Ann Japenga • Comments New York artist Allan McCollum was having a run of bad luck. He'd been sti... more Ann Japenga • Comments New York artist Allan McCollum was having a run of bad luck. He'd been stiffed by a dealer, lost his studio and racked up his credit cards. Fed up with the commerce of art, he put everything in storage and took a road trip to Florida. Breezing through a little town, he passed a sign: Gillespie Museum of Minerals. The sign might as well have said Museum of Miracles, for the effect it would have on the artist.
Allan McCollum's installation Over Ten Thousand Individual Works (1987/1991) consists of rows of ... more Allan McCollum's installation Over Ten Thousand Individual Works (1987/1991) consists of rows of miniature objects, each hand-cast separately from commercially produced items, including bottle caps, paper weights, and kitchen tools, which he then hand-painted. When arranged together, they look alike, but each individual object is, in fact, slightly different. This kind of one-after-another pursuit has defined McCollum's art since the 1970s. In works in which nearly identical objects proliferate, he examines art's relationship to repetition and difference. You can see all 1,400 images currently comprising the project at the artist's website.
The intense engagement with context has created many intersections between artists, at times as a... more The intense engagement with context has created many intersections between artists, at times as actual collaborations, far more often involving the creation of works that incorporate a precise response to other works, both earlier and contemporary. Such works indicate both a thorough analysis of the circumstances of context and an equally careful consideration of the nature of authorshipparadoxically made that much more evident by the mechanisms of reference and quotation. The recontextualization can be as subtle as Sherrie Levine's photographs after other works of art, which contain within a seemingly isolated and portable object traces of multiple contexts of both display and reproduction, or far more explicit in the many and varied ways artists have physically recontextualized nonart and art objects alike. The process of considering works of art that respond to and incorporate other works, which may themselves be created through acts of recontextualization such as copying or appropriation, implies a layering of authorship, or a chain of quotation and reference, that can create a disconcerting sense of vertigo.
Allan McCollum, born in Los Angeles in 1944 and resident in New York since 1975, is not concer... more Allan McCollum, born in Los Angeles in 1944 and resident in New York since 1975, is not concerned in his work with expanding the realm of art yet again and breaking down the boundary between art and reality g"everything is art"). Instead his approach presents him with the potential for investigating the aesthetic, emotional and psychological, social and economic conditions under which art exists within the commercial world of art. The artificial surrogates, universal signifiers which—while lacking any inherent meaning of their own—designate genres like paintings, photographs, sculpture and drawing, assume in a paradigmatic fashion all the functions that this system ascribes to them. On the other hand, McCollum the artist remains a constant fixture within this exchange with its complex rules, thereby preventing him from stepping aside and operating as a neutral and impartial observer. For precisely that reason his aesthetic products, which are simultaneously both art and its surrogate, are able to create responses and be implemented on a range of different levels. Although Allan McCollum accepts the laws of the art exchange and art market for his work, he still adopts a critical position towards them. Through his picture surrogates he treats their inherent mechanisms in his work and thus—rather than simply accepting them unquestioningly—exposes their standards and values. He maintains this stance even though he cannot necessarily change the values.
In a work that will become indispensable to anyone seriously interested in modern art, Yve-Alain ... more In a work that will become indispensable to anyone seriously interested in modern art, Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss introduce a new constellation of concepts to our understanding of avant-garde and modernist art practices. Formless: A User's Guide constitutes a decisive and dramatic transformation of the study of twentieth-century culture. Although it has been over sixty years since Georges Bataille undertook his philosophical development of the term informe, only in recent years has the idea of the "formless" been deployed in the theorizing and reconfiguring of the field of twentieth-century art. This is partly because that field has most often been crudely set up as a battle between form and content; "formless" constitutes a third term standing outside that opposition, outside the binary thinking that is itself formal. In Formless: A User's Guide, Bois and Krauss present a rich and compelling panorama of the formless. They chart its persistence within a history of modernism that has always repressed it in the interest of privileging formal mastery, and they assess its destiny within current artistic production. In the domain of practice, they analyze it as an operational tool, the structural cunning of which has repeatedly been suppressed in the service of a thematics of art. Neither theme nor form, formless is, as Bataille himself expressed it, a "job." The job of Formless: A User's Guide is to explore the power of the informe. A stunning new map of twentieth-century art emerges from this reconceptualization and from the brilliantly original analyses of the work of Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, Lucio Fontana, Cindy Sherman, Claes Oldenburg, Jean Dubuffet, Robert Smithson, and Gordon Matta-Clark, among others.
Allan McCollum: Matt, I want to ask you about your models, and how you think about the concept of... more Allan McCollum: Matt, I want to ask you about your models, and how you think about the concept of the model. You've titled your exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Linz Model Architecture, but I know that title refers to more than just your architectural models.
In June 2003, a letter was sent to a list of small historical society museums across Kansas and M... more In June 2003, a letter was sent to a list of small historical society museums across Kansas and Missouri offering a donation of topographical models cast in Hydrostone. “I am an artist from New York,” Allan McCollum wrote, “and a number of these models were made for an exhibition at a Kansas City gallery called Grand Arts. I am hoping a few of them can find use beyond the boundaries of the contemporary art world.” McCollum included snapshots to give the recipients an idea of the objects on offer: thick, weighty slabs whose surfaces carried the precisely carved topographical features of the two respective states, based on Geographical Information Systems data. Portable, the functionally-scaled models featured edges which had been cut to the contours of the states’ shapes, an added sculptural and political or cultural quality.
Since Allan McCollum decided to become an artist in 1967, his practice has centered on an insiste... more Since Allan McCollum decided to become an artist in 1967, his practice has centered on an insistent drive to demystify the process of art making. "Every project I've done," he stated in a 2001 interview, "has been an inquiry into what it is we look for in an artwork and an attempt…to relativize that process and put it into context with other objects that accomplish similar results." 1 As a self-taught Los Angeles-based painter in the 1960s, McCollum learned about contemporary art by culling information from art magazines, museums, galleries, and his practical experiences as an art handler. He freely experimented with a hybrid mixture of methods and techniques, describing his approach at this time as "a cross between post-painterly abstraction and post-minimalism." 2 Although well-received in the Los Angeles art scene of the late 1960s and 1970s, McCollum's early forays into painting in the form of his Bleach and Constructed Paintings are less known than his subsequent series of Surrogate Paintings (begun in 1978) and Plaster Surrogates (begun in 1982). His earliest paintings represent a vital transitional moment for the artist, linking him to the formalist dialogues of the 1950s and 1960s while anticipating his growing preoccupations with the issues of serial production and strategies of display evinced in his Surrogates and beyond. At the same time, these canvases offer intriguing perspective on the dominant discourses surrounding abstract painting in the beginning of the 1970s and McCollum's aspiration to test and strain them.
in connection with an exhibition of Harrell Fletcher projects at Domaine de Kerguéhennec, Centre ... more in connection with an exhibition of Harrell Fletcher projects at Domaine de Kerguéhennec, Centre d'art contemporain, Bignan, France. www.art-kerguehennec.com Wallet Pictures,1998. SF Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco CA. Museum visitors were asked to show pictures they kept in their wallets. The pictures were rephotographed with a medium format camera on a camera stand in the lobby of the museum. In six hours 150 pictures were rephotographed. From that group ten images were selected, enlarged to 30X40 inches and framed to be included in the museum's permanent collection. Collaboration with Jon Rubin.
Excerpted from RECODING: ART, SPECTACLE, CULTURAL POLITICS,, 1986
The most provocative American art of the present
is situated at such a crossing—of institutions o... more The most provocative American art of the present is situated at such a crossing—of institutions of art and political economy, of representations of sexual identity and social life. More, it assumes its purpose to be so sited, to lay in wait for these discourses so as to riddle and expose them or to seduce and lead them astray. Its primary concern is not with the traditional or modernist proprieties of art—with refinement of style or innovation of form, aesthetic sublimity or ontological reflection on art as such. And though it is aligned with the critique of the institution of art based on the presentational strategies of the Duchampian readymade, it is not involved, as its minimalist antecedents were, with an epistemological investigation of the object or a phenomenological inquiry into subjective response. In short, this work does not bracket art for formal or perceptual experiment but rather seeks out its affiliations with other practices (in the culture industry and elsewhere); it also tends to conceive of its subject differently. The artists activ
Two recent sets of multiple castings by Allan McCollum show the artist reaching beyond his famili... more Two recent sets of multiple castings by Allan McCollum show the artist reaching beyond his familiar theme of mechanical replication to address issues of memory, history, and death.
Interview by Lilian Tone - -
Lilian Tone: Like the rest of your work, the 1,800 Drawings beauti... more Interview by Lilian Tone - -
Lilian Tone: Like the rest of your work, the 1,800 Drawings beautifully encompass uniqueness and sameness, paradoxically employing mass production as an expressive tool. Can you describe the process that went into their production?
Allan McCollum: For the Drawings, I created a system that allowed me to make a potentially infinite quantity of unique, emblemlike "shapes," no two alike. I designed three "curves" by hand-I had no computer in those days-and then
For Lee Mullican the studio was a magical place, a hallowed place, a place for meditation, a meta... more For Lee Mullican the studio was a magical place, a hallowed place, a place for meditation, a metaphysical plane, and a refuge. It was not only a very personal space where the outside world—including influences from other artists—could disappear; it was also a space where all his previous personal experiences could be set aside. It was a space where he felt as if he were almost a kind of medium:
"It’s a state of mind... As you are working through this process of painting, the painting’s there. There is an end to it. The painting’s there, but you’ve gone through this metaphysical process... it’s a meditative act.”
ALLAN McCOLLUM. Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven, Holland; 1989, 1989
BAUDRILLARD’S SUCCINCT analysis of the fundamental differences between the model and the serial o... more BAUDRILLARD’S SUCCINCT analysis of the fundamental differences between the model and the serial object seems particularly pertinent to Allan McCollum’s art, and especially to the Individual Works. This, his latest piece, has comprised in its showings to date some 10,000 small objects, each of which is cast in plaster then painted a shade of artificial aquamarine (a second version is rendered a kind of salmon pink). Each element is, as the title implies, distinctive, there are no repeats, no two exactly alike. The overriding impression of similarity or family resemblance, (plus their haunting familiarity) derives from the fact that each is cast from combinations of up to eight from a total of 150 moulds taken from such mundane things as yoghurt containers, drawer pulls, cake decorating implements etc. Given their small dimensions together Allan McCollum. Over Ten Thousand Individual Works (details). 1987-88. Enamel on Hydrocal with the fact that most of them lack an obvious base, reclining easily on any of several sides, they do not seem to belong to an identifiable context but rather invite being handled, even fondled. Intimate, domestically scaled and apparently functionless they become paradigmatic possessions.
SINCE 1977, when he shifted the focus of his earlier production, Allan McCollum has been involve... more SINCE 1977, when he shifted the focus of his earlier production, Allan McCollum has been involved in an investigation of the work of art with regard to its function within the social system. ‘If one wants to understand art,’ McCollum has stated, ‘it seems to me, one should begin with the terms of the situation in which one actually encounters it’.1 To this end, the artist has developed a diverse series of works that reflect upon the status of art in contemporary culture. Although their particular means and emphasis necessarily vary, the Surrogates, Perpetual Photos, Perfect Vehicles, and Individual Works, created by McCollum during the last twelve years, call attention to the place of art as an economic and psychological, not merely physical, presence within society.
In 1995, when Roxy Paine began to follow a preoccupation with intoxication and decay into the wor... more In 1995, when Roxy Paine began to follow a preoccupation with intoxication and decay into the world of plants and fungi, he did not begin reproducing a series of individual poppies or mushrooms, one by one, in the fashion of a trompe l'oeil sculptor. Instead, he designed a production system that generated them. He made dozens upon dozens of unique molds that could be used to cast and stamp out a large vocabulary of similar but varying plant parts and mushroom caps that all bore close family resemblances, but were never replicas of one another. He designed systems to produce lifelike stems and scores of different sized leaves, and figured out a variety of airbrush and painting techniques for mottling and coloration. He invented and organized assembly line routines and combinatorial programs that mixed and matched this growing storehouse of parts into highly realistic plants and fungi. And he did this in a way that reproduced not simply the look of real botanical specimens, but also the passive, monotonous, and codified manner in which vegetation repeats itself and multiplies. He accomplished not only an imitation of the way nature looks, but also, in a phrase often used by John Cage, an "imitation of nature in her manner of operation."
Ann Japenga • Comments New York artist Allan McCollum was having a run of bad luck. He'd been sti... more Ann Japenga • Comments New York artist Allan McCollum was having a run of bad luck. He'd been stiffed by a dealer, lost his studio and racked up his credit cards. Fed up with the commerce of art, he put everything in storage and took a road trip to Florida. Breezing through a little town, he passed a sign: Gillespie Museum of Minerals. The sign might as well have said Museum of Miracles, for the effect it would have on the artist.
Allan McCollum's installation Over Ten Thousand Individual Works (1987/1991) consists of rows of ... more Allan McCollum's installation Over Ten Thousand Individual Works (1987/1991) consists of rows of miniature objects, each hand-cast separately from commercially produced items, including bottle caps, paper weights, and kitchen tools, which he then hand-painted. When arranged together, they look alike, but each individual object is, in fact, slightly different. This kind of one-after-another pursuit has defined McCollum's art since the 1970s. In works in which nearly identical objects proliferate, he examines art's relationship to repetition and difference. You can see all 1,400 images currently comprising the project at the artist's website.
The intense engagement with context has created many intersections between artists, at times as a... more The intense engagement with context has created many intersections between artists, at times as actual collaborations, far more often involving the creation of works that incorporate a precise response to other works, both earlier and contemporary. Such works indicate both a thorough analysis of the circumstances of context and an equally careful consideration of the nature of authorshipparadoxically made that much more evident by the mechanisms of reference and quotation. The recontextualization can be as subtle as Sherrie Levine's photographs after other works of art, which contain within a seemingly isolated and portable object traces of multiple contexts of both display and reproduction, or far more explicit in the many and varied ways artists have physically recontextualized nonart and art objects alike. The process of considering works of art that respond to and incorporate other works, which may themselves be created through acts of recontextualization such as copying or appropriation, implies a layering of authorship, or a chain of quotation and reference, that can create a disconcerting sense of vertigo.
Allan McCollum, born in Los Angeles in 1944 and resident in New York since 1975, is not concer... more Allan McCollum, born in Los Angeles in 1944 and resident in New York since 1975, is not concerned in his work with expanding the realm of art yet again and breaking down the boundary between art and reality g"everything is art"). Instead his approach presents him with the potential for investigating the aesthetic, emotional and psychological, social and economic conditions under which art exists within the commercial world of art. The artificial surrogates, universal signifiers which—while lacking any inherent meaning of their own—designate genres like paintings, photographs, sculpture and drawing, assume in a paradigmatic fashion all the functions that this system ascribes to them. On the other hand, McCollum the artist remains a constant fixture within this exchange with its complex rules, thereby preventing him from stepping aside and operating as a neutral and impartial observer. For precisely that reason his aesthetic products, which are simultaneously both art and its surrogate, are able to create responses and be implemented on a range of different levels. Although Allan McCollum accepts the laws of the art exchange and art market for his work, he still adopts a critical position towards them. Through his picture surrogates he treats their inherent mechanisms in his work and thus—rather than simply accepting them unquestioningly—exposes their standards and values. He maintains this stance even though he cannot necessarily change the values.
In a work that will become indispensable to anyone seriously interested in modern art, Yve-Alain ... more In a work that will become indispensable to anyone seriously interested in modern art, Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss introduce a new constellation of concepts to our understanding of avant-garde and modernist art practices. Formless: A User's Guide constitutes a decisive and dramatic transformation of the study of twentieth-century culture. Although it has been over sixty years since Georges Bataille undertook his philosophical development of the term informe, only in recent years has the idea of the "formless" been deployed in the theorizing and reconfiguring of the field of twentieth-century art. This is partly because that field has most often been crudely set up as a battle between form and content; "formless" constitutes a third term standing outside that opposition, outside the binary thinking that is itself formal. In Formless: A User's Guide, Bois and Krauss present a rich and compelling panorama of the formless. They chart its persistence within a history of modernism that has always repressed it in the interest of privileging formal mastery, and they assess its destiny within current artistic production. In the domain of practice, they analyze it as an operational tool, the structural cunning of which has repeatedly been suppressed in the service of a thematics of art. Neither theme nor form, formless is, as Bataille himself expressed it, a "job." The job of Formless: A User's Guide is to explore the power of the informe. A stunning new map of twentieth-century art emerges from this reconceptualization and from the brilliantly original analyses of the work of Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, Lucio Fontana, Cindy Sherman, Claes Oldenburg, Jean Dubuffet, Robert Smithson, and Gordon Matta-Clark, among others.
Allan McCollum: Matt, I want to ask you about your models, and how you think about the concept of... more Allan McCollum: Matt, I want to ask you about your models, and how you think about the concept of the model. You've titled your exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Linz Model Architecture, but I know that title refers to more than just your architectural models.
In June 2003, a letter was sent to a list of small historical society museums across Kansas and M... more In June 2003, a letter was sent to a list of small historical society museums across Kansas and Missouri offering a donation of topographical models cast in Hydrostone. “I am an artist from New York,” Allan McCollum wrote, “and a number of these models were made for an exhibition at a Kansas City gallery called Grand Arts. I am hoping a few of them can find use beyond the boundaries of the contemporary art world.” McCollum included snapshots to give the recipients an idea of the objects on offer: thick, weighty slabs whose surfaces carried the precisely carved topographical features of the two respective states, based on Geographical Information Systems data. Portable, the functionally-scaled models featured edges which had been cut to the contours of the states’ shapes, an added sculptural and political or cultural quality.
Since Allan McCollum decided to become an artist in 1967, his practice has centered on an insiste... more Since Allan McCollum decided to become an artist in 1967, his practice has centered on an insistent drive to demystify the process of art making. "Every project I've done," he stated in a 2001 interview, "has been an inquiry into what it is we look for in an artwork and an attempt…to relativize that process and put it into context with other objects that accomplish similar results." 1 As a self-taught Los Angeles-based painter in the 1960s, McCollum learned about contemporary art by culling information from art magazines, museums, galleries, and his practical experiences as an art handler. He freely experimented with a hybrid mixture of methods and techniques, describing his approach at this time as "a cross between post-painterly abstraction and post-minimalism." 2 Although well-received in the Los Angeles art scene of the late 1960s and 1970s, McCollum's early forays into painting in the form of his Bleach and Constructed Paintings are less known than his subsequent series of Surrogate Paintings (begun in 1978) and Plaster Surrogates (begun in 1982). His earliest paintings represent a vital transitional moment for the artist, linking him to the formalist dialogues of the 1950s and 1960s while anticipating his growing preoccupations with the issues of serial production and strategies of display evinced in his Surrogates and beyond. At the same time, these canvases offer intriguing perspective on the dominant discourses surrounding abstract painting in the beginning of the 1970s and McCollum's aspiration to test and strain them.
in connection with an exhibition of Harrell Fletcher projects at Domaine de Kerguéhennec, Centre ... more in connection with an exhibition of Harrell Fletcher projects at Domaine de Kerguéhennec, Centre d'art contemporain, Bignan, France. www.art-kerguehennec.com Wallet Pictures,1998. SF Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco CA. Museum visitors were asked to show pictures they kept in their wallets. The pictures were rephotographed with a medium format camera on a camera stand in the lobby of the museum. In six hours 150 pictures were rephotographed. From that group ten images were selected, enlarged to 30X40 inches and framed to be included in the museum's permanent collection. Collaboration with Jon Rubin.
Excerpted from RECODING: ART, SPECTACLE, CULTURAL POLITICS,, 1986
The most provocative American art of the present
is situated at such a crossing—of institutions o... more The most provocative American art of the present is situated at such a crossing—of institutions of art and political economy, of representations of sexual identity and social life. More, it assumes its purpose to be so sited, to lay in wait for these discourses so as to riddle and expose them or to seduce and lead them astray. Its primary concern is not with the traditional or modernist proprieties of art—with refinement of style or innovation of form, aesthetic sublimity or ontological reflection on art as such. And though it is aligned with the critique of the institution of art based on the presentational strategies of the Duchampian readymade, it is not involved, as its minimalist antecedents were, with an epistemological investigation of the object or a phenomenological inquiry into subjective response. In short, this work does not bracket art for formal or perceptual experiment but rather seeks out its affiliations with other practices (in the culture industry and elsewhere); it also tends to conceive of its subject differently. The artists activ
Two recent sets of multiple castings by Allan McCollum show the artist reaching beyond his famili... more Two recent sets of multiple castings by Allan McCollum show the artist reaching beyond his familiar theme of mechanical replication to address issues of memory, history, and death.
Interview by Lilian Tone - -
Lilian Tone: Like the rest of your work, the 1,800 Drawings beauti... more Interview by Lilian Tone - -
Lilian Tone: Like the rest of your work, the 1,800 Drawings beautifully encompass uniqueness and sameness, paradoxically employing mass production as an expressive tool. Can you describe the process that went into their production?
Allan McCollum: For the Drawings, I created a system that allowed me to make a potentially infinite quantity of unique, emblemlike "shapes," no two alike. I designed three "curves" by hand-I had no computer in those days-and then
For Lee Mullican the studio was a magical place, a hallowed place, a place for meditation, a meta... more For Lee Mullican the studio was a magical place, a hallowed place, a place for meditation, a metaphysical plane, and a refuge. It was not only a very personal space where the outside world—including influences from other artists—could disappear; it was also a space where all his previous personal experiences could be set aside. It was a space where he felt as if he were almost a kind of medium:
"It’s a state of mind... As you are working through this process of painting, the painting’s there. There is an end to it. The painting’s there, but you’ve gone through this metaphysical process... it’s a meditative act.”
ALLAN McCOLLUM. Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven, Holland; 1989, 1989
BAUDRILLARD’S SUCCINCT analysis of the fundamental differences between the model and the serial o... more BAUDRILLARD’S SUCCINCT analysis of the fundamental differences between the model and the serial object seems particularly pertinent to Allan McCollum’s art, and especially to the Individual Works. This, his latest piece, has comprised in its showings to date some 10,000 small objects, each of which is cast in plaster then painted a shade of artificial aquamarine (a second version is rendered a kind of salmon pink). Each element is, as the title implies, distinctive, there are no repeats, no two exactly alike. The overriding impression of similarity or family resemblance, (plus their haunting familiarity) derives from the fact that each is cast from combinations of up to eight from a total of 150 moulds taken from such mundane things as yoghurt containers, drawer pulls, cake decorating implements etc. Given their small dimensions together Allan McCollum. Over Ten Thousand Individual Works (details). 1987-88. Enamel on Hydrocal with the fact that most of them lack an obvious base, reclining easily on any of several sides, they do not seem to belong to an identifiable context but rather invite being handled, even fondled. Intimate, domestically scaled and apparently functionless they become paradigmatic possessions.
SINCE 1977, when he shifted the focus of his earlier production, Allan McCollum has been involve... more SINCE 1977, when he shifted the focus of his earlier production, Allan McCollum has been involved in an investigation of the work of art with regard to its function within the social system. ‘If one wants to understand art,’ McCollum has stated, ‘it seems to me, one should begin with the terms of the situation in which one actually encounters it’.1 To this end, the artist has developed a diverse series of works that reflect upon the status of art in contemporary culture. Although their particular means and emphasis necessarily vary, the Surrogates, Perpetual Photos, Perfect Vehicles, and Individual Works, created by McCollum during the last twelve years, call attention to the place of art as an economic and psychological, not merely physical, presence within society.
In 1995, when Roxy Paine began to follow a preoccupation with intoxication and decay into the wor... more In 1995, when Roxy Paine began to follow a preoccupation with intoxication and decay into the world of plants and fungi, he did not begin reproducing a series of individual poppies or mushrooms, one by one, in the fashion of a trompe l'oeil sculptor. Instead, he designed a production system that generated them. He made dozens upon dozens of unique molds that could be used to cast and stamp out a large vocabulary of similar but varying plant parts and mushroom caps that all bore close family resemblances, but were never replicas of one another. He designed systems to produce lifelike stems and scores of different sized leaves, and figured out a variety of airbrush and painting techniques for mottling and coloration. He invented and organized assembly line routines and combinatorial programs that mixed and matched this growing storehouse of parts into highly realistic plants and fungi. And he did this in a way that reproduced not simply the look of real botanical specimens, but also the passive, monotonous, and codified manner in which vegetation repeats itself and multiplies. He accomplished not only an imitation of the way nature looks, but also, in a phrase often used by John Cage, an "imitation of nature in her manner of operation."
1. In his copious notebooks from the now legendary voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle, Charles Darwin re... more 1. In his copious notebooks from the now legendary voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle, Charles Darwin re– counted his finding of “those vitrified siliceous tubes, which are formed by lightning entering loose sand.” His observations were measured and studied, mind– fully denoting texture, color, size, and shape. He treated these underground tubes as a form of evidence, proof that lightning had occurred; in other words, he bestowed upon them the same detailed attention that he usually reserved for fossils. This should come as no surprise, after all it was Darwin who saw in the fossil record part of the data that helped him to develop his theory of evolution. Through his meticulous observation, the backbone of the work of a naturalist, Darwin’s theory of natural selection slowly and deliberately countered the fallacy of European philosophy, that Nature had no history. The fossil record made clear that Nature was far from an unaltered steady continuum, everlasting, ever the same, without a history of its own. Darwin transformed fossils into the Rosetta Stone of Nature, organic history rendered inorganic, processes transformed into things, the past made permanently present. In the meantime, these tubes of fused sand came to be called fulgurites, or in lay terms, “petrified lightning.” Differing markedly in size and shape, depending upon the force of the lightning and the composition of the soil, each fulgurite is a unique record of lightning, mirroring its brilliant flashes of light and electricity with an often mundane counterpart, a craggy tube of fused earth.
Foreground:
What if an artist put on a show? It would require a stage set (gallery or museum) w... more Foreground:
What if an artist put on a show? It would require a stage set (gallery or museum) with special lighting; an author (the artist), director (art dealer or curator), and stagehands (art handlers); actors (the viewers) and audience (the same spectators, performing a dual role); playbills (press releases, reviews) and props (works of art). It would also need a script (aesthetic discourse) determining the action – although as a live performance, partly improvised, we should anticipate some deviation. This ad hoc production of an ersatz art show comes with a caveat: it should function simultaneously as a legitimate art exhibition. Its objects must exist, likewise, in both their "natural" or "authentic" state and in their theatrical or surrogate version. The whole thing might also encompass a range of seemingly extrinsic materials or forces. Supplemented with other objects and texts, contexts and influences, it would include the response of every viewer who ever saw it.
First there was the sheer multitude of it all. Tables full of identical objects were surrounded b... more First there was the sheer multitude of it all. Tables full of identical objects were surrounded by walls hung with varied responses to what was clearly the same environment. Depending on which of the multiple exhibition sites they experienced, viewers encountered miniature mountains, assorted concretions, multiple identical copies of one of the mineral forms known as a sand spike, or a single enlarged version of that form. And based on how much background information they brought to the experience, they may have understood the display to be the work of an artist with a longstanding interest in evocative found objects, both natural and cultural. With its many and varied components, Signs of the Imperial Valley: Sand Spikes from Mount Signal (2000-01) is an inherently hybrid project, juxtaposing objects produced by Allan McCollum with others ranging from natural specimens to landscape painting in an assembly by an artist also functioning as curator and collector.
During the late 1970s, Allan McCollum began to develop one of the primary concerns of his practic... more During the late 1970s, Allan McCollum began to develop one of the primary concerns of his practice: the creation of new roles and identifications for viewers as opposed to traditional art's valuations of producer and receiver. Since then, McCollum's work has made palpable the idealizations of art's hierarchies of power and its orderings of artist and beholder within the viewing experience. In this way, his art insists on countering formalist art's transcendences of the actualities of daily life and the differences within audiences of education and class, among other social divisions.[1] McCollum staked his position in New York after a seven-year career in his native Los Angeles with two interrelated bodies of work, Surrogate Paintings, emerging in 1978, and Plaster Surrogates, following in 1982. In both series, McCollum treats the presentation of art objects as an event during which an array of cultural meanings and societal relationships can be asserted and acknowledged as politically important. The recognition of such actualities in the experience of the artwork, connecting the social and the psychic realms, calls attention to the processes of cultural reception. In this context, it is possible to locate commonalities between McCollum's work and that of Michael Asher, Daniel Buren, Andrea Fraser, Louise Lawler, and Allen Ruppersberg, among others. In McCollum's realm of perception, reception, and response, painting and other object types actually "maintain a very stable and real relation to the social world as a whole, and the world of objects," in the artist's words.[2] Within the artist's worldview, values such as approachability, abundance, and availability displace orthodox late-1960s fine-art aesthetics. Still, since that time we have hardly left these conflicts in the field of art behind, as McCollum's ongoing work reminds us.
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Papers by Allan McCollum
is situated at such a crossing—of institutions of art
and political economy, of representations of
sexual identity and social life. More, it assumes its
purpose to be so sited, to lay in wait for these
discourses so as to riddle and expose them or to
seduce and lead them astray. Its primary concern
is not with the traditional or modernist proprieties
of art—with refinement of style or innovation of
form, aesthetic sublimity or ontological reflection
on art as such. And though it is aligned with the
critique of the institution of art based on the
presentational strategies of the Duchampian
readymade, it is not involved, as its minimalist
antecedents were, with an epistemological
investigation of the object or a phenomenological
inquiry into subjective response. In short, this
work does not bracket art for formal or perceptual
experiment but rather seeks out its affiliations
with other practices (in the culture industry and
elsewhere); it also tends to conceive of its subject
differently.
The artists activ
Books by Allan McCollum
Lilian Tone: Like the rest of your work, the 1,800 Drawings beautifully encompass uniqueness and sameness, paradoxically employing mass production as an expressive tool. Can you describe the process that went into their production?
Allan McCollum: For the Drawings, I created a system that allowed me to make a potentially infinite quantity of unique, emblemlike "shapes," no two alike. I designed three "curves" by hand-I had no computer in those days-and then
"It’s a state of mind... As you are working through this process of painting, the painting’s there. There is an end to it. The painting’s there, but you’ve gone through this metaphysical process... it’s a meditative act.”
Allan McCollum.
Over Ten Thousand Individual Works (details). 1987-88. Enamel on Hydrocal
with the fact that most of them lack an obvious base, reclining easily on any of several sides, they do not seem to belong to an identifiable context but rather invite being handled, even fondled. Intimate, domestically scaled and apparently functionless they become paradigmatic possessions.
is situated at such a crossing—of institutions of art
and political economy, of representations of
sexual identity and social life. More, it assumes its
purpose to be so sited, to lay in wait for these
discourses so as to riddle and expose them or to
seduce and lead them astray. Its primary concern
is not with the traditional or modernist proprieties
of art—with refinement of style or innovation of
form, aesthetic sublimity or ontological reflection
on art as such. And though it is aligned with the
critique of the institution of art based on the
presentational strategies of the Duchampian
readymade, it is not involved, as its minimalist
antecedents were, with an epistemological
investigation of the object or a phenomenological
inquiry into subjective response. In short, this
work does not bracket art for formal or perceptual
experiment but rather seeks out its affiliations
with other practices (in the culture industry and
elsewhere); it also tends to conceive of its subject
differently.
The artists activ
Lilian Tone: Like the rest of your work, the 1,800 Drawings beautifully encompass uniqueness and sameness, paradoxically employing mass production as an expressive tool. Can you describe the process that went into their production?
Allan McCollum: For the Drawings, I created a system that allowed me to make a potentially infinite quantity of unique, emblemlike "shapes," no two alike. I designed three "curves" by hand-I had no computer in those days-and then
"It’s a state of mind... As you are working through this process of painting, the painting’s there. There is an end to it. The painting’s there, but you’ve gone through this metaphysical process... it’s a meditative act.”
Allan McCollum.
Over Ten Thousand Individual Works (details). 1987-88. Enamel on Hydrocal
with the fact that most of them lack an obvious base, reclining easily on any of several sides, they do not seem to belong to an identifiable context but rather invite being handled, even fondled. Intimate, domestically scaled and apparently functionless they become paradigmatic possessions.
What if an artist put on a show? It would require a stage set (gallery or museum) with special lighting; an author (the artist), director (art dealer or curator), and stagehands (art handlers); actors (the viewers) and audience (the same spectators, performing a dual role); playbills (press releases, reviews) and props (works of art). It would also need a script (aesthetic discourse) determining the action – although as a live performance, partly improvised, we should anticipate some deviation. This ad hoc production of an ersatz art show comes with a caveat: it should function simultaneously as a legitimate art exhibition. Its objects must exist, likewise, in both their "natural" or "authentic" state and in their theatrical or surrogate version. The whole thing might also encompass a range of seemingly extrinsic materials or forces. Supplemented with other objects and texts, contexts and influences, it would include the response of every viewer who ever saw it.