Determined Indeterminancy
A review of
THE THIRD MIND at Le Palais de Tokyo
Curated by Ugo Rondinone
By Joseph Nechvatal
Andy Warhol: Screen Tests
THE THIRD MIND
Le Palais de Tokyo
13, avenue du prŽsident Wilson 75116
Paris
September 7th Ð 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?
Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs
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, GinsburgÕs
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 GinsburgÕs diary entries.
Gysin in the mid 1950Õs 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 GinsburgÕs first exposure to
BurroughsÕs use of the cut-up was met with distain Ð 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 ÒJust having a little fun motherÓ. (pp. 318 Ð 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 ÒassembledÓ and edited by
Ian Sommerville and Michael Portman; BurroughsÕs 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.
Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs
fromThe Third Mind
Now for THE THIRD MIND show itself. Two
major works (themselves multitudinal) advance well RondinoneÕs 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 WarholÕs 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 Ð most all of it a macho silver and black. Bracketing the huge gallery
were long rows of Nancy GrossmanÕs famous black-leathered heads, aggressively sprouting
phallic shapes like picks and horns. Ronald BladenÕs 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 KunzÕs 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 BoyceÕs 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 Ð 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-na•ve canvases of Karen Kilimnik. How to connect this boring, stupid and
na•ve work to the third mind connectivity theme?
OK. I will. On thinking about the show
on my way home, I concluded that the showÕs relationship to connectivity is
gravely na•ve and passŽ (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/HardtÕs 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 Ð and perhaps disastrous Ð 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
October
2007
Lee Bontecou
Nancy Grossman
Cady Noland
Ronald Bladen
(*) 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 BurroughsÕs manuscripts written in Tangier, Paris, and London that all
together created the super mother-load manuscript that served as the basis for
much of BurroughsÕs 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 BurroughsÕs 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 ÒDigital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer VirusesÓ by
Jussi Parikka here:
http://transition.turbulence.org/blog/2007/09/28/review-of-digital-contagions/
mash-up of Ronald
Bladen and Lee Bontecou by Joseph Nechvatal