Exhibit Sign

I refuse to write an Artist’s Statement. If I may speak in my Spiro Agnew mode, almost all that I’ve read are pontificating pieces of pretentious pompousness.

For example: "Capturing the light is what I strive for every time I head into the field, for it is the light that transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary." . . . etc etc blah blah blah.

But you need some kind of something for an exhibit. I was lucky enough to be able to use a little essay by Rebecca Saito, as follows:

A Larger Narrative

While going through a stack of Mike Mundy’s photographs it becomes clear that Mike has never been interested in cultivating a distinctive photographic style: a fatal amateurish flaw, or so we’re told.

But it’s evident that he does like to take pictures, and that he’s been doing it for quite some time. He started using a camera in the 1950’s, when he was going to high school in Los Angeles, taking photographs of, mainly, trains: a decrepit cab-ahead articulated at the Southern Pacific’s Taylor Yard, an abandoned Tower Car in the old Pacific Electric facility on Santa Monica Boulevard.

Mike himself resolutely refuses to commit to paper any kind of aesthetic philosophy. He has a collection of hilariously pretentious Artists’ Statements that he likes to bring out and make fun of. Needless to say, he avoids any kind of remarks that might be construed as an Artist’s Statement. And anyway, he says, not only would he be unable to put together enough coherent phrases describing his art, but any such attempt would be tedious in the extreme.

Maybe so. But while going through that stack of photos it becomes clear that all of his work forms part of a greater, unseen whole. Whether he’s aware of it or not, his billboards and taquerias, sand dunes and granite mountainsides are all perfectly coexistent. All are, or could become, part of a larger narrative, the infinite sum of particular things, that encompass and define the photographs of Michael Mundy.

—Rebecca Saito