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Allan McCollum; SELMA KLEIN ESSINK During the practical organisation of the extensive exhibition in the Van Abbemuseum, my conversations with Allan McCollum frequently turned to more factual problems. These discussions were very enlightening, and gave me, along with the considerations which guided him in creating the concept for the exhibition, more insight into the meanings incorporated in his work and the rich world of ideas of the artist who produces it. On the basis of some key concepts, which I shall discuss with the aid of as much quotations as adequate, it is possible to get acquainted with this world. As McCollum is exceedingly consistent in his statements, I was able to use earlier quotes as well as more recent ones. Painting
As is apparent from the articles by Anne Rorimer1 and Lynne Cooke,2 the origin of Allan McCollum's work lies in painting. The period covering the end of the sixties and the start of the seventies, when McCollum began his artistic career, was characterised in America by either a turning away from painting or a kind of fundamental painting, which generally involves a reduction of painting to a simple set of essential conditions within which the artist then worked to express himself. McCollum, on the other hand, was not interested in defining the essential terms of painting itself, but in determining the identity of painting within the broader field of objects. As Anne Rorimer has described thoroughly, the work by Allan McCollum in the period '68-'70 can be characterised by developing systematical methods to make self-referring art. In his later works at the end of the seventies it is even more clear that his interest was not only in a painting's formal characteristics but also in those characteristics by which we recognize an object is a painting. 'I am at present trying to create works which represent for me an isolation of those aspects of the framed object which seem to be common denominators between the many versions of this type of artifact—to refrain from emphasizing those qualities in painting which lead one to place significance on the differences between individual examples in favor of calling attention to their similarities.'3 'The subject of the work is not painting per se, but rather those human wishes and desires which are mediated and deferred through the various rituals of making art, viewing art, buying and selling art, etc., and for which the art-object itself may be seen as merely a token.'4 His definition of painting will therefore not tend towards describing it as 'paint on canvas on a carrier, but rather towards the statement that 'a painting is something often found over a couch'5 which is made visible in his special installations. Taking painting as a starting point, McCollum interrogates the role which a work of art plays in our society. In order to investigate that role and determine how an object qualifies as a work of art, McCollum aims to create a model, a standard 'sign-for-a-painting'. 'My first impulse was to make only one painting and exhibit it over and over again, to create a sort of archival object—like the government's Bureau of Standards maintains the standard 'inch' in platinum. But this solution eliminated the possibility of exchange transactions—and how could a thing represent an art object if it couldn't be bought and sold? I ultimately decided to use a single but repeatable image, one which I could vary minimally in size and proportion, but which remained esentially the same: a frame, a mat and a black center.'6 Originality and uniqueness
One of the fundamental goals McCollum seeks to accomplish with his work is to objectivise the conventions associated with the production of art. One of these conventions is originality. 'Before I ever actually made any Surrogate Paintings, I was always seeing them on television, on the walls behind the actors. But they were only fleeting images, like accidents of light, or mirages. What I was recognizing, I guess, was an image which was only just potentially developing inside my head. So when I ultimately began to physically create these objects, to cast them in actual plaster, and to produce them by the hundreds, it was always very mysterious to me which image I might honestly point to within this chain of representations as the original "surrogate"7 'During that same conversation it became clear that McCollum regards the concept of originality not only in such a sensitive way but takes into account also the dialectic position Walter Benjamin exposed so clearly in his book 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'8, in which he claims that the original exists by the grace of the copy. The point is that when everything is equally original, the concept 'original' is superfluous. It only becomes meaningful when a distinction has to be made between original and non-original. One can then even go further by saying that something is only original when it has been copied. The whole issue of originality, in light of today's mass production, is problematised by McCollum. Another convention is the uniqueness and exclusivity of a work of art: McCollum, however, works to replace this by 'abundancy and availability'9 In this connection, McCollum points to the great difference between todays visual art and other contemporary forms of artistic expression such as recorded music, drama, literature and film, in that the results of these forms of art can be enjoyed by everyone because they are created with duplication in mind and therefore raise no concerns about the loss of authenticity; that is now inherent in the medium. These disciplines developed through technical change and evolved into forms available to us all. Prior to the invention of printing, a book had a completely different significance from what it had afterwards. The book existed only in a handwritten copy and there were but a few people who could read. Therefore the mass production of books is one of the most revolutionary and positive developments of our culture.
The mass-produced object is an essential feature in the concept of Allan McCollum's work is its production in large numbers. His studios are therefore actually small factories in which objects are cast in plaster by a number of assistants / employees, then sanded down and painted. The use of plaster is important because it bears the connotation of the material used for mass-produced replicas. But for mass production one also needs a mass market in order to sell the products and there is no such market for art. This explains why McCollum started selling his Surrogates in what he calls 'wholesale quantities'. According to McCollum, objects take on a particular aura when people know there are thousands of them in existence. By way of example, he refers to the every day plastic coffee cup. Everywhere in the world millions of people handle the same kind of cup every day. McCollum is interested in our participation in the world of mass-produced objects and in the feelings developed through the awareness of their aura; pleasant and safe feelings—there is enough for everyone — but also fearful and mysterious feelings. These are some of the emotions McCollum evokes, for instance with the Individual Works. Also in the way he installs his works these kinds of emotions are expressed: there is a point at which the safe feeling of 'enough' passes the stage of the satisfying feeling of 'much' and suddenly changes into the threatening sensation of 'too much'. 'Considering the range and potency of the feelings we all have for industrial production, it continues to be a surprise to me that artists never want to utilize industrial production in their work. They will allude to the mass-produced object, through imagery, but not through any actual replication of thousands of things. In our era, we have great powerful ambivalence towards large numbers. We're afraid of how there is more in the world than we can ever know or understand, more human souls than we can imagine, and so forth: hordes of people, hordes of machines, hordes of information. But we are also completely infatuated with exaggerated quantity, with the possibility of abundance and plenitude, with wealth, and with our fantasies of perpetual fecundity, and so on. It's amazing that art completely stands aside of all this drama, preoccupied with its own scarceness, with its own uniqueness. I think that possibly we create art the way we do in order to avoid our feelings about these issues. It is very uncomfortable to have to think that there are five billion other people on this planet. The implications seem staggering. How does our knowledge of this make us feel about our own individuality? How really unique are we? These questions problematise social relations. It's a basic modern contradiction, our wanting to feel the security of the herd and wanting to feel the privileged one. I was especially thinking about these conflicts and wishes when I was working on my Individual Works: objects both mass-produced and each unique at the same time.'10 
Allan McCollum. Over Ten Thousand Individual Works, details. 1987/88.
Mass production offers the consumer a product which is presented in several slightly different versions; in this way, the illusion of choice is created—see Craig Owens, who quotes Jean Baudrillard regarding this subject.11 It thus constitutes a response to man's need to distinguish himself in a marginal way. We want to belong to the herd from the viewpoint of protection, but also to distinguish ourselves from this herd in order to prove our individuality and not allow ourselves to be trampled underfoot by the others.
At first sight, the 10,000 Individual Works all seem to be alike, but on closer inspection they are all slightly different. The same mechanism is the subject of a work which McCollum produced together with Laurie Simmons in 1985. They photographed portraits of scale-model figurines of less than one centimetre which were made mechanically using a mould. The photographs were taken through a microscope at the pathology lab at the hospital. They bought these handpainted dolls in a store specialising in toy train supplies. The dolls look identical to the naked eye but turn out to be very different and all take on a face of their own with personal features. Here, McCollum speaks of a style figure which he uses over and over again: 'a highly focused picture of a very unfocused image.'12 Of central importance here is the question one asks oneself about whether it is an object with which one has an exclusive relationship, or an object, that loses itself in a mass of seemingly identical objects, such as an extremely small grain of sand on the beach that is scarcely distinguishable, or a tree in a forest. In addition to the above-mentioned positive and negative emotions which mass production can evoke in us, McCollum also speaks of another experience he has with mass production. 'Modern industrial production has always been more than just a making of things; it has always also been a highly orchestrated expression, a sort of epic dramatization of a wish, a wish we all share, a wish that we might be able to be as productive as nature. This is a very fundamental wish, I think, and it animates the entire apparatus of mass-production: our desire to be bountiful, to be perpetually creative. I feel that the rhythms of industry are operating in constant imitation of or homage to the productivity of nature. Isn't this what impresses us most about the natural world? The way it replicates itself indefinitely?'13 Man, machine and repetition The origin and significance of concepts such as the original, the authentic, the unique, the expressive, the spontaneous, the impassioned and the touching, lie—according to Allan McCollum—in the existence of machine production. 'Our conception of what an artwork should be seems to have been thoroughly conditioned by our conceptions of what machines can do. First, we've apparently decided that our "most human" qualities are precisely those which can in no way be reproduced by a machine; and second, we have asked that art should represent the very finest of our most human qualities. In this way, our industrial methods paradoxically seem to determine what in our culture is considered both human and artistic."14 McCollum himself does not believe in the sharp dichotomy between the so called human and machine-like. The vast majority of our own activities are repetitive and mechanical, he thinks, but we tend to exclude this kind of behaviour from our conceptions of what is human. 'It's true that most psychosis is expressed through repetitive behaviour, and most neurosis, as well. Inability to control repetitiveness is practically our definition of mental illness. But along with this I think it's interesting to remember that most of our everyday behaviour—especially those behaviours we associate with pleasure—are also characterized by constant repetition; eating, sleeping, and making love come to mind as obvious examples.'15 In fact, with his work McCollum contradicts the separation between the human and the mechanical. This becomes particularly clear in the Individual Works, of which each small part is produced by human hands. Although he copied forms of objects produced by machines, both these forms and these machines were devised and made by human beings. For the Individual Works he 'borrowed' forms of everyday objects such as a pocket torch, a jar of vitamins, a contact lens box, toys, a measuring spoon and many kinds of lids. With the Individual Works he shows that the idea of the unique artwork and the idea of the ordinary mass-produced object are two sides of the same coin: the one is defined and confirmed by the other. Another aspect expressed in the Individual Works is the device of repetition which acts as a metaphor not only for the spirit of cultural abundance but also for the powers of industrial production. Repetition regularly works as a means of stabilising power; which is found in various institutions such as religion, militarism and advertising as well. Culture Allan McCollum believes that it is not right for art to be seen as the supreme discipline for expressing who we are. The rest of our culture—from waging war to bookkeeping—is just as expressive as far as that goes. Asked whether he would like to criticise the isolated function of art in our society with his work, he replies that that would imply too limited a viewpoint. Rather, he aims to produce work out of a very clear understanding that art does not exist without the rest of the culture, for they are inextricably linked with each other. 'Our culture is in a state of high expressivity all the time, on every front; we express ourselves through all our actions, not just through the arts. The most exciting thing that art can do, I think, is to move us toward greater participation in the expressivity of our culture, a culture which is continually moving and growing, changing and progressing.'16 The attraction of objects
McCollum investigates the relationship of people to objects and responds with his work to the feelings which people may have for objects. He is concerned with the attraction objects can have for people and the way we question whether an object has meaning. People keep objects and thus allow these objects to become symbols on which they can vent their emotions. Objects can be worthless for the one and very valuable in an emotional way to the other. Souvenirs or bibelots mean a lot to the owner but for somebody else it is hard or even impossible to discover the significance; the meaning remains a non-communicable value. But the fact that these objects mean something to someone, gives them an extra connotation in the eyes of another. It is the relativity of meaning embodied by an object that interests McCollum, and the way a thing's lack of meaning for one person is often experienced as an index for its meaning to another. 'An absence of meaning can sometimes be exactly the expressivity of the thing'17. Herewith he touches upon the point of correspondence in function which, in his view, exists between artworks and souvenirs. 'With all of my artworks, I have always meant to withhold the creation of specific meaning, or surface meaning, because I am so much more interested in the quality of meaningfulness in and of itself. That people should desire to build an imminent meaning into things, and to produce symbolic objects, to keep them, to exchange them, to love them—this is more touching to me by far than any of the more precise meanings a specific artwork might attempt to convey.'18 His work thus becomes a metaphor for the function of a work of art in our society, in the way that every work of art simulates an autonomy and authenticity and yet functions as an object of exchange. Exchange and commerce A work of art is an object that circulates, that goes from hand to hand and wall to wall. McCollum aimed to make that concept visible in the Individual Works, consisting of hand-sized objects which have no bottom or top and seem to be made to be held in the hand. 'I hear people complaining all the time about how the world has become too commercial, but I really think that just the opposite has occured; commerce has been completely banished from our lives as a form of social discourse. . . The marketplaces in other cultures can be hotbeds of human exchange and interaction. They can be sites of pleasure and passion, sources of anarchistic energy. In our culture, the pleasure of this anarchy is reserved for the few. So when we set art against commerce, we distort both, I think. To define art as a "spiritual" activity, and then to deny human commerce any spiritual value, well that's ludicrous...'19 In this respect it must be pointed out that McCollum uses an uncommon but correct meaning of the word 'commerce', namely commerce viewed as an exchange between people. Artworks in our culture can be, among other things, tokens of exchange and also symbols of value. According to McCollum, commerce is a part of life to be embraced. Art and power It is not only commerce that is in the hands of a select group. Exactly the same applies to art. McCollum is very much aware of this: 'You and I participate in a sect, a sect in which all the action pivots on this single token, the art object; but it's the emotional politics surrounding this token which provide the meaning and the value. The artwork is always just a substitute, a surrogate.... The artwork is a kind of fetish—a kind of substitute for real power, or maybe I mean a kind of sign representing imaginary power.'20 According to McCollum, art is unfortunately often used as a mechanism of power and as a means of exclusion, in the sense that a particular class consolidates its identity by developing specific aesthetic values and collecting particular types of objects, thus distinguishing itself from other classes in society. 'I'm interested to encourage an analysis of art, but through the pleasure of looking. I would like to see us be a little more anthropological in the way that we assess our own cultural production I feel that art now functions to keep people apart, to reinforce and maintain class boundaries, and to encourage exclusion and inequality through the cult of "taste" which I think is wrong. I hope that my work might play some role in the analysis of this situation, and I hope it does so by bringing some pleasure into the discovery that the problem does not necessarily lie with art but with those forces which work to legislate its meaning.'21
Presentation and reception The way in which McCollum hangs and positions his works, adds to their meaning. The Plaster Surrogates generally hang in extreme saturation from floor to ceiling and are distributed as regularly as possible over the wall, with a spacing of 3 or 4 cm. McCollum opted for this salon-like arrangement originally because the exaggeration involved tended to theatricalise the gallery, and register the individual Surrogate as a kind of prop, thus insuring that his Surrogates were understood as tokens. A feeling of saturation is also achieved in the Individual Works, which are displayed on a table in such a way that there are no spaces between them and that it presents itself as a sea of objects. In films on TV, McCollum found what looked like his own Surrogates in the background and photographed them. It was precisely the background position which intrigued him. 'I am interested in the painting presented as an object-in-the-background; their real place in the world is to be in the background functioning as a prop, or a token, and to remain secondary to the social behaviour of making, buying and selling art, and of having art and looking at art.'22 McCollum's work asks to be looked at; yet the active looking is as important as the object to be seen. It makes one aware of the desire to look at a painting. 'I think that there must be something false about the desire to look at a picture; it couldn't possibly be something we are born with. It must be something we grow into, like the way a dog comes to desire such a strangely contrived activity as being taken for a walk on a leash. I am working to construct a charade, in which I am surrounded with false pictures: pseudo-artifacts which beckon me into the desire to look at a picture, but which are complete in doing just that, and that alone. My paintings and drawings don't serve a proper function—how could they? They're only representations, props, and surrogates: not real paintings at all. If I can engineer this charade the way I want, I think I can transform the seemingly innocent act of looking at art into a slightly nightmarish duplication of itself.'23 The concept for the exhibition in the Van Abbemuseum is rather complex although drawn on paper it works simple and rational. One could say that half of the exhibition is reflecting the other half in such a way that it calls to mind installation photos; some rooms tempt to be seen as black-and-white pictures of other rooms. Reference to photography underlies the entire exhibition. 'My work aims to function as a tracer, via which one might observe the route of one's distraction, the desires which give value to an object, and ultimately, the commotion of those hidden desires and wishes the more apparent ones work to disguise.'24 The above makes it clear that Allan McCollum's work is actually not concerned with producing a specific work of art, but with the mechanisms surrounding it; with the way in which it is exhibited; with the exchange of art works; with the trading and commerce in art; with being part of a larger whole, namely culture; with the reception of art, and so on. McCollum makes us aware of these mechanisms, of more or less hidden characteristics of art and our manner of approaching it. These aspects make it clear that the function, meaning and value of art in our society are the main issues of the work of Allan McCollum. ____ Notes 1. Anne Rorimer, 'Self-Referentiality and Mass-Production in the Work of Allan McCollum, 1969-89,' in Allan McCollum, Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Holland; 1989. |
