This
exhibition traces how Asian art, literature, and philosophy were
transmitted and transformed within American cultural and intellectual
currents, influencing the articulation of new visual and conceptual
languages. It explores how American art evolved through a process of
appropriation and integration of Asian sources that developed from the
1860s through the 1980s, when globalization came to eclipse earlier,
more deliberate modes of cultural transmission and reception. While
Europe has long been recognized as the font of mainstream American art
movements, the exhibition explores an alternative lineage of creative
culture that is aligned with America's Pacific vista—Asia.
Vanguard artists consistently looked toward "the East"
to forge an independent artistic identity that would define the modern
age—and the modern mind—through a new understanding of existence,
nature, and consciousness. They drew ideas from Eastern religions,
primarily Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism, as well as classical Asian
art forms and performance traditions. Opening with the late
nineteenth-century Aesthetic movement and the ideas promulgated in
transcendentalist circles, The Third Mind
illuminates the Asian influences shaping such major movements as
abstract art, Conceptual art, Minimalism, and the neo-avant-garde as
they unfolded in New York and on the West Coast. It also presents
select developments in modern poetry, music, and dance theater.
The Third Mind refers to a "cut-ups"
work by Beat writers William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, whose cult
of spontaneity in art and life drew inspiration from Asian attitudes.
This manuscript composed of random texts and images evokes the eclectic
yet purposeful method by which American artists often appropriated
material from Asia to create new forms, structures, and meanings in
their work. Misreadings, mediations, denials, and imaginary projections
emerge as important iterations of this creative process. Some artists
identified with non-Western art and thought precisely to subvert and
critique what they saw as the spiritually bankrupt capitalist West.
Others culled alternative, East-West identities from transcendentalism,
Theosophy, Carl Jung's formulations of the collective unconscious, and
New Age movements preaching the perennial vitality of Asia's spiritual
psychology in a global age. Still others simply extracted and freely
enlisted what served their particular artistic impulses. Grounded in
documentary evidence of the artists' encounters with Asia, this
exhibition shows how artists working in America adapted Eastern ideas
and art forms to create not only new styles of art, but more
importantly, a new theoretical definition of the contemplative
experience and self-transformative role of art itself.
—Alexandra Munroe, Senior Curator of Asian Art