CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/7/2015

Jim Shaw: My Mirage

"Devotional Art" (1987) is reproduced from My Mirage, JRP|Ringier's essential, strangely prescient artist's book by Jim Shaw. One of the central bodies of work on view now in the New Museum's major Shaw retrospective, My Mirage, is an epic body of 170 interconnected works which tell the "polysemous narrative" of a character named Billy, adrift in the confusion of 1960s and 70s white, middle-class America. "His is a tale of unceasing failure, a futile quest for innocence and meaning," writes Fabrice Stroun. From anxious childhood through guilty adolescence to dark episodes with psychedelic utopia and pagan worship and eventual fundamentalist salvation, Billy's story remains "peerless in the density and magnitude of its construction. Structured as a multi-chaptered Bildungsroman, the experience of the work ends up having more in common with that of reading a novel, rather than what one usually expects from looking at art."