Allan McCollum

Infobox Artist
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name = Allan McCollum


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birthdate = 1944
location = Los Angeles, California
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nationality = American
field = Sculpture, Conceptual art
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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. [Anastas, Rhea: [http://www.grandarts.com/exhibits/AMccollum.html "Allan McCollum: The Kansas and Missouri Topographical Model Project"] , Grand Arts, Kansas City, Missouri, 2003.] 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."

Early life

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

Allan McCollum was born in Los Angeles, California, on August 4, 1944. In 1946, his family moved to Redondo Beach, California, where his three siblings were born, and where he lived until 1966. Both of his parents and many others in his family were active in the arts. His father, Warren McCollum, the son of an actress in New York and a child actor himself, performed a number of small parts on the Broadway stage, and a few small roles in movies in the late 30s and early 40s, including the role of “Jimmy Lane” in the 1938 cult classic, "Reefer Madness"; he remained active in local theater groups throughout much of his life, while working as a security guard at a local research corporation. His mother, Ann Hinton, daughter of a piano teacher and a cartographer, also performed regularly as an actress and singer in local theater productions, and as a piano accompaniest to a local voice teacher. His mother’s brother, Sam Hinton, was a well-known folk singer and folk music historian in Southern California, and her sister’s husband was Jon Gnagy, the popular television art instructor who between 1946 and 1970 had the longest continuously running show on television. [Seymour, Liz, " [http://home.att.net/~amcnet3/gnagy/gnagy_lizseymour.html You Were an Artist,” May 7, 1991.] ," "Art and Antiques", February 2007, May 7, 1999.] [Enright, Robert: [http://home.att.net/~amcnet2/album/enright.html "No Things But in Ideas: an interview with Allan McCollum,"] , "Border Crossings", September, 2001.]

Education and Early Career

Constructed Painting: "If Love Had Wings: A Perpetual Canon", 1972. Canvas squares, lacquer stain, varnish, silicone adhesive caulking. 110 x 331 inches. Installation: Pasadena Art Museum, 1972.

In 1964 McCollum moved to Essex, England, pursuing the idea of being an actor, and joined a local theater group in Southend-on-Sea; but he changed his mind about a career in theater and returned to California in 1965, moved into a small mobile home park in Venice Beach, California [Virtual Venice, [http://www.virtualvenice.info/visual/roster.htm Venice Artist Roster] ] , and attended Los Angeles Trade Technical College for five months, attempting to learn the trade of restaurant management and industrial kitchen work. For two years, he worked for Trans World Airlines at the Los Angeles International Airport, preparing meals for flights, but in 1967 he decided to educate himself as an artist. He learned quickly, influenced largely by reading the writings of the Fluxus artists, and found a job as a truck driver and crate-builder for an art handling company in West Hollywood. Through this job he met many artists, art dealers, art collectors, and museum curators, learning much about the contemporary art world. In 1970, McCollum established a studio in a converted parking garage in Venice Beach, where he lived and worked until 1975. During these years, he exhibited his work regularly at the Nicholas Wilder Gallery in Los Angeles, and was in a number of museum group exhibitions, including shows at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Pasadena Art Museum, the Long Beach Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. [Enright, Robert, [http://home.att.net/~amcnet2/album/enright.html op. cit.] ]

Exhibition History

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 [Twentieth Century American Sculpture, [http://clinton4.nara.gov/WH/Tours/Garden_Exhibit4/mccollum.html Northeast Region - Exhibit IV, The 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.

In 2008 McCollum is exhibiting 1800 drawings from his 1988-91 "Drawings" project at the 28th Bienal de São Paulo in São Paulo, Brazil.

Artwork

"Over Ten Thousand Individual Works", (detail) 1987/91. Acrylic on cast Hydrocal. Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

McCollum’s family history, his experiences and training at working in industrial kitchens, and his interest in theater and Fluxus, including “task-oriented” performance art, offered him a unique take on labor and art, and the methods and systems of quantity-production showed themselves in his artwork from the very beginning. He is known for utilizing the methods of mass production in his 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.

Beginning in the early nineties, McCollum expanded his interests in quantity production to include explorations into the ways regional communities give meaning to local landmarks and geological oddities in establishing community identity, and collaborated with a number of small towns and small historical museums in Europe and throughout the United States, bringing attention to the way local narratives develop around objects peculiar to geographic regions. Often these projects involved reproducing local objects in quantity, or creating models or copies of local artifacts and symbols. In 1995 he collaborated with the College of Eastern Utah Prehistoric Museum in Price, Utah, to make replicas of their entire collection of dinosaur track casts, and exhibited these in New York and throughout Europe; in 1997 he collaborated with the International Center for Lightning Research and Testing in Starke, Florida, to trigger lightning with rockets, and worked with a local souvenir manufacturer to create over 10,000 replicas of a fulgurite created by the lightning strike; in 2000 he collaborated with the Pioneers Museum in the desert community of Imperial Valley, California, to reproduce souvenir copies and large models of their local mountain, Mount Signal, and the unique 'Sand Spike' sand concretions found at it’s base; and in 2003, he created 120 topographical models of the states of Missouri and Kansas, which he donated and delivered himself to 120 small historical society museums in both states.

7056 Monoprints from "The Shapes Project", 2005/05. Framed digital prints, each unique, signed, and numbered. 4.25 x 5.5 inches each, on acid-free bond paper. Installation: Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York, 2006.

In 2005, the artist designed "The Shapes Project", a combinatorial system to produce "a completely unique shape for every person on the planet, without repeating." [Princenthal, Nancy, " [http://home.att.net/~allanmcnyc/aia/princenthal.html Shape Shifter] ," "Art in America", February 2007, pp 106-109.] The system involves organizing a basic vocabulary of 300 "parts" which can be combined in over 30 billion different ways, created as "vector files" in a computer drawing program. The artist has used the system in collaborations with a community library, schoolchildren, home craftworkers, writers, architects, and other artists, including artist Andrea Zittel, as the "Shapes" are created to be used for many different kinds of projects, and so far have been produced in the form of both prints and sculpture, in Plexiglas, Corian, plywood, hardwoods, metals, rubber, and fabric, in a variety of sizes.

Collaborations and Writings

McCollum has occasionally collaborated with other artists in producing projects, including Louise Lawler (1983, 1984, 1988, 1996), Andrea Fraser (1991), Laurie Simmons (1984), Matt Mullican (2004), Andrea Zittel (2007), and Allen Ruppersberg (2008). He has also written texts and interviewed fellow artists for books and catalogs, including Matt Mullican (1979 and 2006) Allen Ruppersberg (1999), Andrea Zittel (2001), Roxy Paine (2002), and Harrell Fletcher (2005).

Notes

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.

External links

* [http://home.att.net/~allanmcnyc An informational website on the artist]
* [http://www.grandarts.com/exhibits/AMccollum.html "The Kansas and Missouri Topographical Model Donation Project"]
* [http://home.att.net/~allanmcnyc/mtsignaltitlepage.html "Mount Signal and It's Sand Spikes"]
* [http://www.stadiumweb.com/reprints/introduction.html "The Natural Copies from the Coal Mines of Central Utah Project"]
* [http://home.att.net/~amcimages/pdffiles.html Interview] ("The Event: Petrified Lightning from Central Florida") with Allan McCollum and associated mass quantities of [http://home.att.net/~amcimages/pdffiles.html PDF's] related to the subject of fulgurites.
* [http://home.att.net/~amcnet2/album/shapes/intro.html Introduction to "The Shapes Project"]