Wikipedia

Mungo Thomson

Mungo Thomson (born 1969) is a contemporary visual artist based in Los Angeles.[1] His wide-ranging, often serial work explores mass culture, everyday perception, representation and cosmology through films, sound, sculpture, installations, drawings and books.[2][3][4] Thomson employs counterintuitive artmaking strategies and unconventional methods of audience engagement that privilege overlooked aspects of experience, subtle humor, and the dislodging of expectations.[5][6][7] Critics place his work within the tradition of West Coast conceptual art, while also noting its incorporation of the divergent vocabularies of minimalism and the Northern Californian counterculture, New Age mysticism and popular science.[8][9][10][11] Critic Francesco Tenaglia notes that Thomson's later work updates themes of the Pictures Generation and appropriation art: "Using techniques such as mounting, erasing and reframing, he successfully addresses issues such as the permanence of the image, its value and status, and the emergence of aesthetic practices from the diffusion of technological media."[12]

Mungo Thomson
Born1969
Woodland, California, US
EducationUniversity of California, Los Angeles, University of California, Santa Cruz
Known forFilm, sound, installation, sculpture, drawings, books
MovementConceptual art
AwardsLouis Comfort Tiffany Foundation
California Community Foundation
USArtists International
WebsiteMungo Thomson
Mungo Thomson, Time Life Volume 5. Sideways Thought, 4K video with sound, 8:09 minutes, original score by Ernst Karel, 2020–22, Installation view, Walker Art Center.

Thomson's work belongs to public collections including those of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles,[13] Whitney Museum,[14] Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA),[15] and Walker Art Center.[16] He has exhibited at those four venues, as well as at the Hammer Museum,[17] Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.) and MUDAM, among others.[18][19]

Education and career

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Thomson was born in Woodland, California in 1969 and raised in Northern California.[8] He completed a BA at University of California, Santa Cruz in 1991 and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 1994, where he worked with conceptual artist Mary Kelly.[20] In 2000, he earned an MFA from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), studying with John Baldessari, among others.[11][21]

In his first professional decade, Thomson appeared in group shows at the New Museum and SculptureCenter in New York,[22][23] the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Hirshhorn Museum and Orange County Museum of Art,[24][25][26] as well as in the Whitney Biennial (2008) and the inaugural Performa Biennial (2005).[7] His early solo exhibitions took place at Margo Leavin Gallery (Los Angeles),[27][2] John Connelly Presents (New York),[28][29] Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GAMeC),[30] Kadist Art Foundation (Paris),[31] and the Hammer Museum.[17]

Thomson has had subsequent solo exhibitions at the Aspen Art Museum,[32] Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver),[33] SITE Santa Fe,[11] Henry Art Gallery,[34] Walker Art Center,[35] and galleries including Galerie Frank Elbaz (Paris) and Karma (New York and Los Angeles).[36][37]

Work and reception

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Thomson has been described as a "second-wave" conceptual artist[10] whose work is open to pop and pictorial strategies, media and consumer culture, and the interference of everyday life.[12][4] Critic Martin Herbert suggests that Thomson fuses exclusive practices (conceptualism, minimalism) to the inclusive ethos of avant-garde composer John Cage, taking a "broader interest in privileging access, in disseminating an open-ended, chancy art about an expanding sense of context … specifically, through artworks that both move into public arenas and put democratic spins on high-art reference points."[4][9]

Thomson's art emphasizes context—the lenses and frames through which people encounter the world—over personal expression.[3] He superimposes, re-translates or inverts different realms of thought and experience, using structuring systems and premises, subtractive methods or iterative processes that build from discrete parts (film frames, book pages, CMYK dots).[20][17][38] While these methods can involve an exacting sense of production, they frequently obscure any trace of the artist's "hand," creating a sense of the work having already existed—an impression bolstered by Thomson's preference for found objects, appropriated mass-culture forms and experiential phenomena as sources.[20] A common strategy involves focusing on largely ignored background elements through processes of erasure, editing or reframing in order to raise questions about status, attention and access.[4][5][12][39]

Thomson's work is equally attuned to time, often juxtaposing different modes—measured, experiential, geological—to bring the theme to awareness.[20] Many of his projects function like archives, registering not only movement through time but also cultural change—and consequently loss—as objects, styles and technologies become unfashionable or obsolete.[3][40] Several critics note in his work a sense of melancholy, rueful humor—what Frieze's Megan Ratner called "a sunshine bleakness [in Thomson's] distinctly Californian work."[28][20][4]

Thomson's solo exhibitions have generally featured disparate objects, drawings, films and sound pieces in combinations that Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight first described as "wryly engaging" and characterized by a "gentle discord, in which perception, memory and imagination compete."[2][27][28] His sculptural objects have often riffed on familiar types and images from mainstream and alternative culture, fine and folk art, and Americana, inspiring double-takes at their unexpected juxtapositions of consumer goods, artisanal craftsmanship and political or populist content.[10][6][28]

 
Mungo Thomson, Coat Check Chimes, Nickel-plated aluminum and steel, 1200 pieces, dimensions variable, Installation view, 2008 Whitney Biennial exhibition.

Sound projects and early films

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Thomson's sound works date back to his time at UCLA, when he sought to break from conventional modes of artmaking with works such as Room Tone (1998), a CD recording of the ambient sound of his studio that listeners could superimpose onto their own spaces.[20][5] He continued to explore atmospherics and human presence with his "Wind Chimes" (1999–2004), which ironically hung in indoor galleries lacking any breeze, thus requiring visitor activation.[2][27][9] The series culminated in Coat Check Chimes (2008, Whitney Biennial), for which Thomson hung 1,200 specially-fabricated, tuned metal hangers from the motorized rack system in the museum's cloakroom.[7][3][4] The hangers functioned like orchestral triangles, their movement creating a Cagean musical overture that framed the broader show. Emanating from an overlooked, purely functional "dead zone" of the museum, the sound changed according to time of day, weather, and number and type of coats being checked, forming a dialogue centered on service staff and visitors.[7][20]

For Crickets (2012–14; Pacific Standard Time, the High Line),[41] Thomson and composer Michael Webster transcribed field recordings of crickets from around the world and orchestrated them into musical movements for performance by classical musicians.[42][5][11] The final work (a life-size video projection of a 17-piece ensemble performance, an installation, embossed sheet music and an artist book) played with shifting phenomenological and institutional contexts and registers of "high" and "low" art—formally dressed musicians simulating a common insect sound, "crickets" signifying audience silence.[4][42] Critic Kate Green noted, "The beauty of Thomson’s attempts to represent nature through conceptual strategies is that, paradoxically, they drain it of its magic. The results suggest the impossibility of the task, and in so doing evoke the particular wonders of nature and of art."[5]

 
Mungo Thomson, Negative Space (STScI-PRC2007-41a) and Negative Space (STScI-PRC2003-24), Photographic murals, 136" x 150", 250" x 585" and 250" x 255", all 2008, Installation view, Hammer Museum.

In several projects Thomson used a subtractive approach to consider the periphery and notions of the void. The Collected Live Recordings of Bob Dylan, 1963–1995 (1999) involved three decades of live recordings in which he edited out the music, leaving 25 minutes of wave-like applause and crowd noise; recalling New Age recordings of rain, the CD (advertised on posters and bus benches) played in full at night on several Los Angeles radio stations.[2][4][10] For The American Desert (for Chuck Jones) (2002) he erased the characters from twenty-five Road Runner cartoons, leaving an archival montage of uninhabited, comically surreal backdrops and "camera" pans, sweeps and zooms that seemed to comment on the mythological American West, the void of the desert and manifest destiny.[38][4][9] The Swordsman (2004) focused on the off-screen void of film through a looped video of retired Hollywood "sword master" Bob Anderson re-enacting his (typically out-of-frame) toss of a prop sword to movie action heroes.[43][28]

Thomson also looked at these themes in printed projects, such as the tabloid People (2011), in which he digitally erased all the artworks from repurposed photographs of art fairs, galleries and museums, refocusing attention on the gestures, attitudes and styles of spectators contemplating empty walls and booths.[4] For the wall murals and book Negative Space (2008, Hammer Museum), he inverted the hues and values of Hubble Telescope deep-cosmos images, transposing dark voids into luminous décor that recalled marble, psychedelia and Light and Space art worthy of aesthetic attention.[17][9][4][40] Thomson also created permanent installations of the project for the University of California Berkeley, University of California San Francisco and Los Angeles Metro.[44][45]

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Thomson has frequently explored time, often using additive formats (the archive, stop-action "flicker-style" films) and analog reference points.[3][4][46] Untitled (Margo Leavin) (2009) was a stop-motion Super-16mm animation offering an near-archeological presentation of the well-known gallerist's Rolodex—both the physical apparatus and its contents: artist, collector and celebrity contacts flipped through card-by-card.[29][3][4] The film concisely mapped and retrospected an obsolete information technology and a vanishing art world community and era (the gallery since closed).[40][20]

 
June 25, 2001 (How the Universe Will End); Reflected: March 6, 1995 (When Did the Universe Begin?), Enamel on low-iron mirror, poplar and anodized aluminum, 74" x 56" x 2.5" each, both 2012. Installation view, Gavin Brown's Enterprise.

Thomson's TIME body of work (2009– ) examines the popular magazine as a repository of time itself across a range of media.[4][36][20] The time-lapse video Untitled (TIME) (2010) scrolled through the magazine's covers to date, depicting its evolving design, changing topics and framing of life over nearly a century, in the process highlighting a sense of ephemerality and idiosyncrasy rather than coherence.[4][20] His mirrored TIME series (2012– ) positioned viewers as subjects, their reflections caught inside life-sized mirrors silkscreened with only the periodical's red-bordered cover frame and masthead from specially chosen issues.[36][11] The mirrors reflected one another (depending on vantage point), generating a hall-of-mirrors effect and a slightly wavy funhouse quality that suggested a commentary on vanity, fame and mortality.[36][20][12]

Three projects broached contemporary flows of culture, nature and time.[3] For Mail (2013–18, a series of installations and an artist book), Thomson asked venues to let their incoming mail accumulate and amass in a pile, unopened, during the run of an exhibition, creating a work that functioned as a timepiece, installation, archive and exposé of institutional function, including waste.[47][36] The "Snowman" series (2020– ) consists of uncanny, realistic painted bronze fabrications of stacked Amazon packages that connect consumption, climate change and weather through an analogy between the assembly and disassembly (melting) of a snowman and a stack of delivered boxes.[3][20] The large, two-sided, backlit Wall Calendars (2019– ) featured iconic nature settings appropriated from popular print calendars; they were overlaid with calendar grids in reverse (as if the back side of a page was seen through filtering light), juxtaposing human time with geological time.[3]

Thomson's Time Life video project (2014– ) examines instruction, process, archive and the diffusion of technology.[46][12] It has included eight rapidly edited stop-motion "volumes" scored to percussive and electronic music, whose images he photographed page by page from vintage reference books (several actual Time-Life guides), mimicking how materials are now digitized for data archiving.[46][48][37] Each brings an encyclopedic scope to a single theme—food, flowers, color, exercise and sport, the sculptural oeuvre of Rodin (Volume 5. Sideways Thought), search-engine-style questions and knot-tying.[39][8][12] Nonetheless, critic Hal Foster observed that the series' editing, framing and evident staging undercut the instructional genre it derived from, achieving a "how-not-to aspect [that is] a function of the out-of-date status of the source materials … the implication [being] that each new medium all but destroys the ones before it."[46]

Recognition

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Thomson's work belongs to the collections of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive,[49] British Council,[50] Colección Jumex,[51] di Rosa Center,[52] FRAC Île-de-France,[53] GAMeC,[54] Hammer Museum, Henry Art Gallery,[34] Hirshhorn Museum,[55] Kadist Art Foundation,[31] LACMA,[15] Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles,[13] Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston,[56] Orange County Museum of Art,[57] Seattle Art Museum,[58] Tang Museum, Tate,[59] Walker Art Center[16] and Whitney Museum, among others.[14]

He has received a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award (2013), California Community Foundation fellowship (2011), USArtists International grant (2003), and artist residencies from the Guangzhou Times Museum, Arcadia Summer Arts Program and Stichting Kaus Australis (Netherlands).[60][61]

References

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  1. ^ Packard, Cassie. "Half-Analog, Half-Digital: Mungo Thomson by Cassie Packard," BOMB Magazine, February 8, 2023. Retrieved November 26, 2024.
  2. ^ a b c d e Knight, Christopher. "Confronting Perception, Memory and Imagination," Los Angeles Times, October 27, 2000. Retrieved November 26, 2024.
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h i Griffin, Tim. "The Chimes," in Mungo Thomson, Donatien Grau, Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, Tim Griffin and Mungo Thomson, Geneva: JRP Editions, 2023. Retrieved November 26, 2024.
  4. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o Herbert, Martin. "Background Radiations," in Time, People, Money, Crickets, Santa Fe, NM: SITE Santa Fe, 2013.
  5. ^ a b c d e Green, Kate. "Mungo Thomson at Artpace," Art in America, May 2014. Retrieved November 26, 2024.
  6. ^ a b Myers, Holly. "An object lesson in Americana," Los Angeles Times, October 1, 2004. Retrieved November 27, 2024.
  7. ^ a b c d Gopnik, Blake. "Indelible Impressions," The Washington Post, March 6, 2008. Retrieved November 27, 2024.
  8. ^ a b c Chamberlain, Colby. "Mungo Thomson," Artforum, Summer 2022. Retrieved November 26, 2024.
  9. ^ a b c d e Herbert, Martin. "Mungo Thomson," Artforum, January 2008. Retrieved November 26, 2024.
  10. ^ a b c d Morgan, Margaret. "Mungo Thomson: Don’t Look Back," Art/Text, March 2001.
  11. ^ a b c d e Weideman, Paul. "Mungo & the Crickets: Art and acoustics from Mungo Thomson," Pasatiempo, February 22, 2013. Retrieved November 27, 2024.
  12. ^ a b c d e f Tenaglia, Francesco. "Mungo Thomson's 'Sideways Thought,'" Art Agenda, December 15, 2022. Retrieved November 27, 2024.
  13. ^ a b Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles. Mungo Thomson, Artists. Retrieved November 27, 2024.
  14. ^ a b Whitney Museum. Mungo Thomson, Artists. Retrieved November 27, 2024.
  15. ^ a b Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Mungo Thomson, Collections. Retrieved November 27, 2024.
  16. ^ a b Walker Art Center. Mungo Thomson, Collections. Retrieved November 27, 2024.
  17. ^ a b c d Myers, Holly. "Beauty resides there, in the void," Los Angeles Times, August 15, 2008. Retrieved November 27, 2024.
  18. ^ Stedelijk Museum. "Beyond The Picturesque," Exhibitions. Retrieved November 27, 2024.
  19. ^ MUDAM. "After Laughter Comes Tears,", Exhibitions. Retrieved November 27, 2024.
  20. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l Owens, Laura. "Mungo Thomson in Conversation," in Mungo Thomson, Donatien Grau, Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, Tim Griffin and Mungo Thomson, Geneva: JRP Editions, 2023. Retrieved November 26, 2024.
  21. ^ Finkel, Jori. "John Baldessari's 'Pure Beauty' at Los Angeles County Museum of Art", Los Angeles Times, June 20, 2010. Retrieved November 27, 2024.
  22. ^ New Museum. Mungo Thomson, People. Retrieved November 27, 2024.
  23. ^ Smith, Roberta. "At Shows Painted with Sound, Be Prepared to See With Your Ears," The New York Times, May 21, 2004. Retrieved November 27, 2024.
  24. ^ Artmap. "Sympathy for the Devil," Exhibition, 2008. Retrieved November 6, 2024.
  25. ^ Rosenberg, Karen. "Now You Perceive It, Now You Think You Do," The New York Times, August 22, 2008. Retrieved November 27, 2024.
  26. ^ Knight, Christopher. "Biennial arrives, and so does a museum," Los Angeles Times, October 13, 2004. Retrieved November 27, 2024.
  27. ^ a b c Miles, Christopher. "Mungo Thomson," Artforum, November 2004. Retrieved November 26, 2024.
  28. ^ a b c d e Ratner, Megan. "Mungo Thomson," Frieze, October 13, 2005. Retrieved November 27, 2024.
  29. ^ a b Chamberlain, Colby. "Mungo Thomson," Artforum, March 2009. Retrieved November 26, 2024.
  30. ^ Fumagalli, Sara. "Mungo Thomson at GAMeC," Flash Art, January–February 2007.
  31. ^ a b Kadist Art Foundation. Mungo Thomson, People. Retrieved November 27, 2024.
  32. ^ Finkel, Jori. "Mungo Thomson riffs on Michael Heizer's 'Levitated Mass'", Los Angeles Times, June 18, 2012. Retrieved November 27, 2024.
  33. ^ Contemporary Art Gallery. Mungo Thomson, Exhibition. Retrieved December 16, 2024.
  34. ^ a b Henry Art Gallery. "Mungo Thomson: Composition for 52 Keys." Retrieved November 27, 2024.
  35. ^ Walker Art Center. Collection in Focus: Mungo Thomson, 2024. Retrieved November 27, 2024.
  36. ^ a b c d e McGarry, Kevin. "Mungo Thomson," Art Agenda, September 18, 2013. Retrieved November 27, 2024.
  37. ^ a b Schwendener, Martha. "Mungo Thomson," The New York Times, March 31, 2022. Retrieved November 26, 2024.
  38. ^ a b Kushner, Rachel. "Tree and Rock and Cloud," Mungo Thomson: Cuenca, Cultural Affairs Department, United States of America, 2004.
  39. ^ a b Packard, Cassie. "Mungo Thomson’s Elegies to an Analogue World," Hyperallergic, April 2, 2022. Retrieved November 26, 2024.
  40. ^ a b c Hudson, Suzanne. "Mungo Thomson," Artforum, Summer 2009. Retrieved November 26, 2024.
  41. ^ Finkel, Jori. "PST: Performance and Public Art Festival a visual feast,", Los Angeles Times, January 18, 2012. Retrieved November 27, 2024.
  42. ^ a b Castro, Leslie Moody. "Mungo Thomson," Artforum, March 2014. Retrieved November 26, 2024.
  43. ^ Schwendener, Martha. "Mungo Thomson," Artforum, April 2005. Retrieved November 26, 2024.
  44. ^ UCSF Art Collection. Mungo Thomson, Artist. Retrieved December 16, 2024.
  45. ^ Vankin, Deborah. "For L.A.’s newest underground art experience, head down to the Metro Regional Connector," Los Angeles Times, June 17, 2023. Retrieved December 16, 2024.
  46. ^ a b c d Foster, Hal. "How Not To," Mungo Thomson: Time Life, New York: Karma, 2022.
  47. ^ Gosling, Emily. "What Can a Pile of Letters and Junk Mail Reveal About the Age We Live In?" Elephant, May 3, 2020. Retrieved November 27, 2024.
  48. ^ Scott, Andrea K. "Mungo Thomson," The New Yorker, March 25, 2022. Retrieved November 26, 2024.
  49. ^ Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. b/w (bird/whale), Mungo Thomson, Collection. Retrieved November 27, 2024.
  50. ^ British Council. Mungo Thomson, Collection. Retrieved November 27, 2024.
  51. ^ Colección Jumex. Mungo Thomson, Faith/Failure, Collection. Retrieved November 27, 2024.
  52. ^ di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art. di Rosa Artist List. Retrieved November 27, 2024.
  53. ^ FRAC Île-de-France. Mungo Thomson, Crickets (Conductors; Score), Artworks. Retrieved November 27, 2024.
  54. ^ RAAM. Mungo Thomson, Artists. Retrieved November 27, 2024.
  55. ^ Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Philosophy Rug #3, Mungo Thomson, Collection. Retrieved November 27, 2024.
  56. ^ Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Mungo Thomson, The American Desert, Objects. Retrieved November 27, 2024.
  57. ^ Orange County Museum of Art. Mungo Thomson, The American Desert, Collection. Retrieved November 27, 2024.
  58. ^ Seattle Art Museum. Mungo Thomson, Objects. Retrieved November 27, 2024.
  59. ^ Tate. Mungo Thomson, Artists. Retrieved November 27, 2024.
  60. ^ Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. Mungo Thomson. Retrieved November 27, 2024.
  61. ^ California Community Foundation. Mungo Thomson. Retrieved November 6, 2024.
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