Mungo Thomson
The Brooklyn Rail - NSE #514 | Mungo Thomson with Andrew Woolbright
Artist Mungo Thomson joins Rail contributor Andrew Woolbright for a conversation.
The wide-ranging, multi-media work of Mungo Thomson approaches mass culture and everyday perceptual experience through a lens of deep time and cosmic scale, implicating the spaces of production and exhibition in ever-widening extrapolations. Recent exhibitions have taken place at renowned institutions, including The Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Museo Jumex, Mexico City. He was included in many events, such as The 2nd CAFAM Biennial, Beijing, China; the 2011 Istanbul Biennial, and The 2008 Whitney Biennial. His work is in the public collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Whitney Museum of American Art; and many others.
Artist, curator, and critic Andrew Woolbright is based in Brooklyn, New York, and is an MFA graduate from RISD in painting. Woolbright is the founder and director of the gallery Below Grand located on the Lower East Side in New York. In addition to curating, he is a regular contributor to the Brooklyn Rail. In 2021, Woolbright curated the show Density Betrays Us with Angela Dufresne and Cash Ragona at the Hole; and will be curating shows at Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and Hesse Flatow in the summer or 2022. He currently teaches at School of Visual Arts and SUNY New Paltz and is a 2021-2022 resident at the Sharpe Walentas Studio Program in Dumbo.
Mungo Thomson, Composition for Marimba, 2016
Composition for Marimba is based on Thomson’s premise that one can write a score for a 52-key marimba by shuffling a deck of cards. The marimba is commonly used as background music in pharmaceutical commercials, political campaign ads and movie trailers, for his warm and “human” sound; Composition for Marimba proposes the marimba as an endless, oceanic aural backdrop for an exhibition. An iPhone app plays every configuration of a shuffled deck of cards as a new sequence of notes on a marimba, displaying each card onscreen. Given that the number of possible arrangements in a deck of cards is an "astronomically large number", the program will not run through all the possible combinations of musical notes during the lifespan of planet earth. The visual reference to Robert Filliou’s piece Telepathic Music No. 5 is important as well as the filiation with John Cage; Mungo Thomson plays with Cage’s notions of an open-ended and chance-based score and associates them with the logic of computers and automation.
Mungo Thomson
Composition for Marimba, 2016
iOS app, iPhone 6 Plus Custom music stand in chromed brass
Duration variable
Edition 2/5
Courtesy galerie frank elbaz, Paris