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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

Part of the flow in this show, organized by Alexandra Munroe, the Guggenheim's senior curator of Asian art, is history. And it helps to bring a little bit with you. It is useful, for example, to know that Asia made itself felt on American culture well before the 1860 start date. Already in the 1840s, Emerson was reading the Upanishads; and Thoreau, by his own account knew more about Hindu, Chinese and Persian philosophy than he did about the Old Testament. In Asian scripture both men found a vision of nature and the divine as one, an ideal distilled by another New Englander,[[underlined]] Emily Dickinson[[underlined]], in a kind of Transcendentalist haiku:

In the name of the Bee

And of the Butterfly

And of the Breeze - Amen!

Asian influence seeped into American Painting a bit later, after scholars like Ernest Fenollosa and artist like John La Farge visited Japan. In the show you can see the fashion for it catch on and spread, in Whistler's inky 1870s nocturnes, in Arthur Wesley Dow's turn-of-the-century Japanese-style prints, and in the spiritualizing work of artists who lived closer to Asia in the American Northwest: Morris Graves with his luminous images of birds and Chinese bronzes, Mark Tobey with his calligraphic "white writing."

Tobey's art is sometimes taken as a precursor of gestural abstraction in New York. And the case for linking some forms of Abstract Expressionism with Asian writing has been made and unmade many times. With its lineup of Pollocks, Motherwells and Klines the show pushes the argument forward again, though without adding anything startlingly new to it.

Instead its surprises come from the West Coast. There's a gorgeous painting by Sam Francis, who lived for a while in Tokyo, of what looks like a lotus on fire. Lee Mullican's "Evening Raga" has the note-by-note shimmer of Indian music. And his friend Gordon Onslow-Ford, a spiritual omnivore who painted on a ferryboat in Sausalito and wore "visionary" like a campaign button, offers a kind of abstract version of "Starry Night," all filigree webs and wheels.

By the time this piece, "Round See," was done in 1961, [[Underlined]] John Cage [[Underlined]] had been painting, composing and proselytizing his customized version of Zen for years. A section of the show is dedicated to him, or rather to a concept h embodied, one absolutely central of Asian culture: the idea of lineage, the transmission of forms and knowledge from mind to mind.

Cage developed his aesthetic of chance operation in part through study with he Zen scholar D. T. Suzuki, and shared what he learned with contemporaries like [[underlined]] Robert Rauschenberg [[Underlined]] and [[Underlined]] Jasper Johns [[Underlined]]. A Rauschenberg combine called "Gold Standard" (1964) was slapped together in a matter of hours on a Tokyo stage as Cage watched.

But Cage's creative DNA also passed on to a generation of younger, Zen-tinged, Neo-Dada artists who used the group name Fluxus. Work by several of them - Nam June Paik,[[Underlined]] Yoko Ono [[underlined]], Alison Knowles - is assembled near Cage's, along with a ready-for-the-future-travel suitcase packed with Fluxiana.

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