My MirageJim Shaw

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My Mirage (1986-1991) is the first major body of work by Jim Shaw (*1952), an artist from Los Angeles who started exhibiting in the late 1970s. Composed of nearly 170 pieces—each one drawn, silk-screened, photographed, sculpted, filmed or painted in a different style—“My Mirage“ recounts the wandering of Billy, a white, middle-class American sucked into the whirlwind of the 1960s and 1970s. His is a story of unceasing failure. After an anxious childhood, Billy later withdraws from the guilt-wracked spasms of adolescence in order to lose himself in a psychedelic utopia, which soon becomes a nightmare. In the depth of psychotic hallucinations, he follows a woman who he worships into a pagan sect, before finally returning to the religion of his youth, „reborn“ as a fundamentalist Christian. Each piece appropriates an image taken from an extremely broad iconographic field ranging from children’s book to contemporary art and including comics, religious literature, and psychedelic posters. As a narrative, „My Mirage“ is structured like a „Bildungsroman,“ with successive chapters structuring the various, gradual mutations of Billy. This narrative appears and disappears, like a mirage, according to the distance of the observer, depending on whether one considers Shaw’s image to be aggregate of heterogeneous source, moments of a personal history, or fragments of a collective cultural history. Hence while creating a quasi-encyclopedic compendium of American vernacular iconography (which includes a page from a high-school yearbook, a thrift store painting, countless grass-root, counter-culture graphic designs, as well as late 1970s neo-Christian propaganda), „My Mirage“ thus provides a social and cultural image of an individual in the 1960s and 1970s and, moreover, produces a sharp analysis of the evolution of the subject through the cultural and social history of that era. * * From the onset of the series, „My Mirage“ has been constructed with the idea of the book as model. Not only does the overarching narrative takes the form of a coming of age novel, but many of the individual pieces make direct reference to a book format. Created in close collaboration with Jim Shaw, the book thus presents itself as the culmination of the artist’s original project. „My Mirage—The Book“ will allow Jim Shaw’s ever-growing audience to look at the whole of Billy’s story for the first time. Furthermore, its format and content should appeal to a wide readership, beyond contemporary art, which includes anyone interested in the history of the counter-culture of the 1960s and 1970s, American graphic design and popular illustration. * * *