The Third Mind
Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France
William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s unpublished 1965 book The Third Mind functions as a point of departure for this eponymous exhibition, curated by Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone at the invitation of the Palais de Tokyo. Presented as part of the exhibition, the book comprises a wide range of fragments – typewritten notes, drawings, news cuttings, personal photographs – exemplifying the Beat writers’ interest in the cut-up technique. As a collaborative project, Burroughs and Gysin’s book also explores the possibility of a ‘third author’, created by the encounter of the two writers’ minds.
Rondinone’s ‘The Third Mind’ deploys the cut-up method as a curatorial tool. Conceived as a subjective montage of works from thirty-one artists, the exhibition considers connections, confrontations and unforeseen meanings that might emerge from such juxtapositions, this ‘1+1=3’ logic articulated through precise and often unexpected dialogues between works. Serendipitous combinations include an intriguing face-to-face between Vija Celmins’s oil painting Night Sky #11 (1995) and Karen Kilimnik’s Swan Lake (1992), as well as an installation consisting of a Martin Boyce’s hung neon piece (When Now is Night (web), 1999), Valentin Carron’s minimalist, cruciform wall sculptures, and Jay de Feo’s series of abstract paintings ‘Hawk Moon’ (1983-1985).
The installation often uses cut-up as a means of disrupting reality. Displayed in the large, curved hall of the Palais de Tokyo, Cady Noland’s silkscreens on aluminium feature enlargements of archive pictures and newspaper cuttings. Oozewald (1989), is based on a photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald at the point of his assassination by Jack Ruby. The thick aluminium plate, on which the picture is printed, has eight perforations, disproportionate bullet holes, in one of which Oswald’s mouth is stuffed with an American flag. Noland’s work is juxtaposed with two imposing sculptures by Ronald Bladen and a number of ‘heads’ – carved wood figures clad with enigmatic zippered leather masks – by Nancy Grossman, the ensemble emitting an atmosphere of violent clashes.
In the current field of artist-curated exhibitions, ‘The Third Mind’ takes its place beside Mike Kelley’s ‘The Uncanny’, first presented in 1993 and restaged at Tate Liverpool in 2004. In a similar vein, ‘The Third Mind’ demonstrates Rondinone’s eye for subtle and coherent connections between disparate works, approaching the exhibition medium as a montage. If the press release’s descriptions of Rondinone’s installation as a ‘stroll through a brain in perpetual activity’ and ‘an exhibition that no curator would ever have been able to dream up’ appear slightly pretentious, ‘The Third Mind’ highlights what artist-curated exhibitions might bring to the curatorial field: a more intuitive and sensitive approach regarding the choice of artists and the display. By establishing unconventional dialogues between artists, ‘The Third Mind’ also succeeds in bringing historical works – including pieces by Andy Warhol and Bruce Conner, as well as Swiss healer and artist Emma Kunz – into the present, recalling Burroughs’s description of the cut-up: ‘When you cut into the present the future leaks out.’
Christophe Gallois
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