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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

Traditional Zen painting is black and white. By contrast, Tibetan Buddhist art comes in vivid colors, which made it naturally attractive to artists and writers taking drugs in the 1950s and 1960s. Some are indelibly identified as Beats. Jack Kerouac, with sketchy bodhisattvas and a manuscript slice of "Dharma Bums," is one. So is William Burroughs, whose esoteric cut-and-paste work called "The Third Mind" gave the show its title.

Where an artist like Harry Smith fits in is harder to say. Chronologically he was a Beat. But his short animated films blending Tantrism, Theosophy, Orientalist Pop and Alastair Crowley, all to a cool jazz score, don't feel period specific. They could be hippie '60s. They could be by young artists today. (It's important to note that the show barely touches on Islamic Asia, specifically on Sufism, in which Mr. Smith was interested.)

There are a number of free-radical types like him in the show, which is one reason it has a patchy, scrapbookish look. Even the section devoted to Minimalism resists the sort of uniformity that art history, even straightening and cleaning, tries to impose.

Ms. Munroe finesses the problem by inventing a category she calls ecstatic minimalism, which covers expected figures like Robert Irwin, Ad Reinhardt and Richard Tuttle, but also admits personally expressive works like those of Agnes Martin and Yayoi Kusama, and makes room for excellent artists like Natvar Bhavsar, Zarina Hashmi and Tadaaki Kuwayama, so seldom seen in big mainstream shows that they've barely been slotted in at all. 

Into this charmed circle Ms. Munroe also brings abstract artists working with sound and light, like Jordan Belson, James Whitney and La Monte Young. whether you call Mr. Belson and Mr. Whitney optical scientists or psychic magicians, they are fascinating figures, very much in line with the Guggenheim's own history as a museum of non-objective art rooted in diverse cultural and spiritual traditions.

As for Mr. Young, he and his "Dream House," with a 24/7 drone and trippy lighting by Marian Zazeela, have long since become underground institutions. First installed as a permanent environment in his Manhattan home in 1962, then used for performances with his teacher, the Hindustani raga vocalist Pandit Pran Nath, and now reconstituted at the Guggenheim, "Dream House" forms a natural bridge to the conceptual and performance art that brings the show to a close.

It is a disappointing close. The artists are impressive; the range of Asian reference supple and broad. But most of the work is visually spare-to-barely there, and the pretentious exhibition design introduced at this point - tall, beetling dark-painted partition walls facing out into the ramp - squashes it. 

A few pieces hold their own. Linda Montano's haunting, chanted video tribute to her dead spouse works well. So does Mark Thompson's video called "Immersion," in which the artist, in an extreme Thoreauvian communion with nature, stands immobile as his head and bare torso are covered by swarming bees.

The prerequisite for Mr. Thompson's art would seem to be a yogic capacity for endurance. And this

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