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PUBLISHER
Inventory Press

BOOK FORMAT
Paperback, 8.5 x 10.25 in. / 496 pgs / 3000 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date
Active

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: SPRING 2020 p. 134   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9781941753347 TRADE
List Price: $45.00 CAD $63.00 GBP £40.00

AVAILABILITY
In stock

TERRITORY
WORLD

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INVENTORY PRESS

Mungo Thomson: Mail

Text by Aram Moshayedi.

Mungo Thomson: Mail

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.

Mungo Thomson: Mail

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FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 8/10/2020

Artbook @ Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles Bookstore presents a virtual launch event for 'Mungo Thomson: Mail'

Artbook @ Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles Bookstore presents a virtual launch event for 'Mungo Thomson: Mail'

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. continue to blog


FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 8/15/2020

'Mungo Thomson: Mail' is NEW from Inventory Press

'Mungo Thomson: Mail' is NEW from Inventory Press

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


MUNGO THOMSON MONOGRAPHS + ARTIST'S BOOKS

Mungo Thomson: Time Life

MUNGO THOMSON: TIME LIFE

Karma Books, New York

ISBN: 9781949172898
USD $50.00
| CAD $72.5 UK £ 45

Pub Date: 3/28/2023
Active | In stock


Mungo Thomson

MUNGO THOMSON

JRP|Editions

ISBN: 9783037645758
USD $48.00
| CAD $65 UK £ 36

Pub Date: 8/15/2023
Active | In stock


Mungo Thomson: Mail

MUNGO THOMSON: MAIL

Inventory Press

ISBN: 9781941753347
USD $45.00
| CAD $63 UK £ 40

Pub Date: 8/11/2020
Active | In stock


Mungo Thomson & Michael Webster: Crickets

MUNGO THOMSON & MICHAEL WEBSTER: CRICKETS

JRP|Ringier

ISBN: 9783037643341
USD $34.95
| CAD $45.95 UK £ 20

Pub Date: 4/30/2014
Active | In stock


Mungo Thomson: Time People Money Crickets

MUNGO THOMSON: TIME PEOPLE MONEY CRICKETS

SITE Santa Fe/Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver

ISBN: 9780985660215
USD $45.00
| CAD $60 UK £ 40

Pub Date: 10/31/2013
Active | Out of stock


Mungo Thomson: Negative Space

MUNGO THOMSON: NEGATIVE SPACE

JRP|Ringier

ISBN: 9783905770278
USD $29.00
| CAD $39.5 UK £ 19

Pub Date: 3/1/2007
Active | Out of stock