with Asian art, literature, music, and philosophical concepts inspired them to forge an independent artistic identity that would define the modern age and the modern mind. These artists developed a new understanding of existence, nature, and consciousness through their prolonged engagement with Eastern religions (Hinduism, Tantric and Chan/Zen Buddhism, Taoism), classical Asian art forms, and living performance traditions. Japanese art and Zen Buddhism dominated in part because America’s political and economic ties with Japan were historically stronger than those with China or India, the other prime source nations examined in this exhibition.

Beginning with the late nineteenth-century American Aesthetic movement and the ideas promulgated in transcendentalist circles, The Third Mind illuminates the Asian influences shaping such major movements as abstract art, Conceptual art, Minimalism, and the neo-avant-garde as they unfolded in New York and on the West Coast. It also presents select developments in modern poetry, music, and dance-theater. According to Ms. Munroe, “What emerges is a history of how artists working in America interpreted, mediated, and incorporated Eastern ideas and art forms to create not only new styles of art, but more importantly, a new theoretical definition of the contemplative experience and a new, self-transformative role for art itself.”

The title of the exhibition refers to Untitled (“Rub Out the Word”) from The Third Mind (ca. 1965), a “cut-ups” work by Beat writers William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, which combines and rearranges unrelated texts to create a new narrative. The mixed-media piece, which will be on view, evokes the eclectic method by which American artists adapted ideas from Asia to create new forms, structures, and meanings for their own art.

The Third Mind features over 100 artists and literary figures from artistic communities throughout the United States, including those in Boston, New York, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Selected for their demonstrable engagement with Asian art, thought, or forms of spiritual practice, the key artists represented in the exhibition include, chronologically: James McNeill Whistler, John LaFarge, Mary Cassatt, Arthur Wesley Dow, Augustus Vincent Tack, Ezra Pound, Georgia O’Keefe, Mark Tobey, Isamu Noguchi, David Smith, Morris Graves, Agnes Martin, John Cage, Ad Reinhardt, Anne Truitt, Jack Kerouac, Robert Rauschenberg, Allen Ginsberg, Jordan Belson, Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono, Dan Flavin, LaMonte Young, Walter de Maria, Marian Zazeela, Adrian Piper, Tehching Hsieh, and Bill Viola.

The exhibition is organized chronologically and thematically into seven sections:

Exhibition Team
The Third Mind was conceived and organized by Alexandra Munroe, Senior Curator of Asian Art of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Vivien Greene, Curator of Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-century Art of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, contributed expertise and the selection of works for the opening section Aestheticism and Japan: The Cult of the Orient, along with a scholarly essay in the exhibition catalogue. Research Associate Ikuyo Nakagawa, Assistant Curators Sandhini Poddar and Nat Trotman, and Asian Art Curatorial Fellow Yao Wu supported the realization of this project. An exhibition Advisory Committee of distinguished arts and humanities scholars provided input and insight into the development of this project.

Exhibition Catalogue
The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989 is accompanied by a richly illustrated 440-page catalogue edited by Alexandra Munroe. It includes scholarly essays by curators and academics specializing in American art history, intellectual history, Asian studies, and postcolonial religious and cultural studies. The catalogue also features a comprehensive chronology of events in U.S.-Asia relations, a bibliography, and artists’ biographies compiled by Ikuyo Nakagawa.

  For updated program information or tickets, contact the Box Office at 212 423 3587 or visit www.guggenheim.org/education.

About the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Founded in 1937, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation is dedicated to promoting the understanding and appreciation of art, primarily of the modern and contemporary periods, through exhibitions, education programs, research initiatives, and publications. Currently the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation owns and operates the Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue in New York and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection on the Grand Canal in Venice, and also provides programming and management for two other museums in Europe that bear its name: the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin. In early 2013 the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, a 452,000 square foot museum of modern and contemporary art designed by architect Frank Gehry, is scheduled to open.

VISITOR INFORMATION
Admission: Adults $18.00, students/seniors (65+) $15.00, members and children under 12 free. Admission includes audio guide tour. Museum Hours: Saturday to Wednesday, 10 a.m. to 5:45 p.m.; Friday, 10 a.m. to 7:45 p.m. Closed Thursday. On Friday evenings, beginning at 5:45 p.m., the museum hosts Pay What You Wish. For general information call, 212 423 3500, or visit www.guggenheim.org.

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