Mungo Thomson
The White Album
2008
The White Album
Mungo Thomson’s The White Album 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 conceptual artist whose practice reveals a fascination with time, space, music, and perceptual phenomena. Engaging with the nuances of the everyday and the overlooked, his diverse body of work encompasses various media, including video, sound, sculpture, and installation. Thomson's art privileges backgrounds: material (the white walls), institutional (the gallery), as well as historical, exploring the contexts that frame and influence perception. His innovative approach often involves recontextualizing mundane elements, prompting viewers to reconsider their surroundings and experiences. Employing intellectual rigor and aesthetic depth, Thomson invites audiences to engage with the underlying structures that shape our understanding of the world.