Allan McCollum: Selected Works

As one of the most influential names in American conceptual art, Allan McCollum has developed his artistic process since the 1970s around transforming the dichotomy of the relationship between producer and receiver. Central to this was the artistic and sociological investigation of the individual within processes of mass production. To that extent, McCollum‘s works are often characterised by an extreme accumulation of individual parts—drawings or sculptural objects—with the aim of transcending such social categorisations as education and class which often divide audiences in their reception.

This viewing room presents an overview of some of Allan McCollum's most important series of the late 60s to 90s—Constructed Paintings (1969), Bleach Paintings (1969), Perpetual Photos (1982), Plaster Surrogates (1982), Perfect Vehicles (1985), Drawings (1988), and The Dog From Pompei (1990)—as well as a selection of some major work groups conceived over the last twenty years until this very moment.

The Constructed Paintings are formed from strips or squares of canvas that have been individually dyed and stained and subsequently adjoined using rubberized caulking. The overall appearance suggests a quilt, a mosaic, tiling or brickwork – an architectural quality that highlights the paintings’ built-up nature. Their  constructedness is also perceptible in the thick, raised lines of caulking at the seams and fraying around the edges. In their somewhat messy, unfinalized appearance and piecedtogether approach, their construction not only seems incomplete, but also as though it could continue infinitely.

A snapshot is taken from the television screen when a framed artwork is seen on the wall behind the dramatic action. The Perpetual Photos are these artworks enlarged again to a normal scale and reframed by the artist for re-presentation in a tangible setting. Each Perpetual Photo is completely unique and an endless number of different Perpetual Photos remain to be discovered and produced.

The Plaster Surrogates stem from Allan McCollum's earlier series of unique works called Surrogate Paintings, which were made from wood and museum board, glued and pressed together and painted all over with several coats of paint. Each Surrogate Painting is unique in size.

In 1982 rubber molds were taken from selected Surrogate Paintings, and these were used to cast the Plaster Surrogates. The Plaster Surrogates are cast in gypsum and painted.

Plaster Surrogates with black centers are given different colored mats and frames. Around 20 different sizes of Plaster Surrogates have been painted with around 140 different frame colors, combined with around a dozen different mat colors, which can produce many thousands of unique Plaster Surrogates. The Plaster Surrogates are grouped into collections of many different amounts.

At first, Plaster Surrogates of all sizes were grouped together and were sold individually. Later on McCollum decided to group them in different ways and to only sell them in predefined groups or collections, for which he would also provide exact installation diagrams.

The earliest of these collections contained twenty Plaster Surrogates, including one of each size. These groups were established as early as 1983/84. Later on, the artist decided to only use groups with either the four largest sizes (large Plaster Surrogates) or collections with only the smallest sizes.

The Plaster Surrogates come in two main color schemes, which means collections of Surrogates are comprised either entirely of frames in shades of grey or in shades of brown. For a short time Allan McCollum has also designed groups of monochromatic Surrogates, in which a piece is painted in one solid color (ca. 1988-1990).

Allan McCollum first made his Perfect Vehicles in 1985. The standard mode of display for the sculpture was sitting atop a plinth in groups ranging from five to fifty generic cast-plaster vases. The shape of the vase is that of an antique Chinese ginger jar; a shape made ubiquitous by centuries of its reproduction. The Perfect Vehicles come in a range of colors, such that, even though each vase is identical in shape, no two groupings were alike based on quantity and color. Radically dysfunctional (they are solid and could never be used actually to hold anything), they nonetheless perform their domestic role as decoration. In so doing, they conflate the art object proper with its lesser partner, the objet d’art, suggesting that the shared function of the two categories is their presentation of taste and wealth within the domestic interior.

In subsequent iterations of the Perfect Vehicles, McCollum played with issues of scale. Maintaining the same shape, he enlarged the vases to human scale.  Larger Perfect Vehicles are cast from glass fiber reinforced concrete, and are also painted all over with many coats of paint. Each of the larger Perfect Vehicles is unique in color.

The Dog From Pompei casts are taken from a mold which was made from the famous "chained dog" plaster cast in the collection of the Museo Vesuviano, in Pompei, Italy. The original dog was smothered in volcanic ash during the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D., and its body left a natural mold in the earth after it deteriorated over the centuries. This natural mold was discovered by excavators in 1874, and they produced the original cast by pouring plaster into the cavity, and excavating the resulting cast once it had hardened. The original natural mold was destroyed in the process. The Dog From Pompei casts are produced in polymer-enhanced gypsum.

Allan McCollum began this project in 2015 as a visual essay about the meaning of closeness and comfort in our society. He wants it to serve as a reminder that it is through the telling and sharing of stories that we perceive the world. It is also a critique of Hollywood and populist rhetoric which both instrumentalize our emotions by promoting the narrative of a hero coming to the rescue, while in reality we depend on being part of a community of family, friends, neighbors and colleagues. All of the screenshots from films and movies amassed by McCollum depict people in situations of great uncertainty and distress being comforted with words of support that spell out in the subtitles. But while anxiety and worry are feelings that are individually and subjectively felt and experienced by all of us, the encouraging phrases on the screen through endless repetition soon become somewhat meaningless.