[curatorial.net] FW: reviewing THE THIRD MIND at Le Palais de Tokyo

Tue Oct 9 10:27:33 BST 2007

You may be interested in this review from Joseph Nechvatal:

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Determined Indeterminancy
A review of  THE THIRD MIND at Le Palais de Tokyo curated by Ugo Rondinone
By Joseph Nechvatal

THE THIRD MIND 
Le Palais de Tokyo 
13, avenue du président Wilson 75116 Paris
September 7th  January 8th

I first want to congratulate the guest curator Ugo Rondinone and the new
director of Le Palais de Tokyo, Marc-Olivier Wahler, for mounting a really
high-quality group show (*) that criss-crosses an assortment of generational
frontiers and stylistic barriers. Ugo Rondinone is an artist known for his
talent for building systems of connections and given the visual results of
this exhibit; he has, in large part, very good taste in art. I particularly
enjoyed his assembling excellent works of Brion Gysin - William S.
Burroughs, Ronald Bladen, Lee Bontecou, Andy Warhol, Nancy Grossman, Cady
Noland, Martin Boyce, Paul Thek and Emma Kunz.

I think what might be interesting about this disquieting show, is to look at
how this group show differs in its conjoining (or not) from other group
shows by pinning it to the collaborative work of Brion Gysin and William S.
Burroughs from the early 1960s known as The Third Mind. Also we can place
THE THIRD MIND in the context of wider connections and ponder at what point
does homage turn into exploitation?

First some background. Beat writer Burroughs and the artist Brion Gysin,
known predominantly for his rediscovery of the Dada master Tristan Tzara's
cut-up technique and for co-inventing the flickering Dreamachine device,
worked together in the early 1960s on a publishing project that used a
chance based cut-up method. A cut-up method consists of cutting up and
randomly reassembling various fragments of something to give them a
completely new and unexpected meaning. 1+1=3 (**) In the recent biography of
Allen Ginsburg, Celebrate Myself, Ginsburg¹s archivist, Bill Morgan,
excellently recounts some of the genesis of Brion Gysin and William S.
Burroughs forays into radical Dada cut-up technique and collaboration based
on Ginsburg¹s diary entries.

Gysin in the mid 1950¹s pointed out to Burroughs that collage technique has
been a regular tool in painting and graphics since half a century. This came
as late news to the young Beat writers of that time, so it is perhaps not
surprising that Ginsburg¹s first exposure to Burroughs¹s use of the cut-up
was met with distain  Ginsburg considered it something along the lines of a
parlor trick. (p. 318) Even more, Ginsburg speculated from NYC that
Burroughs had lost his mind through lack of sex (note: Burroughs lusted
after Ginsburg in vain). As a joke, Ginsburg and Peter Orlovsky cut up some
of their own poems and rearranged them and sent them to Burroughs with the
note ³Just having a little fun mother². (pp. 318  319). However Burroughs
was so dedicated to the random cut-up method that he often defended his use
of the technique. When Ginsburg and Orlovsky arrived in Tangiers in 1961,
Burroughs was working on an even more advanced use of the cut-up; he and Ian
Sommerville were cutting and splicing audiotapes and Burroughs was making
collages from newspapers and photographs while proclaiming that poetry and
words were dead. (pp. 331-332)

Burroughs however soon began work on a cut-up novel, the Soft Machine -
drawing material from his The Word Hoard. (**) This manuscript was soon
being ³assembled² and edited by Ian Sommerville and Michael Portman;
Burroughs¹s companions. Sommerville was regularly speaking of building
electrical cut-up machines.

Burroughs would soon begin collaborating on a book project with Brion Gysin
using the cut-up method; cutting up and reassembling various fragments of
sentences and images to give them a new and unexpected meaning. The Third
Mind is the title of the book they devised together following this method -
and they were so overwhelmed by the results that they felt it had been
composed by a third person; a third author (mind) made of a synthesis of
their two personalities.

Ginsburg remained highly skeptical for some time, but following his travels
in India came to appreciate the cut-up technique; even while never employing
it. 

Now for THE THIRD MIND show itself. Two major works (themselves
multitudinal) advance well Rondinone¹s thesis of the third mind. Of course,
foremost is the Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs collaboration The Third
Mind. An entire gallery is devoted to the maquettes for this unpublished
book from the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art - and it
does not disillusion the 4th mind: that of the viewer/reader. It is a golden
hodgepodge feast and serves as the underpinnings of the exhibit.

Then there is the glamorous video installation/accumulation of Andy Warhol¹s
Screen Tests from 1964-1966: a group of silent b&w three-minute films in
which visitors to the Warhol factory try to sit still. Here we see an
interlaced presentation that visually connects the youthful faces of Edi
Sedgwick, Susan Sontag, Nico, John Giorno, Jonas Mekas, Gerald Melanga, Jack
Smith, Paul Thek, Lou Reed and the distinguished Marcel Duchamp. The
presentation is structurally connectivist given its 4 directional
presentation as a low laying sculpture. It is incredibly enjoyable. Plus the
room is ringed with black haunting photograms called Angels by the
fascinating Bruce Conner from 1973-75.

In terms of a more traditional synthetic associational curatorial fission,
the strongest effect was achieved for me in the Ronald Bladen, Nancy
Grossman, Cady Noland gallery. Everything here is screaming in harmony of
power, sex and violence. The entire space felt hard as nails  most all of
it a macho silver and black. Bracketing the huge gallery were long rows of
Nancy Grossman¹s famous black-leathered heads, aggressively sprouting
phallic shapes like picks and horns. Ronald Bladen¹s 1969 minimal masterwork
The Cathedral Evening aggressively dominates the interior space with a
mammoth triangle breach. This is backed up by his famous Three Elements from
1965. Then, giving the gallery a sense of an almost palpably Oedipal
contest, is a large group of superb black on silver Cady Noland
anthropological silkscreens on metal from the early 1990s.

The other room that really collectively worked for me held Paul Thek and
Emma Kunz. Three wonderful Paul Thek Meat Piece are there; weird
post-minimal sculptures that sickly encase flayed body sections in wax in
long yellow transparent plexiglas shrines that literally shine. This
meat-machine mix is counter-pointed with the healing magnetic-field
ephemerality of Emma Kunz¹s geometric drawings, done with lead and colored
pencils or chalk on graph paper. It was easy to envision some fierce
spiritual forces zapping each other throughout that area.

Other rooms bring the connectivest bent to a jolting halt. I simply admired
Martin Boyce¹s huge neon sculpture (Boyce channeling Dan Flavin), but it
produced no associative effects with what else was in the room. Worse of all
was a room entirely devoted to the work of Joe Brainard. What was that doing
there? One strains to see (or imagine) even a 2nd mind in that space. So the
unavoidable thought arises, well, Rondinone must like this stuff  so that
is at least two minds in synch. But does Rondinone think there is anything
still interesting in a Gober sink? His The Split-up Conflicted Sink from
1985 also played a huge flat note for me in this supposed visual symphony,
as did the overly unembellished black crosses of Valentin Carron, the stupid
car bashed installation by Sarah Lucas, and the cloying faux-naïve canvases
of Karen Kilimnik. How to connect this boring, stupid and naïve work to the
third mind connectivity theme?

OK. I will. On thinking about the show on my way home, I concluded that the
show¹s relationship to connectivity is gravely naïve and passé (if pleasant
in a quaint, charming way) in lieu of the multi-networked world in which we
now reside. By now various theories of complexity have established an
undeniable influence within cultural theory by emphasizing open systems and
collaborative adaptability. One ponders if Rondinone has ever even heard of
the theories of Tiziana Terranova, Eugene Thacker or other cultural workers
involved in the issues of human-machine symbiosis as interface within our
inter-network media ecology. So yes, part of the pleasure for me was bathing
in this old fashioned naivety, having just spent some serious time reading
and writing on the topics of conspiratorial shadow activities (****) and
viral software logic based on complex inter-connectionism (*****). Placed
against issues of avant-garde cybernetics, the coupling of nature and
biology via code, media ecologies, distributed management teams, internet
mash-up music, artificial life swarms, the political herd mind, and
Negri/Hardt¹s multitudes; THE THIRD MIND played in my mind like a romp
through a kindergarten playpen. Nice. It felt good to forget about that
pervasive nagging political/cultural feeling of stalemate created by the
resilience of our current reality in that it assimilates everything.

But no, Ugo Rondinone did not randomly cut and reassemble art to create a
new third meaning. He did not cut-up anything. He did, like every music dj,
fashion designer, and group show curator, remix contemporary expression from
recent decades to permit new meanings to emerge from the mix. The ideas in
the collaborative work of Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs were not
needed to achieve this end - and perhaps they were poorly intellectually
served here (even though it was great to see the work). There was no use of
chance or randomness evident here (even the re-shuffled catalogue pages I
heard was rather suspiciously non-random) that is necessary for a really
unexpected  and perhaps disastrous  result. This show did not go that far.
There was no randomly reassembling of various fragments of something to give
them a completely new and unexpected meaning (like I saw in the show
Rolywholyover: A Composition for Museum by John Cage at the Guggenheim
Museum in Soho NYC in 1994). THE THIRD MIND is just a standard, but good,
heterogeneous art show where the whole is greater than its parts. Which is
as it must be. 

Joseph Nechvatal 
http://www.nechvatal.net

(*) The show contains work from: Ronald Bladen, Lee Bontecou, Martin, Boyce,
Joe Brainard, Valentin Carron, Vija Celmins, Bruce Conner, Verne Dawson, Jay
Defeo, Trisha Donnelly, Urs Fischer, Bruno Gironcoli, Robert Gober, Nancy
Grossman, Hans Josephsohn, Brion Gysin and  William S. Burroughs, Toba
Khedoori, Karen Kilimnik, Emma Kunz, Andrew Lord, Sarah Lucas, Hugo Markl,
Cady Noland, Laurie Parsons, Jean-Frederic Schnyder, Josh Smith, Paul Thek,
Andy Warhol, Rebecca Warren, and Sue Williams. Also applause to Marc-Olivier
Wahler for cutting Le Palais de Tokyo into large but manageable discrete
spaces. What a relief from the prior cavernous chaos.

(**) Recently I heard Martin Scorsese speak about how any editing together
of two shots in a film creates a third subjective image effect in the mind
of the viewer. 

(***) The Word Hoard is a collection of Burroughs¹s manuscripts written in
Tangier, Paris, and London that all together created the super mother-load
manuscript that served as the basis for much of Burroughs¹s cut-up writings:
The Soft Machine, Nova Express, The Ticket That Exploded, (together referred
to as The Nova Trilogy or Nova Epic). Even Naked Lunch was taken from
sections of The Word Hoard. There was also produced a text called Dead
Fingers Talk in 1963 which cotains excerpts from Naked Lunch, The Soft
Machine and The Ticket That Exploded - combined together to create a new
narrative. Also, via Burroughs¹s artistic collaborations with Brion Gysin
and Ian Sommerville, the cut-up technique was combined with images, Gysin's
paintings, and sound, via Somerville's tape recorders. Some of these
recordings can be heard here: http://www.ubu.com/sound/burroughs.html
There were also a number of cut-up films that were produced which can be
seen here: 
http://www.ubu.com/film/burroughs.html
William Buys a Parrot (1963)
Bill and Tony (1972)
Towers Open Fire (1963)
Ghost at n°9 (Paris) (1963-72)
The Cut-Ups (1966) 

(****) See my review of The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of
America by Peter Dale Scott here:
http://heyokamagazine.com/HEYOKA.9.BOOKS.DaleScott..htm

(*****) See my review of: IF/THEN - A Book Review of ³Digital Contagions: A
Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses² by Jussi Parikka here:
http://transition.turbulence.org/blog/2007/09/28/review-of-digital-contagion
s/ 

Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs from The Third Mind

Codex: 
You may wish to put my text into the cut-up machine on the web here:
http://www.languageisavirus.com/cutupmachine.html

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