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...
Matthew Buckingham presents a narrative directly connected with a highly symbolic site in the United States, the Mount Rushmore Memorial*...
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...
This series of small drawings is executed with varying materials—pen, ink, colored pencil, charcoal, and masking tape—on architect’s tracing paper...
Oded Hirsch’s video work Nothing New (2012) utilizes seemingly absurdist tropes to raise more trenchant questions about communal action and collective identity in modern day Israel...
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
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...
This series of small drawings is executed with varying materials—pen, ink, colored pencil, charcoal, and masking tape—on architect’s tracing paper...
Composed of four images, the series Sleeping Elephant in the Axis of Yogyakarta (2011) explores the artist’s observation of how Javanese mythology and cosmology have marked the geography of Yogyakarta, the cultural centre of Indonesia...
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...
Women Are the Post-Apocalyptic Future Skip to content Dana Schutz, "Civil Planning" (2004), oil on canvas (all photos Ela Bittencourt/ Hyperallergic ) BERLIN and PARIS — In recent years, impending ecological apocalypse has spurred a number of contemporary artists to visualize fears of an environmental collapse...
Ukraine is under tension due to the politics of President lanoukovitch since 2010...
San Pedro is a seaside city, part of the Los Angeles Harbor, sitting on the edge of a channel...
To make Mickey Mouse (2010), Paul McCarthy altered a found photograph—not of the iconic cartoon, but of a man costumed as Mickey...
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...
The Ballad of Special Ops Cody by Michael Rakowitz is a serio-comic stop motion animated film in which an everyday African-American G...