CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 8/15/2020

'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."