CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/8/2015

Jim Shaw: My Mirage

In celebration of the New Museum's exceptional Jim Shaw retrospective, we present "One Way" (1991) from JRP|Ringier's Jim Shaw: My Mirage. Of this epic project, which chronicles the character Billy from confused and pressured youth to born-again adult, Fabrice Stroun writes, "This space delimits a white, middle-class America to which Jim Shaw himself belongs, at a time during which the main value and significations systems were collapsing—a dissolution allegorically personified by Billy. The character's ultimate conversion is symptomatic here of the lobotomized reconstitution of a subject whose dispersal has taken on the appearance of a new 'spiritual homogeneity.' This diagnosis—expressed in a tone that is both ferocious and humorous, tinted with a slight melancholy—might have appeared, when it was first issued in the mid-1980s, as incredibly pessimistic, to the point of probably seeming reactionary. Unfortunately, as the figure of the 'born again' has since become fully naturalized in American culture by the force of the highest and most brutal political powers that be, Jim Shaw's twisted morality play still needs to be reckoned with."