Allan McCollum

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Collection of One Hundred Plaster Surrogates, 1982/90. Enamel on cast Hydrostone. Collection of the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Belgium.

Allan McCollum is a contemporary American artist who was born in Los Angeles, California in 1944, and now lives and works in New York City. He has spent over thirty years exploring how objects achieve public and personal meaning in a world constituted in mass production, focusing most recently on collaborations with small community historical society museums in different parts of the world.^[1] His first solo exhibition was in 1970, and his first New York showing was in an exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1972. In 1975 his work was included in the Whitney Biennial, and he moved to New York City that same year. In the late seventies he became especially well known for his series, Surrogate Paintings.

McCollum has had over 100 solo exhibitions, including retrospectives at the Musée d'Art Moderne, Villeneuve d'Ascq, Lille, France (1998); the Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany (1995-96); the Serpentine Gallery, London (1990); the Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art, Malmo, Sweden (1990); IVAM Centre del Carme, Valencia, Spain (1990); Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands (1989), and Portikus, Frankfurt, Germany (1988).

He participated in the Aperto at the 1988 Venice Biennale, his works have been exhibited in the United States White House, he has produced numerous public art projects in the United States and Europe, and his works are held in over seventy art museum collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.

McCollum is known for utilizing the methods of mass production in his art work in many different ways, often generating thousands of objects that, while produced in large quantity, are each unique. In 1988-91 he created over thirty thousand completely unique objects he titled Individual works, which were gathered and exhibited in collections of over ten thousand. The objects were made by taking many dozens of rubber molds from common household objects—like bottle caps, food containers, and kitchen tools—and combining plaster casts of these parts in thousands of possible ways, never repeating a combination. In 1989, he used a similar system to create thousands of handmade graphite pencil drawings, using hundreds of plastic drafting templates he designed for this purpose, each drawing made unique by combining the templates according to a combinatorial protocol that never repeated itself.

In 2005, the artist designed The Shapes Project, a system to produce a completely unique shape for every person on the planet, without repeating.^[2]

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• Nicolas Bourriaud, "McCollum's Aura," New Art International, October, 1988.
• Lynne Cooke, Selma Klein-Essink, and Anne Rorimer: Allan McCollum, Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Holland, 1989; in Dutch and English.
• Hal Foster, "Subversive Signs," Recoding: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics; Seattle Bay Press, 1986.
• Andrea Fraser, König, Kasper and Wilmes, Ulrich: Allan McCollum. Portikus, Frankfurt, Germany. Published by Walther König, Cologne, West Germany, 1988; in German and English.
• Rosalind Krauss., and Yve-alain Bois: Formless: A User's Guide, Zone Books, New York 1997.
• Craig Owens, "Allan McCollum: Repetition & Difference," Art in America, September 1983.

[edit] External links

• An informational website on the artist
• The Kansas and Missouri Topographical Model Donation Project
• The Natural Copies from the Coal Mines of Central Utah Project
• Interview (The Event: Petrified Lightning from Central Florida) with Allan McCollum and associated mass quantities of PDF's related to the subject of fulgurites.
• Introduction to The Shapes Project