Colby Chamberlain on Mungo Thomson

I keep in mind seeing the movies of Mungo Thomson in 2009 at John Connelly Presents, one of many NADA galleries that occupied a row of storefronts on the western finish of Twenty-Seventh Avenue in Manhattan’s Chelsea district. Derek Eller Gallery, Cunning Manufacturing, JCP, Oliver Kamm/5BE Gallery, and Wallspace all used to coordinate their openings for a similar night, encouraging a block-party ambiance that reliably spilled out onto the road—a lot in order that the NYPD caught on and began rolling via to challenge tickets for out of doors consuming. (As soon as, as two of my pals have been being written up, I heard a senior critic marvel aloud whether or not cops have been consulting the calendar of openings posted on the Douglas Kelley Present Record.) At JCP, Thomson screened two works shot on 16-mm movie, each silent however for the clanking whir of their projectors. Every hearkened again to the Sixties and ’70s. The primary took the clean chief from Nam June Paik’s Zen for Movie, 1962–64—one of many items in George Maciunas’s Fluxfilm Anthology—and reversed its polarity. The dust-flecked white of Paik’s authentic turned a glittering starscape. The second centered on the archived Rolodex that Los Angeles’s Margo Leavin Gallery had maintained since 1970. By way of jerky stop-motion animation, the Rolodex got here to life, flipping via the telephone numbers and addresses for a fabled assortment of names: CASTELLI, JUDD, KOSUTH . . .

I assume I’m being doubly nostalgic right here, reminiscing a few gallery scene the place you would sip a can of PBR whereas considering the Sixties. Although often thought-about an heir of the cheerful LA Conceptualism promulgated by John Baldessari, Thomson (b. 1969) identifies as a baby of Northern California, raised among the many dissipating energies of the counterculture. A movie similar to Untitled (Margo Leavin Gallery, 1970–), 2009, recovers the previous via each medium and message. The celluloid reel, Rolodex, and roster of art-world contacts are all completely synced to evoke the identical interval model. (Aspect observe: Don Draper’s well-known Mad Males soliloquy on slide carousels first aired in October 2007.) The constant anachronism of Thomson’s earlier work stands in distinction with the temporal drift of his exhibition “Time Life,” a sequence of seven digital movies with references drawn freely from the nineteenth century to the current.

The exhibition’s title nods to Time-Life Books, a now-defunct purveyor of direct-mail encyclopedias, catalogues, and how-to manuals that, previous to the rise of the Web, have been acquainted fixtures in American middle-class houses. The vanity of the movies is that we’re these volumes from the attitude of a high-speed scanner because it captures their pages at a charge of eight frames per second—too quick for the human thoughts to totally comprehend, however adequate for making a everlasting digital report that renders the print publication superfluous. “Time Life,” 2014–22, bears traces of Thomson’s earlier movies with out remaining tethered to any particular period. The sentences in Quantity 4. 1000 Questions, 2016–22, flash by with the identical semisubliminal flicker because the textual content in Paul Sharits’s Fluxfilm Phrase Film, 1966. The animation results of Margo Leavin Gallery reappear in Quantity 2. Animal Locomotion, 2015–22, as photographic sequences of leotard-clad fashions demonstrating Nineteen Eighties aerobics routines. Notably enthralling is Quantity 5. Sideways Thought, 2020–22, which cycles via the celebrated oeuvre of Symbolist sculptor Auguste Rodin. Set to an authentic rating composed by Ernst Karel, the sinuous surfaces of The Thinker and The Kiss quiver and are available alive.

The “Time Life” sequence appears to belong to the rising style of “desktop movies” (or maybe, tempo Leo Steinberg, “flatbed movies”), similar to these by Camille Henrot or Sara Cwynar, whereby disparate agglomerations of textual content and media slide throughout the display to the hypnotic rhythms of a pulsing soundtrack. Alternately, Thomson’s allusions to guide scanners join the movies to investigations by Trevor Paglen and the late Harun Farocki into “machine imaginative and prescient”—photos meant for technical gadgets fairly than human eyes. That’s, “Time Life” could also be much less involved with the previous, and even the current, than with an more and more believable future the place conventional receptacles of reminiscence are supplanted by server farms for uncooked information. Watching Thomson’s movies, I all of the sudden recalled a headline from the routinely oracular satirical newspaper The Onion: “Google Publicizes Plan to Destroy All Info It Can’t Index.” The article, I later checked, was revealed in 2005.

— Colby Chamberlain