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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
Perpetual Photo, by Allan McCollum, 1982

Allan McCollum

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After moving to New York from his hometown of Los Angeles in 1975, Allan McCollum devel­oped an artistic practice that integrated modern­ist painting, conceptual art, and legacies of the readymade as a means to interrogate the ontol­ogy of art. Applying the strategies of mass production to finely crafted handmade objects, McCollum carried modernist reductionism to its parodic extreme by determining and perform­ing the nominal means by which painting, photography, and sculpture are recognized as such. His multiple series of nearly identical paintings and sculptures, however, reveal that those conventions exist not only within the borders of the art objects themselves but also in the relationships and expectations generated by the objects and in the various contexts of art's distribution and consumption.

McCollum began making his Surrogate Paintings in the late 1970s by gluing together wood and museum board to create objects that resembled matted and framed paintings. From these objects, he cast his Plaster Surrogates, now numbering in the hundreds, which are further distanced from painting by the reproductive process of casting and yet are each painted individually by hand. "I reduce all paintings," McCollum explains, "to a single 'kind,' to a universal sign-for-painting."# What appear to be five small, variously sized rectangular black paintings with white mats and reddish frames in Collection of Five Plaster Surrogates (1982/1990) reveal themselves, on closer inspection, to be five solid objects painted with enamel to give the impression of having component parts. Singular and repeatable like a logo, surrogates signify as paintings by virtue of their generic attributes, their contexts, and the mechanisms of display, spectatorship, and sale. This particular Collection of Five Plaster Surrogates (though surrogates evidently disrupt discourses of particularity) appeared in Andrea Fraser's 1991 performance May I Help You? at American Fine Arts, Co., in New York. Performers in the guise of gallery staff gave visitors a tour of an exhibition of McCollum's Plaster Surrogates, expressing a variety of reactions, including exclamations of appreciation and distaste as well as incomprehension. Fraser crafted the script using statements about art by dealers and collec­tors as well as quotations from the subjects of Pierre Bourdieu's sociological study Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste.# Fraser's performance, like McCollum's surro­gates, enlists the contexts of art—including the gallery space, viewer behavior, and critical discourses—as its primary subject, extending the deconstructive impulses enacted by the surro­gates to art's institutional and economic frames. 

Left wall: two works by Allan McCollum titled "Perpetual Photo," 1982; right wall, from left to right: Silvia Kolbowski, "Model Pleasure III," 1983, and Allan McCollum, "Collection of Five Plaster Surrogates," 1982/1990. Installation view at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
Left wall: two works by Allan McCollum titled Perpetual Photo, 1982; right wall, from left to right: Silvia Kolbowski, Model Pleasure III, 1983, and Allan McCollum, Collection of Five Plaster Surrogates, 1982/1990. Installation view at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
Take It or Leave It: Institution, Image, Ideology. February 9–May 18, 2014. Photography by Brian Forrest
McCollum has pursued a comparable mining of the mediums of photography and drawing. In 1982 he began his Perpetual Photo series by photographing his televi­sion screen whenever he spotted a framed picture within the diegetic space of the scene. He then photographically isolated and enlarged the overlooked picture, which had been distrib­uted instantaneously as light rays to millions of television sets, to produce a highly abstract photograph, reframed and hung on the wall. He also attached to the back of each framed piece the snapshot of the TV screen showing the framed picture on the wall, the source for the enlarged and cropped Perpetual Photo. The large-scale photographs of murky black-and-white patterns frustrate the physical claims of the photographic index through a simulacral process of transmission that traffics in light, distance, time, and the process of close looking.

McCollum began his Drawings project in 1989 by creating custom-designed stencils from a set of forty curves, which form the basic vocabulary of all the drawings. Using the stencils, he has produced by hand hundreds of different graphite drawings (ensuring that no two are the same), which he displays in groups numbering in multiples of thirty. A group of 120 was included in the exhibi­tion. Continually straddling the margins of singular/multiple, beautiful/banal, and deci­pherable/indecipherable, McCollum's many series critically occupy the place of art in a world of mass industrial production.

—Ruth Erickson