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Collage of five diverse artworks from the Hammer Museum Collections side by side. From left to right: 1) Contemporary painting of two embracing figures with surreal elements. 2) Post-impressionist style painting of trees with vibrant blues and greens. 3) Black and white illustration of a face with intricate patterns. 4) Japanese woodblock print style image of a figure in a checkered robe. 5) Photograph of a couple dancing, the woman in a black dress and the man in white

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Digital Archive Take It or Leave It: Institution, Image, Ideology
Art Allan McCollum, Collection of Five Plaster Surrogates
Collection of Five Plaster Surrogates, by Allan McCollum, 1982/1990

Allan McCollum, Artist
Collection of Five Plaster Surrogates , 1982/1990

Medium
Enamel on Hydrocal
Dimensions
20 1/4 x 69 1/4 x 1 3/4 in. (51.4 x 175.9 x 4.4 cm)
Credit Line
The Knez Family Collection, Boston. Image courtesy of the artist and Petzel Gallery

Allan McCollum's practice integrates modernist painting, conceptual art, and legacies of the readymade as a means to interrogate the ontology of art. Applying strategies of mass production to finely crafted handmade objects, McCollum carries modernist reductionism to its parodic extreme by highlighting the nominal means by which painting, photography, and sculpture are recognized as such. His multiple series of nearly identical minimal paintings and sculptures, which function as what he has called a "universal sign-for-painting"—reveal that those conventions exist not only within the borders of the art objects themselves but also in the relationships and expectations generated by these objects in the various contexts of art's distribution and consumption.