An artist’s book compendium of the Hammer’s Museum’s entire incoming mail, designed in the style of a mail-order catalog
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.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Elephant
Emily Gosling
The contents of Mungo Thomson’s newly documented piece, Mail, represents the “fleeting and ideologically fraught notion of exhibition time.
Garage
Haley Mellin
Mungo Thomson engages with how time is archived, chronicled, and immortalized through dispersed media.
LA Weekly
Shana Nys Dambrot
In 2018 as part of an exhibition at the Hammer Museum, Thomson asked that all incoming mail — every “letter, package, notice, magazine, flyer, restaurant menu, exhibition postcard, vendor catalog and piece of junk mail that came to the museum” — be collected and forwarded to an off-site location unopened, to be documented at the end of the show. This book examines that pile, in what was originally an homage to the history of mail art, but has since become a rousing salutation to the vital role of the USPS in a time of pandemic, privatization, and centrality to the function of democracy.
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Saturday, August 15 at 3PM PDT / 5PM CST / 6PM EST, join Artbook @ Hauser & Wirth LA Bookstore and Inventory Press for a live stream with artist Mungo Thomson, in conversation with Tosh Berman, discussing Thomson's new book, Mail. This event is free with registration here. Email bookshw-la@artbook.com to order a copy of Mungo Thomson: Mail with free shipping in the U.S.
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Featured spreads are from Mungo Thomson: Mail, a new artist's book published by Inventory Press to document one aspect of Thomson's 2008 exhibition at the Hammer Museum, during which every letter, package, notice, magazine, flyer, restaurant menu, exhibition postcard, vendor catalog and piece of junk mail that came to the museum was collected, unopened, to be documented at the end of the show. "Beyond being another example of correspondence art or art that uses correspondence as a material, Thomson’s Mail is a byproduct of accretion and accumulation," Aram Moshayedi writes. "Entropy and decay are terms that are often evoked in discussions of art. Works of art are, after all, like all living things, prone and vulnerable to time. The institutions of conservation and preservation tend to deny this, promising that paintings and sculptures are stable and frozen in permanent stasis. Mail, by contrast, supplies this tendency with something of a rejoinder." continue to blog
Published by Inventory Press. Text by Aram Moshayedi.
An artist’s book compendium of the Hammer’s Museum’s entire incoming mail, designed in the style of a mail-order catalog
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.
