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.
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 reflects many of Kelley’s works, in both its compositional and semantic qualities...
The Nightwatch , which is an ironic reference to the celebrated painting by Rembrandt, follows the course of a fox wandering among the celebrated collections of the National Portrait Gallery in London...
In Stong Sory Vegetables , Laure Prouvost explains that she woke up one morning and that some vegetables had fallen from the sky on her bed, making a hole in her ceiling...
Glenn Ligon’s diptych, Condition Repor t is comprised of two side-by-side prints...
Monteverdi Ici by Laure Prouvost is a non-narrative video work that depicts the back of the artist’s naked body standing, with her back towards the camera in a field...
In Monster (1996-97), the artist’s face becomes grotesque through the application of strips of transparent adhesive tape, typical of Gordon’s performance-based films that often depict his own body in action...
Half Dome Hough Transform by Trevor Paglen merges traditional American landscape photography (sometimes referred as ‘frontier photography’ for sites located in the American West) with artificial intelligence and other technological advances such as computer vision...
Like many of Larry Bell’s works, VFGY9 deals primarily with the viewer’s experience of sight...
The voids in Baldessari’s painted photographs are simultaneously positive and negative spaces, both additive and subtractive...
Behind the simplicity and beauty of this untitled photograph of a brilliantly-colored flowerbed by Félix González-Torres are two remarkable stories of love, loss, and resilience...
Meireles, whose work often involves sound, refers to Sal Sem Carne (Salt Without Meat) as a “sound sculpture.” The printed images and sounds recorded on this vinyl record and it’s lithographed sleeve describe the massacre of the Krahó people of Brazil...
Untitled (Construction) recalls the series of glass cubes that gained Bell international recognition in the 1960s...
Matthew Buckingham presents a narrative directly connected with a highly symbolic site in the United States, the Mount Rushmore Memorial*...
The types of objects Feldmann is interested in collecting into serial photographic grids or artist’s books are often also found in three dimensional installations...
The types of objects Feldmann is interested in collecting into serial photographic grids or artist’s books are often also found in three dimensional installations...
Untitled is a work on paper by Martin Kippenberger comprised of several seemingly disparate elements: cut-out images of a group of dancers, a japanese ceramic vase, and a pair of legs, are all combined with gestural, hand-drawn traces and additional elements such as a candy wrapper from a hotel in Monte Carlo and a statistical form from a federal government office in Wiesbaden, Germany...