Three books bound with a rubber band. Designed by Conny Purtill; English/Spanish texts by Mary-Kay Lombino, Jan Tumlir, and Rachel Kushner.
Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Mungo Thomson organized by Mary-Kay Lombino for the Eighth International Bienal in Cuenca, Ecuador in 2004, the bilingual books in this collection masquerade as anything but exhibition catalogues yet manage to get across a lot of information about the artist and his work not only or this exhibition but throughout his career. In The Easy Field Guide to Mungo Thomson pamphlet, Thomson’s own drawings of his multiples, projects and publications are accompanied by Matthew Higgs’ deadpan “Easy Field Guide”-style descriptions. One such entry is for another book in this collection, Todo Ha Sido Grabado orEverything Has Been Recorded, a book in the form of a religious pamphlet: “Mr. Thomson has dressed up his own half-baked ideas about art and life in the form of seductively readable comic book. Like the religious nuts at the Greyhound Bus Station, Mr. Thomson wants you to get "on message” with his crackpot ideas, which, if presented in any other form, you would rightly ignore. Read at your peril!“
The third and most substantial book in the series is designed to look like the 1972 Bantam pocket-book edition of Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, a novel emblematic of the countercultural milieu from which Thomson’s work takes its inspiration. Rachel Kushner, Mary Kay Lombino and Jan Tumlir’s essays on the artist are interspersed with sections of color photographs of his work.
