Edited by Lionel Bovier, Fabrice Stroun. Text by Fabrice Stroun.
A bricoleur of uniquely American utopian/dystopian cosmologies, Jim Shaw (born 1952) weds themes from American religious history with motifs from 1960s and 70s counterculture, often coining rubrics--such as his invented religion of O--or series under which to unify these narratives. My Mirage is Shaw's earliest sequence of this kind. Conceived between 1986 and 1991, arranged in chapters and constituted of nearly 170 works--drawn, silk-screened, photographed, sculpted, filmed or painted in a different style--My Mirage recounts the wanderings of Billy, a white, middle-class American sucked into the whirlwind of the 1960s and 70s counterculture. An anxious and withdrawn youth consumed by psychotic hallucinations, Billy joins a psychedelic pagan cult, eventually and inevitably returning to the religion of his youth, “reborn” as a fundamentalist Christian. Shaw's broad iconography for this visual bildungsroman ranges from children's books to contemporary art, religious literature and psychedelic poster art, all juxtaposed en face--one image per page--to relay an associative narrative progression. From the start, the project was intended for the book format as its ideal incarnation, and this edition was therefore created in close collaboration with the artist. My Mirage offers one of Shaw's most concise statements on vernacular culture and the wild polarities of religious life in postwar America.
Featured image is STILL, part of Jim Shaw's My Mirage project.
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"Devotional Art" (1987) is reproduced from My Mirage, JRP|Ringier's essential, strangely prescient artist's book by Jim Shaw. One of the central bodies of work on view now in the New Museum's major Shaw retrospective, My Mirage, is an epic body of 170 interconnected works which tell the "polysemous narrative" of a character named Billy, adrift in the confusion of 1960s and 70s white, middle-class America. "His is a tale of unceasing failure, a futile quest for innocence and meaning," writes Fabrice Stroun. From anxious childhood through guilty adolescence to dark episodes with psychedelic utopia and pagan worship and eventual fundamentalist salvation, Billy's story remains "peerless in the density and magnitude of its construction. Structured as a multi-chaptered Bildungsroman, the experience of the work ends up having more in common with that of reading a novel, rather than what one usually expects from looking at art." continue to blog
In celebration of the New Museum's exceptional Jim Shaw retrospective, we present "One Way" (1991) from JRP|Ringier'sJim Shaw: My Mirage. Of this epic project, which chronicles the character Billy from confused and pressured youth to born-again adult, Fabrice Stroun writes, "This space delimits a white, middle-class America to which Jim Shaw himself belongs, at a time during which the main value and significations systems were collapsing—a dissolution allegorically personified by Billy. The character's ultimate conversion is symptomatic here of the lobotomized reconstitution of a subject whose dispersal has taken on the appearance of a new 'spiritual homogeneity.' This diagnosis—expressed in a tone that is both ferocious and humorous, tinted with a slight melancholy—might have appeared, when it was first issued in the mid-1980s, as incredibly pessimistic, to the point of probably seeming reactionary. Unfortunately, as the figure of the 'born again' has since become fully naturalized in American culture by the force of the highest and most brutal political powers that be, Jim Shaw's twisted morality play still needs to be reckoned with." continue to blog
FORMAT: Pbk, 8.25 x 10.25 in. / 240 pgs / 150 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $55.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $72.5 GBP £32.00 ISBN: 9783037641873 PUBLISHER: JRP|Ringier AVAILABLE: 10/31/2011 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: WORLD Excl FR DE AU CH
Published by JRP|Ringier. Edited by Lionel Bovier, Fabrice Stroun. Text by Fabrice Stroun.
A bricoleur of uniquely American utopian/dystopian cosmologies, Jim Shaw (born 1952) weds themes from American religious history with motifs from 1960s and 70s counterculture, often coining rubrics--such as his invented religion of O--or series under which to unify these narratives. My Mirage is Shaw's earliest sequence of this kind. Conceived between 1986 and 1991, arranged in chapters and constituted of nearly 170 works--drawn, silk-screened, photographed, sculpted, filmed or painted in a different style--My Mirage recounts the wanderings of Billy, a white, middle-class American sucked into the whirlwind of the 1960s and 70s counterculture. An anxious and withdrawn youth consumed by psychotic hallucinations, Billy joins a psychedelic pagan cult, eventually and inevitably returning to the religion of his youth, “reborn” as a fundamentalist Christian. Shaw's broad iconography for this visual bildungsroman ranges from children's books to contemporary art, religious literature and psychedelic poster art, all juxtaposed en face--one image per page--to relay an associative narrative progression. From the start, the project was intended for the book format as its ideal incarnation, and this edition was therefore created in close collaboration with the artist. My Mirage offers one of Shaw's most concise statements on vernacular culture and the wild polarities of religious life in postwar America.
