reviews THE THIRD MIND
The Third Mind:
CarTe BlanChe a Ugo rondinone
PalaIs DE Tokyo, PaRIs
27 sEPTEMbER – 3 JaNuaRy
Given carte blanche to chart his artistic
tastes and influences, Ugo Rondinone has
lodged the works of 31 artists in a dozen
or so ‘interzones’ (William S. Burroughs’s
cutup and fold-in concepts are a dominant
inspiration), in which works by two,
three or four artists, exhibited together,
‘metamorphose into a third mind, and from
this collision a new spirit emerges, an absent
third person, invisible and beyond grasp’.
Rondinone’s poetic conceit is borrowed
from Burroughs and Brion Gysin; the
original cut-up collages from their cult
book, The Third Mind (1965), fill one of the
rooms; and the source for the book’s title,
personal-success guru Napoleon Hill, is
quoted at the top of Rondinone’s curatorial precis. That Hill, proponent of the psychic-economic
The Third Mind: Carte Blanche à Ugo Rondinone,
2007, installation view. Photo: Marc Domage.
‘master mind’ principle and author of Think and Grow Rich! (1937) and Success Through a Positive Courtesy Palais de Tokyo, Paris
Mental Attitude (1960), should sire such artistic offspring is a comic miracle.
As usual, it is impossible to get a clear read on Rondinone’s bored aesthete athleticism – an
artist so enamoured by pointlessness and ennui, yet so industrious! The ‘central metaphor’ of this
curatorial effort is the clockbug, which ‘exists by consuming its own faeces [and] uses its antennae to
rotate itself in a counter-clockwise direction, so that it persists in a cycle of ingestions and excretion.
The clockbug provides a metaphorical mirror for one archetypical existential dilemma that we all
must face: The oscillation between the boredom of satiation and the longing of unfulfilled desires.’
A Bug’s Life meets Faust. How this relates to the The Third Mind is unclear, but no matter – so
many of the works speak for themselves, and their juxtapositions often bear fruit. What a rare treat
to see examples of installation pioneer Paul Thek’s ‘meat pieces’ from the mid-1960s; that they share
space with Swiss artist-healer Emma Kunz’s geometric drawings is a happy concatenation. Hauling
Ronald Bladen’s minimalist sculptures out of storage and surrounding them with Nancy Grossman’s
black-leathered busts and Cady Noland’s Americana silkscreens on aluminium is genius. Here,
though, the emerging third mind is not ‘invisible and beyond grasp’. The organising principle is
simple: everything is black and white. It is interior decoration.
The fastest walkthroughs, for me, were rooms devoted to solo artists: the faux-naive
theatrics of Karen Kilimnik, the faux-naive collages of Joe Brainard, and Sarah Lucas’s smashed-
up car installation. Here, even the Second Mind — mine — was barely solicited. Unfortunate, too,
that every room was filled with a fourth presence; the b-flat drone of Martin Boyce’s ceiling work,
When Now Is Night (Web) (1999), a gigantic neon spiderweb that bathed in unhealthy light a pile
of dirt and detritus by Laurie Parsons (Troubled, 1989) and a large, lush canvas by Jay DeFeo (Hawk
Moon No. 1, 1983–5). All in all, however, a triumph: the best Palais de Tokyo show ever, and Ugo
Rondinone’s most compelling installation yet. Christopher Mooney
arTreview 142
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