The White Album (2008) presents a compilation of one hundred issues of Artforum magazine released between 1970 and 1979. As with Will Rogan’s MUM series, also included in the Kadist Collection, vital information is now missing: All of all the articles and features have been removed, leaving only ten years of advertisements. In an unusual way, The White Album reminds us that this important New York-focused magazine was originally founded in 1962 in San Francisco to promote Bay Area artists before it moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1960s in search of a wider advertising base. Thomson’s encyclopedic gesture not only exposes the magazine’s commercial scaffolding, but takes aim at a critical period in the rise of the art market.
Mungo Thomson is a Los Angeles-based conceptual artist whose challenging works reveal a fascination with time, space, music, and perceptual phenomena in general. It has been pointed out that Thomson’s work privileges backgrounds: material (the white walls), institutional (the gallery), and historical.
In Thomson’s Untitled (TIME) , every front cover of TIME magazine is sequentially projected to scale at thirty frames per second...
Starting with Bruce Nauman’s iconic artwork, The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign) , Mungo Thomson’s neon sign is one of a series that replaces Nauman’s quixotic mini-manifesto with aphorisms from ‘recovery’ culture, especially those made popular by alcoholics anonymous...