Bruno Gironcoli
The Third Mind
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Palais de Tokyo, Paris
For its fourth issue, PALAIS/ invited Ugo Rondinone to imagine a special edition inspired by his exhibition The Third Mind. The result is a monumental cut-up drawn from 350 works by the participating artists, printed with 30 different covers, and produced through an unprecedented process of random assembly — making every copy a one-of-a-kind artist’s book and a true collector’s edition.
As Marc-Olivier Wahler notes, The Third Mind unfolds like a journey through Rondinone’s influences, passions, and obsessions — an MRI scan of an artist’s mind in perpetual motion. For the first time, Rondinone’s extraordinary ability to build networks of correspondences is turned not toward his own practice, but toward the work of others. The exhibition thus presents a constellation that no curator or art historian could have imagined.
In homage to the legendary book The Third Mind by William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, Rondinone reconfigures and remixes the contemporary artistic landscape, generating new meanings. Bringing together works by thirty-one artists, this vast visual cut-up becomes a unique artist’s book, shaped by a “third mind”: the encounter between Rondinone and his chosen constellation of works.
