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Art Review- 'The Third Mind- American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989' - Gaze East and Dream, at the Guggenheim - NYTimes.com       
7/13/09 2:01 PM

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January 30, 2009
ART REVIEW  "THE THIRS MIND: AMERICAN ARTISTS CONTEMPLATE ASIA, 1860-1989'
Gaze East and Dream
By(Underlined and Bold) HOLLAND COTTER

"The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989" at the (underlined) Guggenheim Museum is a strange show, mostly good-strange, often beautiful-strange, and for sure long overdue. 

When I first saw the title, I thought: O.K., so we're going to get Nature, cosmic consciousness and tons of Zen. All of which we do get, maybe too much, but we also get more, including enough revisionist thinking to muss up all the standard accounts of 20th-century American art, always a worthy goal.

The strangeness starts with the look of the museum itself. It's rare to see (underlined) Frank Lloyd Wright's pristine white spiral looking funky and unharmonious; but now, in a mild way it does, like a half-emptied attic or a convention hotel for mad scientists, poets and saints, with cluttered stretches and blank stretches and a few sculptures tossed here and here. 

The first thing you see is a 1970 piece by the West Coast conceptualist Paul Kos: a circle of microphones clustered around a block of melting ice, picking up the sound of every crack and drop. Up the ramp is the famous ink and brush painting of a circle, triangle and square by Sengai Gibon (1750-1837). It's a Zen Mona Lisa, on a rare loan from Japan. 

And just beyond that is "The Death of James Lee Byars": an open-front box, a kid of teahouse as wide as a two-car garage, lined with blazing gold leaf, with a bierlike platform inside. Mr. Byars, an American Buddhist dandy, long resident in Japan, made the piece when he was very much alive and sometimes lay on the bier "practicing death." Now that he's gone - he died in 1997 - five small crystals take his place.

The show finds the museum unusually full of sounds, however faint. Bells held in a kind of cage periodically sail down the spiral and ring. Synthesizers drone and vibrate away somewhere, and an amplified buzzing of bees has, when you get close, the roar of fighter planes. 

Periodically parcels of books descend by pulley from on high, as part of an elaborate - overly elaborate - installation by (bold) Ann Hamilton. Lights flash in the dark; paintings all but disappear into walls. You catch glimpses of familiar artists - Franz Kline, Brice Marden, James McNeill Whistler - but also lots of strangers. Who's that, and that, and that?

I initially found myself impatient with the show's less than obvious thematic logic, and distracted by trying to sort out who was who, and where, and why. Then a bell rang and I thought: Never mind; read all the wall texts, look around, go with the flow. And I did. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/30/arts/design/30mind.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print

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