In Conversation with Allan McCollum

As part of Andrea Bowers and Tom Lawson's class "In Conversation," we got to meet and talk to artist Allan McCollum. He had come to CalArts as a visiting artist in the mid-80's, around the time he was showing his Perfect Vehicles. At the time when appropriation was the buzzword, and representational was pronounced RE-Presentational, and Alan's work was shown along side folks like Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine. Years later, after reading his great piece on Allen Ruppersberg, I came to realize that he was an artist from an earlier generation.

This time around he showed work dating back to his beginnings as a painter, and talked about the work in a way that (for me) shifted the focus away from the retinal and onto the labor of artistic production.

More recently his work has moved into the realm of public art projects involving local groups and collaborations that integrate into the places and localized objects that become the subject of the work. Twenty years later, one could make a case for Allan work fitting in with relational practices that constitute a quasi-trend.

At the beginning of the conversation, Allan told the story (also in the interview with Tom Lawson) about how he went to a manufacturer to have a small part made. He needed 1200, and the ad in the Yellow Pages said, "No job too small," but as it turned out, 1200 was too small. He asked what a 'short run" was, and the response was, "About 10,000," a number that returns to Allan's practice.

I would make the case that art writers can (and will) make associations between Allan's individual projects and the zeitgeist of current artistic production, but to see what's really going on, his work should be appraised for the "long run."

My comment above about appropriationist strategies tends to turn the focus on the object and how it functions in institutional spaces. This sort of cultural analysis often downplays the role of the artist's labor in the grand scheme of things. The old Marxist example of the shovel being an amalgam of raw materials (wood and metal) plus the labor to fit them together still allows the finished object to function in a world of ditch diggers and hardware stores. Seeing the Surrogate Paintings from Allan's point of view--that of the installation shot--points to how the art object functions in the art world system. By stripping away so much of the retinal, the viewer is forced to look at context for content.

In a way, this mode of production inverts the readymade, where an preexisting object is conceptually activated by the artist. Through mold-making, and other algorithms of production, the focus is reversed to the history of its making, rather than its future though activation. In the purest sense, The Dog From Pompei underscores the labor of production, with its origin coming from the naturally occurring matrix of the hollow made by a decomposed dog that was covered in ash. The mold made by nature only became activated through the labor of men. Because the representation is ultimately of a void and also a reproduction of a museum artifact, The Dog From Pompei can both be a copy and a reproduction while downplaying the trope of mimicry that easily creeps into some representational art.

Lastly I want to mention the idea of the artifact in Allan McCollum's art, which I haven't fully thought out. Tom mentions in his interview the anecdote of being contacted by a woman who had Egyptian artifacts from her recently deceased husband. It turns out they were souvenirs purchased at a King Tut exhibit. Likewise, many of the objects in Allan's later work have their origins in localized artifacts. Both these examples point to artifacts whose value comes from location. That location can be a temporary exhibition or a local geographic feature. Though it was laughed about in the class discussion, the people of nearby Vernal, Utah saw Andrew Carnegie's excavations as plunder of their heritage.

I feel Allan is seduced by the same power of place. His locations are known for everything from sand spikes to dinosaur tracks. His recent work incorporates the local population and their labor that has already focused on their particular geographies. Perhaps it's because Alan is still working through issues of place and its relationship to his practice that these last paragraphs dance around the issue without making a cohesive point. There are some parallels between Andrew and Allan. Unlike Carnegie, McCollum's digs leave something of value behind.

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