20 Surrogates

1982 - Sculpture (Sculpture)

Allan McCollum

year born: 1944
gender: male
nationality: American
home town: Los Angeles, California

In the work titled The Glossies (1980), an affinity for photography manifested itself before McCollum actually began to use photography as a medium. The Glossies are drawings, rectangular forms applied with blank ink and watercolors, which fill up the sheets parallel to the edges except for a small margin. Finally, the whole paper is covered with an adhesive plastic laminate, which gives it the shiny surface of a photograph. The drawing as original artistic expression is employed as a sign for photography. In this respect, The Glossies marks a decisive transition to the “Plaster Surrogates”, a multi-phase work, which McCollum began to create in 1982. Discussing the Plaster Surrogates in a 1985 interview, McCollum described his practice as “a sort of ‘working to rule’”: a job action in which workers do precisely and only what is required contractually, both refusing excess work and excessively observing rules and regulations. “In a sense, I’m doing just the minimum that is required of an artist and no more.” Each and every Surrogate is signed dated and numbered. Although McCollum works with assistants, he insists on painting the outer edge of every black center and the inner edge of every border. No two surrogates are identical; all those of the same dimensions have slightly different colored borders and vice versa. There is nothing false about the objects themselves. McCollum doesn’t employ illusionism or trompe l’oeil. His Surrogates aren’t forgeries of paintings. They’re not even paintings – only plaster objects, which may, at a distance, resemble framed images. The artist proceeded to hang his Surrogate Paintings in larger groups and in a relatively order less way, side by side and one beneath the other. By his increase of quantity and the effect of repetition, he intended likewise to interpret this exaggerated idea of an installation as a sign and to exclude any kind of view, which emphasizes the importance of the single picture. The surrogates, via their reduced attributes and their relentless sameness, started working to render the gallery into a quasi-theatrical space which seemed to “stand for” a gallery; and by extension, this rendered the artist into a caricature of the artist, the viewers performers.


Allan McCollum neither superimposes the conditions of industrial production as artistic practice nor attempts to raise them, in a heroic gesture, to the status of high art. The starting point of his art generally surrounds the idea of a sign. He frames the sign inside of realm of the significant characteristics of the total quantity of all pictures in general. These considerations are the result of an inconsistency of art production in relation to culture at large and the function it fulfills. This function is determined by the fact that in the economic system of a consumer society, the artwork becomes a commodity.


Colors:



Untitled (City Limits)
© » KADIST

Allen Ruppersberg

1970

Untitled (City Limits) is a series of five black-and-white photographs of road signs, specifically the signs demarcating city limits of several small towns in California...

Towhead n’Ganga enclosed in darkness, lorded over by the sexualized folded high priestless form
© » KADIST

Mike Kelley

1996

Towhead n’Ganga, enclosed in darkness, lorded over by the sexualized folded high priestless form reflects many of Kelley’s works, in both its compositional and semantic qualities...

Untitled (San Francisco)
© » KADIST

Edward Kienholz

1984

Untitled (San Francisco) was made in Idaho in 1984 and was facetiously dedicated to Henry Hopkins, the then director of the San Francisco Museum of Art who added “modern” to its name...

Plug the well ( July / August 2003)
© » KADIST

Keith Tyson

The work of Keith Tyson is concerned with an interest in generative systems, and embraces the complexity and interconnectedness of existence...

Collectors’ Favorites
© » KADIST

Jennifer Bornstein

1994

Collectors’ Favorites is an episode of local cable program from the mid-1990s in which ordinary people were invited to present their personal collections—a concept that in many ways anticipates current reality TV shows and internet videos...

Untitled (series)
© » KADIST

Francis Alÿs

2006

This series of small drawings is executed with varying materials—pen, ink, colored pencil, charcoal, and masking tape—on architect’s tracing paper...

This Exhibition
© » KADIST

Tino Sehgal

2004

Tino Sehgal’s This Exhibition requires an interpreter (in this particular piece, a gallery attendant) to faux faint each and every time a visitor enters into a given space...

Other related works, blended automatically  
» see more

Collectors’ Favorites
© » KADIST

Jennifer Bornstein

1994

Collectors’ Favorites is an episode of local cable program from the mid-1990s in which ordinary people were invited to present their personal collections—a concept that in many ways anticipates current reality TV shows and internet videos...

Untitled (series)
© » KADIST

Francis Alÿs

2006

This series of small drawings is executed with varying materials—pen, ink, colored pencil, charcoal, and masking tape—on architect’s tracing paper...

Roca Grafito (Graphite Rock)
© » KADIST

Mateo Lopez

2012

With Roca Carbon ( Charcoal Rock , 2012) and Roca Grafito ( Graphite Rock , 2012), López plays with our relationship to inert and unremarkable objects such as rocks...

Related works sharing similar palette  
» see more

A roof top photoshoot with the dancers; Tonnex, (Ruby, Nonso and Oshodi)
© » KADIST

Sabelo Mlangeni

2019

The Royal House of Allure is a name of a safe house on mainland Lagos where members of the queer community in need of boarding, due to various circumstances, live together...

Land art, art conceptuel révisés et réactualisés par la Critical Race Theory- Cameron Rowland (1)
© » LE BEAU VICE

Le Beau Vice: Land art, art conceptuel révisés et réactualisés par la Critical Race Theory- Cameron Rowland (1)...

“love letters”
© » THE JEALOUS CURATOR

Yes, Toronto based Bahamian artist Gio Swaby is back on the podcast! I only had her on seven months ago, but since then her career has exploded… clearly, we need to hear everything! From articles in the New York Times and interviews on oprah.com, to five (FIVE!) museums acquiring her work! Also, can we talk […]...

Pierre Huyghe's - The Third Memory (2000)
© » KADIST

Drinks at 6pm, event at 7pm A quarter century after Wojtowicz’s Brooklyn heist, Pierre Huyghe ‘s two-channel video installation, The Third Memory (2000), allows the charismatic mastermind to give his version of that fateful day in a reconstructed set of the bank...

Related artist(s) to: Allan McCollum » Cindy Sherman, » Mark Dion, » Sigmar Polke, » Allan Sekula, » Ana Mendieta, » Dan Graham, » Gordon Matta-Clark, » Joan Jonas, » Joseph Kosuth, » Louise Lawler  
» see more

Related works found in the same semantic group  
» see more

Good Life
© » KADIST

Danh Vo

2007

Good life (2007) is an installation displaying letters, documents, photographs and objects from a man named Joseph Carrier, and appropriated by artist Danh Vo...

Mickey Mouse
© » KADIST

Paul McCarthy

2010

To make Mickey Mouse (2010), Paul McCarthy altered a found photograph—not of the iconic cartoon, but of a man costumed as Mickey...

Patient Admission, US Naval Hospital Ship Mercy, Vietnam
© » KADIST

An-My LE

2010

The print Patient Admission, US Naval Hospital Ship Mercy, Vietnam (2010) features an Asian Buddhist monk and an American Navy Solider on board the Mercy ship –one of the two dedicated hospital ships of the United States Navy– sitting upright in their chairs and adopting the same posture...

Untitled
© » KADIST

Elisabeth Wild

2015

Her collage works are made from the pages of glossy lifestyle magazines, from which the artist identifies colors, forms, and textures that she reconstitutes into rich, abstract compositions...