Mungo Thomson

This first comprehensive monograph on the Los Angeles–based multimedia artist Mungo Thomson (born 1969) focuses on three series that embody his exploration of popular culture, time perception and everyday objects to question what we most take for granted. In the Time series, person-size silkscreened mirrors bearing the red border and logo of the 100-year-old magazine, pair a precise historical moment with the viewer’s own reflection in the present. The Wall Calendar series displays commercial calendar images as if held up to the sun, allowing the reverse side of the page to show through. Printed on both sides of the fabric and stretched over a light box, recto and verso are collaged together with light—the calendar grid of a single month is superimposed onto a photograph of a 40-million-year-old mountain. The Snowman series consists of trompe-l’oeil stacks of Amazon boxes and other online retail shipping cartons cast in sturdy patinated bronze.

This volume documents eight short stop-motion animations by Los Angeles–based artist Mungo Thomson (born 1969) that use reference encyclopedias, photobooks, how-to guides and production manuals as their raw material. The project imagines these books being scanned by a high-speed robotic book scanner of the type used by universities and tech companies to digitize libraries, and proposes such a device as a new kind of filmmaking apparatus. Thomson exploits the dualities of the digital and the analog, the video and the book, the automated and the handmade, binding them each together. The videos feature soundtracks by Andrea Centazzo and Pierre Favre, Laurie Spiegel, Sven-Åke Johansson, Lee Ranaldo, Ernst Karel, Pauline Oliveros, Adrian Garcia and John McEntire. The New York Times called Time Life a "thrilling accomplishment, adding a new chapter to the long conversation about photographs, mechanical reproduction and ways of seeing."

For Mail, Los Angeles–based artist Mungo Thomson (born 1969) asked the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles to let its incoming mail accumulate unopened during the run of the exhibition. Over the course of the show a pile of correspondence and packages grew, forming a temporary archive.

This book functions both as an artwork and as an elaborate and exhaustive documentation of the work as realized by the artist. Every letter, package, notice, magazine, flyer, restaurant menu, exhibition postcard, vendor catalog and piece of junk mail is represented.

Featuring an essay by Hammer Museum curator Aram Moshayedi, Mail performs a kind of autopsy of the sculpture, displaying every facet and revealing the infrastructure of both the artwork and the museum.

The design of the book loosely mimics a popular mail-order catalog, and Thomson’s photography of the items in the mail pile at the Hammer was undertaken with this catalog design in mind.